She approached him respectfully, and while eager to meet him and grasp his hand, Leslie Gerwin waited until she had been introduced.

“I have admired you for so many years,” Gerwin told Theodore Sorensen as he was led through the lobby of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

“I doubt that it could be that many years,” said the man who wrote some of the most striking political rhetoric of the 20th century, including that inaugural line about not asking what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

Oh, no, explained the Princeton lawyer, she remembered him at the 1968 Democratic convention, where he had worked on the peace platform and she had come because, well, she had worked on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign, was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles that dreadful night, and just felt she should be in Chicago even though her candidate would not be.

“You wouldn’t be tricking an old blind man, would you? You can’t be that old.”

Gerwin reddened. “Oh, yes I can,” she said to the man whose vision is, in fact, severely impaired. “Now I more than admire you, now I love you.”

It was a revealing moment, and a bittersweet one, reflecting sentiments that would be repeated by others for the few hours Sorensen, 78, once counsel to President John F. Kennedy, recently spent at Princeton, bringing a faded swatch of Camelot with him.

Gerwin was restrained, especially compared with a white-haired schoolteacher who had finagled his way to Sorensen’s lecture and into an invitation-only seminar for students of the professor, Al Felzenberg, who had arranged the Sorensen visit.

The teacher was so gushing about Sorensen – and so self-conscious about his groupie-like enthusiasm – that he said he was too embarrassed to give his name.

“This is just one of the greatest days of my life,” he said, sliding a poster for the lecture under Sorensen’s hands and asking Sorensen to sign it. The man was crying.

How strange the pull of the Kennedy years, that it endures, maybe even grows.

There was Anne-Marie Slaughter, the school’s dean, a preschooler when JFK was shot. She thanked Sorensen for “the words I grew up with” and, after expressing sadness about foreign policy today, recalled the dead president once said, “The world knows America will never start a war.”

Lingering Kennedy worship is perhaps understandable because the contrast with current leadership is so stark. Sorensen got a good reaction when, referring to his handicap, he said, “Don’t worry about my eyesight, I have more vision than the president of the United States.”

While Kennedy was a better president than the second George Bush – but, then, who wasn’t? – there is a danger here, not just in hero worship but also in believing that, implied in Slaughter’s remark, Bush is the first president to start a war.

The anti-Communism paranoia of the ‘60s – like the terrorism paranoia now – got us into a lot of trouble. The embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs. The threat of mass incineration portended by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ultimately, Vietnam – where, it could be argued, Kennedy really did start a war.

Acting from fear is always dangerous, as Franklin Roosevelt knew. But it is so easy for leaders to instill fear, easier yet when we admire them too much. Heroes can be dangerous, as former Sen. Bill Bradley once warned.

But perhaps some forms of admiration are harmless. After Sorensen’s lecture, Leslie Gerwin again approached him, and somehow the topic of birthdays came up.

She wanted one of JFK’s closest aides to know that, when the time drew near to give birth to her oldest son, she faced a small window of time in which she could choose the exact date for the delivery.

“I chose May 29th,” she told Sorensen.

JFK’s birthday.