As the old saying goes, the mediocre are always at their best. So went Arthur Schlesinger's
determination in his phony annual presidential rankings made by his survey of other mediocre, biased, and mendacious "historians."
That was in the days when you had to look hard to discover Lincoln was a Republican.
That was in the days when you had to look hard to discover Lincoln was a Republican.
Here is a precise essay on the real Kennedy and his failings as President. It is slightly similar to the situation we are now stuck with in that we are stuck with a foolish and completely inexperienced executive. Then Kennedy's problems were of his own making and the perception then was more to his advantage. Then, as now, the press gave him too much cover and he was able to exploit that. Unlike now, Kennedy was much more fiscally responsible and hated Communists! m/r
A Beautiful Mediocrity | National Review Online
almost any measure, John F. Kennedy was a middling president at best, and an occasionally disastrous one. The Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban missile crisis, setting the nation on the wrong course in Vietnam, his nepotism, the spying on political rivals — all must weigh heavily in our judgment of his presidency. And while Kennedy the president was a middle-of-the-range performer at best, Kennedy the man has been relentlessly diminished by the eventual revealing of the facts of his day-to-day life.
Conservatives who see in Kennedy a committed combatant in the Cold War and a supply-side tax-cutter must keep in mind his bungling at home and abroad. Liberals who see in Kennedy a receptacle for all they hold holy must keep in mind his calculating cynicism — for example, his opposition to civil-rights legislation when he believed its passage would strengthen the Republican president proposing it. Kennedy’s virtues — his vocal anti-Communism, his assertive sense of the American national interest, his tax-cutting — would hardly make him a welcome figure among those who today claim his mantle. His vices, on the other hand, are timeless.
The Cuban missile crisis is generally presented as the great episode of Kennedy’s hanging tough in the face of Communist aggression, but, like so much about Kennedy’s life, that story represents a triumph of public relations over substance. Kennedy gave up much more than he let on to resolve the crisis, agreeing to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey — on the condition that the concession remain secret, so as not to undermine his political career or his brother’s. And the Cuban missile crisis was brought on in no small part by Kennedy’s inviting displays of weakness: His performance at the 1961 Vienna summit made little impression on Nikita Khrushchev, and within a few months the Berlin Wall was under construction. After the Bay of Pigs, the Soviets had little reason to suppose that Cuba was anything but a safe port for them.
But Kennedy had a gift for spinning gold out of goof-ups.
-go to the link-
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