Thomas Putnam may have one of the best views in the city from his desk, but the recently named director of the John F. Kennedy Library said a passion for education and history — not a degree in economics or a high-powered business career — brought him to his oceanfront office.

Looking out at Boston Harbor from the I.M. Pei-designed Kennedy Library at Columbia Point, the new director of the library, who is completely absorbed in the intricacies of the former president’s material legacy, said he walks a fine line there between showing his reverence for the former president and maintaining a balanced presentation of history for educational purposes.

Putnam said his work at the library offers opportunities to work extremely close with the body of work surrounding just one man.

“We try not to be partisan,” he said. “I’m a federal employee, so often-times, I need to be careful that what we talk about is truly historical.”

Almost all of Kennedy’s papers are available to scholars, he said.

But Putnam cannot work with some unprocessed papers from Kennedy’s administration, however, because they are still censored by federal agencies because of their sensitive content.

“Some of them literally have the U.S. thoughts about how we were constructing our own nuclear weapons program,” he said.

Organizations like the CIA and FBI decide whether to declassify materials, Putnam said.

Because not all of Kennedy’s papers are available, Putnam said he mostly likes to spend time perusing the audiovisual materials from Kennedy’s presidency.

Putnam also revels in his new job because he is easily absorbed by the small, and often random, artifacts the museum accumulates, seeing as there is no place to store them.

He is easily fixated, for example, by a coconut shell that once saved Kennedy’s life. On the shell, he said Kennedy and his crew on a PT-109 boat that sunk in August 1943 inscribed directions to the location where they were marooned. Natives ferried it to a naval base, he said, and the forces that came to collect him saved him and the 10 other men.

“It’s such a fascinating thing to think, what if that had not been there?” Putnam said.

College students, he said, only occasionally visit the library, so he is forming focus groups to find which exhibits most interest the difficult-to-catch 18-to 24-year-old age category. He wants to attract them, he said, because he wants them to take notice of the smaller things that so easily draw him in.

“I love teaching people about history,” he said.

Putnam first became interested in education after finding inspiration in a French book The Ambiguous Adventure he read while attending Bowdoin College, in which a bright native boy in colonial Senegal must decide between a traditional or European education.

Putnam was captivated by a question posed in the novel – “In learning, he’ll forget, and will what he learns be worth what he forgets?”

At the library, Putnam said he uses world history to examine contemporary questions. At a March 2006 forum on the Vietnam War where Henry Kissinger and David Halberstam spoke, Putnam said the audience asked questions such as how the lessons of Vietnam could apply to Iraq.

The researcher and educator found himself in this unique position after years of study around the world — as far away as Senegal, where he studied the Senegalese education system.

Because of its devoted focus to just one person and one administration, some question the ability of presidential libraries to be politically neutral.

Boston University international relations professor Andrew Bacevich said though libraries focused on certain men make for good research locations, scholars would be just as successful in their research if all materials were kept in a central, unbiased archive.

Bacevich has studied at the Kennedy library, as well as at the Dwight D. Eisenhower library in Abilene, Kan.

“As monuments to ‘great men,’ they are a monumental waste of money, more appropriate to a monarchy than to a democracy,” he said.

Those who appointed Putnam say they think he will handle the task of balancing his admiration for Kennedy with evenhanded presentation of his documents well.

Because of his successful previous experience with the library and elsewhere in academia, National archivist and BU professor emeritus Allen Weinstein, who appointed Putnam, said in a Jan. 10 statement that Putnam was a good choice.

“Tom is fully prepared for the challenge of administering [the library],” he said.