Josiah Bartlet is only the latest American president to hide a serious medical condition from the public, and the fact that his administration exists only on the small screen and in the viewers’ imagination makes the issue no less compelling.

The occupant of the fictional Oval Office on television’s “The West Wing” managed to skate to a landslide re-election despite revelations about the multiple sclerosis that already impaired his sight and memory.

Fiction isn’t stranger than truth. It’s just easier to swallow.

Easier to take the dramatic story line of a brilliantly written TV show than to ponder the latest revelations of the medical ordeals of John F. Kennedy before and during his fabled presidency.

In the latest Atlantic Monthly, historian Robert Dallek tells of Kennedy’s many illnesses and the crippling pain that plagued him all his life. Reading it is to marvel at Kennedy’s courage and holler at his lies. “Kennedy, like so many of his predecessors,” Dallek writes, “was more intent on winning the presidency than on revealing himself to the public.”

Had the true story been known – so common wisdom dictates – Kennedy never would have won the chance to leave his invigorating, elegant stamp on the White House. Then again, had the world known of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s polio or Dwight D. Eisenhower’s heart condition or Abraham Lincoln’s depression, those great men may not have had the opportunity to leave their marks on the nation, either.

The rules of the game have been rewritten in the decades since Kennedy. In those days, his daily cocktail of steroids for Addison’s disease, painkillers for his back, anti-spasmodics for colitis, and antibiotics for urinary-tract infections – as well as his serial hospitalizations – were secrets as closely guarded as the nuclear code.

For better and for worse, “Don’t ask, don’t tell” doesn’t apply anymore. Withholding personal medical information is a lot riskier today for those in the political arena because it makes the public rightly wonder: What else are they withholding? Isn’t truth-telling a prerequisite of the job?

No one wants to feel hoodwinked, and as David Frum wrote in last week’s National Review, the Kennedy entourage’s denial of their leader’s illness and drug regimen was “probably the most successful and enduring act of political manipulation of this century.”

But our new age of transparency comes with its own costs. Not only are politicians obliged to reveal more, but also the public has to ask itself: What will we do with the information?

Today, 39 years after his assassination, we can learn about Kennedy’s physical torments and conclude that they did not diminish the effectiveness of his presidency. (At least Dallek believes they didn’t.) Making those judgment calls right in the thick of things is far trickier.

It requires the electorate to be knowledgeable and discerning about diseases most of us can’t spell, never mind understand.

A candidate’s personal behavior in or outside of office is generally judged against a citizen’s individual standards of morality. You decide whether the DUI offense or the long-ago affair is a disqualifer.

Fitness for office on medical grounds is more complicated because it depends in part on individual capacity and will, and the mysterious, often unpredictable workings of the human body and mind.

Reading the details of Kennedy’s operations, hospitalizations, medications and brushes with death left me amazed that someone could run for national office and then run a nation while suffering as he did. His “extraordinary sense of will cannot be underestimated,” writes Dallek. A less ambitious, less determined person wouldn’t have been up to the task.

At the time, concealing Kennedy’s illnesses, like hush-hushing his womanizing, was considered an act of loyalty. Now the book contract possibilities alone make staying mum none too attractive, and cover-up is a hard charge to overcome.

The fictional electorate on “West Wing” saw past Jed Bartlet’s disease, just as these latest revelations aren’t likely to puncture the enduring Kennedy myth. The American public has matured enough to know that more medical knowledge is better than less, but I’m not sure that we know – in real time – quite what to do with it.