That’s how I remembered it. I was in my young teens at the time but I already had a passion for politics.
Limbaugh and Hannity popularize the idea that Kennedy was a conservative because he passed tax cuts. Neither one of them seem to know much about the division between liberals and conservatives in the early 60s. And considering how they champion the civil rights movement they would find themselves on the same side as JFK and Lyndon Johnson and opposed to Goldwater and Reagan.
And opposed to the Founding Fathers & the continuity of the social & political culture they believed that they were vouchsafing to their posterity.
As a Conservative spokesman in the era, I will assure you young "teenagers," that no one in the era who considered themselves a Conservative considered Kennedy a friend. I personally was the principle organizer of the hostile greeting he got in Cincinnati, when he came here in September, 1962, to campaign for the Democratic Congressional candidates, and he was greeted with signs challenging his policies on Cuba, Old Miss & in general--half of the signs paid for by me, from a friendly sign maker, who gave us a "sweetheart" at cost rate..
Kennedy was not only way out there on the movement euphemistically labeled the "Civil Rights Movement," but on foreign policy with respect to promoting Marxist values in the Third World; as well as the insane immigration policy that his younger brother & LBJ put through in 1965. We (as almost all American Conservatives), used to absolutely cringe when we heard that Boston accent reading the speeches his Leftist advisers wrote for him, over the radio or television.