I was in the army for a three year hitch back in those days.
Eisenhower told Kennedy about the planned Bay of Pigs invasion, Don’t start a war unless you intend to win it.
So Kennedy started a war and then immediately chickened out. Worst thing he could have possibly done. He was tested again and again by the USSR because they judged that he was a weakling.
Even the Cuban missile crisis was resolved by a retreat, when Kennedy agreed to pull our defensive missile shield out of Europe.
I have a friend whose father worked in JFK’s administration and had interesting stories to tell. When it came to women, JFK was a pig who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
My husband was in the Air Force stationed in Turkey on the Russian border in the sixties during the Cold War. That was three years after Kennedy was assassinated.
Kennedy is one of the “sacred cows” of the Democrat Party, along with the bloated, debauched Teddy, as you know. I’m sick and tired of having the “Kennedys” thrown in my face. To me, that whole dynamic is phony and hypocritical. The Catholic Church seems to be stuck with them and their piggishness and unwilling to stand up to them. God is not a respecter of persons I’ve heard. That whole “Rose Kennedy” aspect of it all is very dysfunctional sounding. So, I feel better about my own sorta dysfunctional family.
My Daddy was in the Army Infantry in WWII, the 88th/351st, in N. Africa, Sicily, Italy and Germany. He was in the worst of it and never really got over it, but did “man up”, suck it in and get up and go to work when he got out. Passed on six and a half years ago.