Yes,his private life was a bit of a mess....
But he abandoned people in the Bay of Pigs. His weakness emboldened the Soviet Union and that led into Vietnam.
Problem is, he STOLE the Presidency. The more you learn about him, the less respectable he becomes.
He was a big bag of wind, no matter how eloquent his scripted speeches were. He planned to put troops in Vietnam (so much for that idiotic claim by Ventura) after having spent his time in the Senate holding hearings about having military advisers and sending military aid to Indo-China. He spoke of “brush-fire wars” in reference to Vietnam, Korea, and dozens of other places, all to oppose the spread of Soviet and Red Chinese influence.
He was militantly anti-communist in his rhetoric, and chose to have his back surgery and be absent from the Senate when the condemnation vote was taken on Joe McCarthy (he couldn’t be seen voting either way on that one; had he voted to condemn, his constituents would have excoriated him; had he voted against, he’d have ended his plans to run for POTUS). He inherited the Bay of Pigs program, then basically screwed it up (no air support). The Bay of Pigs led to Castro’s and Khruschev’s putting Soviet missiles in Cuba, hence the missile crisis.
But he also wanted, campaigned for, and got Congress to pass, temporary tax cuts either identical or similar to those Reagan wanted and got 20 years later. He came at it from a different angle, that is, gov’t had a duty to stimulate the economy, rather than to get the gov’t the hell off all of our backs.
Still, as you said, there hasn’t be a worthy Demwit POTUS since JFK.