Posted on 10/24/2013 9:26:12 AM PDT by NKP_Vet
John F. Kennedy is lionized by liberals. He inspired LBJ to push for landmark civil rights laws. His “New Frontier” promised new spending on education and medical care for the elderly. His champions insist he would have done great liberal things had he not been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald.
But what if we judge him by the lengthy record of his actual political career, in historical perspective? What if this hero of liberals was, in fact, the opposite of a liberal?
As Ira Stoll convincingly argues, by the standards of both his time and our own, John F. Kennedy was a conservative. His two great causes were anticommunism and economic growth. His tax cuts, which spurred one of the greatest economic booms in our history, were fiercely opposed by his more liberal advisers. He fought against unions. He pushed for free trade and a strong dollar. And above all, he pushed for a military buildup and an aggressive anticommunism around the world. Indeed, JFK had more in common with Ronald Reagan than with LBJ.
Not every Republican is a true heir to Kennedy, but hardly any Democrats deserve that mantle. JFK, Conservative is sure to appeal to conservative readers — and will force liberals to reconsider one of their icons.
(Excerpt) Read more at amazon.com ...
I don’t need to write to every person that wants to create and feed the never ending myths of JFK.
Without JFK America would have survived and we would be living in an entirely different America.
Electing Eisenhower’s vice president would have made an incredible difference, and America would have survived and would be totally different (in 1960 even Nixon was a very different man).
Imagine no Vietnam, no 1960s era dominated by Vietnam and the draft and resistance, no Kennedy assassinations, no unionizing of government employees, NO 1965 IMMIGRATION ACT that led to the end of America.
No Watergate, no Bay of Pigs, a President Reagan in 1968 without any Bush dynasty being created, no LBJ, no Goldwater debacle, no creation of Ted Kennedy the Senatorial Giant.
Imagine America without this immigration that killed it, and no 1960s.
Ike had already sent advisors there.
Don’t confuse having some advisers there with creating JFK’s Vietnam War.
The US Army had been involved in Vietnam since FDR and the 1940s with no intention of becoming engaged in an American war there, we have advisers and Army Special Forces all over the globe and in war zones today, that has nothing to do with sending in 16,000 troops as JFK did, and Nixon would not have done.
No, that was J. Edgar Hoover, who spied on everybody, to include MLK and JFK. Hoover despised JFK because of his reckless affairs with women other than his wife.
Nazi lover too.
I like(ed) JFK...the favorite Presidents of my lifetime are Reagan, Eisenhower and JFK. He would have been like a sore thumb to these diseased liberal “statists” of today.
JFK did not want to expand the war in Vietnam and had drafted plans to pull US forces out of Vietnam. LBJ owned his political career to Brown and Root (a subsidiary to Halliburton), the huge defense contractors that wanted war in Vietnam. LBJ gave Brown and Root the contruction contracts in South Vietnam. Hell, he and his wife has so much stock in Brown and Root, it was called Brown, Root and Johnson. LBJ also had huge stock in Flying Tiger Airlines, who flew most of the US military to Southeast Asia. Well Kennedy wanted to end the American involvement in SEA, Johnson wanted to make money. Does not take a genius to put two and two together. On his death bed, Douglas MacArthur pleaded with JFK to keep the US out of Vietnam, saying it was an unwinnable civil war. What man alive knew more about war in the Pacific theater and Asian geopolitical politics than MacArthur. I can’t think of any. Looks like JFK was going to take his advice. Then he went to Dallas and we all know the rest the story. Vietnam was not Eisenhower’s war, it was not JFK’s war, it was not Nixon’s war, it was that sorry ass, crooked as a snake Lyndon Johnson’s war. End of story.
In reality JFK went into Vietnam with 16,000 troops and part of the JFK machine wants to pretend that he was only escalating because he wasn’t, or what is, is, or whatever.
Now we have a JFK fan boy to push him on us here at FR?
Are you also a fan of his fatal blow to America, his immigration policy? How about unionizing government?
Even as a young newspaper boy, JFK’s seeming incompetence puzzled me.
Wow, you really are a fan boy of that nasty SOB.
Drunks are hard to interpret.
I don’t think JFK was a drunk was he, wasn’t he only a drug addict?
I despise liberals, but JFK was an old time conservative democrat, more pro-life and small government that 99% of the RINOs that dominate today’s GOP.
Reagan also started out as a democrat. One of Reagan’s political heroes was Kennedy. And speaking of liberals, one of the biggest liberals of the last 50 years to be president was George W. Bush. He never vetoed the first spending bill till his last year in office and exploited the national debt. He appointed more open homosexuals to his administration than Bill Clinton did to his. He threw away hundreds of millions of dollars fighting AIDs in Africa, when the majority of the money went to warlords. Lastly, he invaded the wrong country when he went into Iraq in retaliation for 9/11, and we’ll be bogged down there until hell freezes over. If Bush had governed like a conservative republican instead of a spend crazy liberal democrat the election of Obama would have never happened.
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/1963_Vietnam_Withdrawal_Plans
Reagan’s “hero”? Reagan was anti-JFK, “As a “Democrat for Nixon,” Reagan champions Nixon’s candidacy for president, delivering more than 200 speeches in his support.”
You keep harping on JFK as a pro-life president, where are you seeing campaign literature on abortion from pre-1960 for JFK, or anyone else?
Don’t drag Reagan into this, he opposed JFK and campaigned as a leader of the “Southern California Democrats for Nixon”.
JFK was a sleazy liberal, the scum of the earth type guy and a disaster for America.
“When John Kennedy was President, he didn’t push a program of dreary mediocrity with endless tax increases on those who dream of better days. He challenged Americans, just as we’re challenging you today, to make America grow and to make America great by pushing for lower personal income tax rates for all the working people of America. And there was a great similarity between his tax cut program and the one that we implemented in 1981” ~ Ronald Reagan, Oct 10, 1984
Abortion in 1960 was not the hot political issue it would later become, but “population control” was a topic of discussion. As a senator, Kennedy was asked, “Do you see any hope at all of slowing up the rate of population increase?” Kennedy’s reply was somewhat dismissive. “Now, on the question of limiting population: As you know the Japanese have been doing it very vigorously, through abortion, which I think would be repugnant to all Americans.”
That’s it for me attempting to post anything about Kennedy.
You must have been very close to him to call him “a “sleazy liberal, the scum of the earth and a disaster for America”.
Now that’s words I would reserve for Obama, but I can’t recall any time on these boards that you have lowered the boom on Obama like you have on Kennedy with your irrational rants. From your questioning back to me about Kennedy being pro-life where I showed you where he appointed pro-life Byron White to the Supreme Court and White DID NOT vote for Roe v. Wade, it’s obvious you have not read one link I provided on Kennedy. No need in continuing this conversation. It’s liking to a wall.
Reagan compared his “hero” (according to your lie) to Karl Marx and Hitler. “ Under the tousled boyish hair cut it is still old Karl Marx”.
While you are promoting the sleazy liberal that so despised America that he sought to replace it’s people and identity (successfully) and claiming that he was a “hero” of Ronald Reagan, and posting a 1981 quote when President Reagan was seeking to use a dead president for politics when speaking to the public as president, just as any politician would after JFK was turned into a martyr by dishonest people like you, let me show you what Reagan really thought.
In a hand written private letter to republican Richard Nixon in 1960, this is what the democrat Ronald Reagan had to say about JFK in regards to his acceptance speech as the democrat nominee. Shortly after the Democratic Party held its Convention in Los Angeles in 1960 where it nominated Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy for President, Ronald Reagan sent the following letter to Vice President Richard Nixon offering his services in the upcoming presidential campaign.
After mocking the “platitudes and generalities” of the other democrat speeches, Reagan gets to the meat of who JFK was.
The hand written letter:
“”I do not include Kennedy’s acceptance speech because beneath the generalities I heard a frightening call to arms. Unfortunately he is a powerful speaker with an appeal to the emotions. He leaves little doubt that his idea of the “challenging new world” is one in which the Federal Govt. will grow bigger & do more and of course spend more. I know there must be some short sighted people in the Republican Party who will advise that the Republicans should try to “out liberal” him. In my opinion this would be fatal.
(snip
I am convinced that America is economically conservative and for that reason I think some one should force the Democrats to publish the “retail price” for this great new wave of “public service” they promise. I don’t pose as an infallible pundit but I have a strong feeling that the twenty million non voters in this country just might be conservatives who have cynically concluded the two parties offer no choice between them where fiscal stability is concerned. No Republican no matter how liberal is going to woo a Democratic vote but a Republican bucking the give away trend might re-create some voters who have been staying at home.
One last thought,— shouldn’t some one tag Mr. Kennedy’s bold new imaginative program with it’s proper age? Under the tousled boyish hair cut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago. There is nothing new in the idea of a Govt. being Big Brother to us all. Hitler called his “State Socialism” and way before him it was “benevolent monarchy.
I apologize for taking so much of your time but I have such a yearning to hear some one come before us and talk specifics instead of generalities. I’m sure the American people do not want the govt. paid services at “any price” and if we collectively can afford “free this & that” they’d like to know it before they buy and not after it is entrenched behind another immovable govt. bureau.
You will be very much in my prayers in the days ahead.
Sincerely,
Ronnie Reagan
I like the way you completely ignore any and all links that have anything good to say about JFK. Sounds like an anger issue to me. Why not reserve your venom to a real life person that is actually destroying this country while you go on a rant against a man who’s been dead 50 years.
By the way JFK was the conservative when he ran against Nixon, who was as liberal as the day is long.
The Republicans didn’t fancy “Catholics.”
Reagan had a different opinion on who the conservative was in 1960.
Why you are promoting the man who ruined America is a puzzle, why you are lying about Reagan is a puzzle, why you are lying about JFK being anti-abortion when nobody knows is a puzzle, chances are that a number of JFK’s kids were aborted if anything, Byron White wasn’t chosen in early 1962 America for anything related to abortion, no one even knew or cared about the issue then in presidential and Supreme Court politics.
What is this creepy obsession you have with promoting the man that Reagan compared to Karl Marx and Hitler as a liberal, and that led him to campaign as a “democrat for Nixon because he was the conservative?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.