A Beautiful Mediocrity: JFK was a so-so president, a deeply flawed man.
National Review ^ | 11/20/2013 | The Editors
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3093553/posts
By 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.
John Kennedy looms large in the American imagination, but not for anything he accomplished in office. He was a handsome and vivacious man whose ascendancy coincided with that of television, a politician who was one part royal, one part movie star. That Americans found his celebrity and his pretensions to aristocracy appealing is beyond argument; however, it does not speak well of our political culture. But as created personas go, JFK was a doozy: He won the Pulitzer Prize for a book largely written by somebody else; his reputation as an intellectual was largely the creation of Arthur Schlesinger; and his family was figuratively and perhaps literally in bed with Joe McCarthy (who dated two of the Kennedy women), but the stigma of McCarthyism has never attached itself to his name.
His pathological sexual appetites gave him the reputation of a charming rogue, when the truth is that he was closer to a mid-century Anthony Weiner. He was a veteran with an admirable military record, an unexceptional and difference-splitting senator with an Irish name: But for his celebrity, he would have been John McCain or John Kerry.
Kennedy did not transform the country, but he did transform the presidency – largely for the worse. Combining grandiose rhetoric with shallow policy, he established the modern template of president as media hero, beginning the conversion of the office of the presidency from that of chief administrator of the federal government to the modern grotesquery it has become. The main effects of his time in the White House were to make his immediate predecessor look like Cincinnatus by comparison and to unleash the ugliness of Johnson and Johnsonism on the republic after his martyrdom at the hands of a deranged Communist. That Lyndon Johnson, a man he detested, was Kennedy’s political heir is a testament to the fact that there was hardly any devil he was unwilling to get in bed with if it brought him political power.
And what did he do with that power? Among the heaviest burdens facing the American public in 2013 are the direct expenses and unfunded liabilities associated with Medicare and Medicaid, two ill-shaped programs conceived of by the Kennedy administration but executed under Johnson — which is to say, we’ll be paying the price for Kennedy’s grand dreams for a long time to come.
He looked great in a suit, and he could deliver an applause line with the best of them. We may grieve the murder of a president, but our grief should not blind us to what kind of president, or man, he was.
Those who lived this last four decades understand, but the younger Americans are unaware of how the Communist STRONGHOLD took hold. 1917 donation to Columbia University and 30+ years later Nikita Kruschev and his infiltration of the education system of teachers from Russia...clear in his famous statement ‘we will take America without firing a shot’; all show the importance of his association with JFK and how the underground Communists worked with the openly above ground Communists to make Cuba & Castro happen. No backlash.
The book by J Edgar Hoover “Masters of Deceit” discusses the Communist infiltration of America and their intent, it was copyrighted in 1958...I think his cross dressing caused the man not to be taken seriously, yet the FBI information he had was so important to us as a nation.
The SDS had over 100,000 members when the Weathermen Underground formed with Bill Ayers, this was a Marxist organization that said ‘they would disban’ intentionally false, to go Underground as teachers, union members, politicians, executives of corporations, bankers, wall street and government officials...it was a preplanned effort in 1968.
The whole point is the average American does not understand the evil of communism and how it deceives, controls, and using subterfuge to get it’s way. The NWO aligns itself with Communism and manipulates wars.
The left being the hippie and college intellectuals, instead of intelligence crowd, allowed the Democrat Party to take over in 1964, and the Republicans have been infiltrated by members of the communist party individually.... complicating the party.
That division of the conservative party complicates a recovery through voting. All the information is out there but many cannot seem to put it together...in order to see the conspiracy that really does exist to takeover America.