It's not as though we would ever forget, nor fail to pass our memories on to our children. But television is typically overdoing it, indulging in dramatic excess.

All week there are panels, miniseries, interviews and documentaries reliving the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

It has been 40 years since I climbed into a bus in Dallas with other White House correspondents and rode behind the president to his death. The tragedy remains as vivid in the minds of my generation as though it happened yesterday.

The current emotional outpouring is bigger than past anniversaries, which television has marked regularly every 10 years. Perhaps the emphasis this time is because there are so few of us left who were there. Another 10 years and there will be far fewer eyewitnesses.

It is good that all the interviews, books and shows are leaving a record that grows more complete each time the Kennedy administration and his death are re-examined. With every account, we learn startling new details about his amazingly intricate, secretive life.

There is, however, nothing new about his death. Incredibly, there are still a few conspiracy buffs who cling to the nutty notion that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone after all, that there were mysterious men on the grassy knoll that Kennedy's car passed as he was shot.

There is no proof of this. Nor is there any evidence -- as some have speculated -- that Lyndon Johnson plotted Kennedy's death. Even the Soviets rushed to the White House with their secret KGB dossier on Oswald to insist "he wasn't one of ours."

But it is still difficult for many to accept that a lone communist nutcase with a gun could have such a dramatic impact on American history. An unheroic explanation for a cataclysmic tragedy is terribly unsatisfactory. And Oliver Stone stirred up wild rumors with his despicable movie, JFK, that distorted the event for millions with its claims of hidden motives and concealed documents.

Johnson once told me that he accepted the Warren Commission conclusion that Oswald was the lone gunman, although he suspected that Cuban propaganda and encouragement might have fired him up.

In the emotional aftermath of the assassination, Kennedy and his 1,000 days in the White House were lionized beyond all reason. His wife, Jacqueline, cleverly orchestrated an image of a magical Camelot that never existed. But we wanted desperately to believe the myth, and we still partially do despite later lurid accounts of his womanizing.

Johnson wanted us to believe it, too, because it provided the political momentum he needed to get the great civil rights and education bills past a conservative Congress and launch his Great Society programs.

When Kennedy was shot, he was only 46 years old. We can only speculate about what America would be like had he lived to finish a second term.

Some Kennedy acquaintances claim that he would have pulled out of Vietnam before it became the bloody disaster over which Johnson and Nixon presided. There is no serious evidence of that -- Kennedy was a Cold War warrior, a military hawk like Johnson. It would not be his nature to retreat against a communist foe.

On domestic issues, he moved very slowly. He proposed sweeping civil rights remedies to end racial discrimination but was unable to get them past the Southern barons in Congress. In fact, he got very little out of Congress but the Peace Corps. He often said that he hoped to accomplish more legislatively in a second term, once he got past Sen. Barry Goldwater for re-election.

His foreign policy record was mixed. The failure of the U.S. invasion at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba taught him never to trust his own military brass, who had assured him it would be an easy victory.

At his first meeting in Vienna with Soviet boss Nikita S. Khrushchev, he made such a weak impression that the Soviets tried to ship atomic warheads to Cuba. The crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, but in the end Kennedy held firm and Khrushchev backed down.

We remember Kennedy, however, not for his domestic or foreign achievements but for his personal style -- the wry wit, glamorous family and jovial demeanor.

After six months in the White House, I asked Kennedy how the Oval Office had changed his life. "I can't remember what it was like not to be president," he replied. For him, as for all of us, the time passed too quickly