[Helms]

Re: "Ask not..." JFK felt free to lift that line from the headmaster of Choate who in his opening day speech always said "Ask not what your school can do for you, ask what you can do for your school."

Is this really true? If so, another unveiling of the Kennedy mistig\que, right out of a prep school exhortation.

[GoodyBrown]

Hi ~ Yes, absolutely, gratingly true. The boys of JFK's time heard it yearly from Headmaster St.John.

[hinckley buzzard]

The "Ask not..." line has been used by a multitude of would-be leaders for a good 150 years. National Review, I believe, did a search on it years ago. Probably an old edition of Bartlett's will confirm that this statement was a well-worn cliche long before JFK stole it.

No fan of JFK here, but just to set the record straight, the "Great Society" was LBJ's baby, for the 1964 election.

Ditto for the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, which was passed with strong Republican backing, more so than Democrat, since in 1964 half the democrats were conservative Southerners who wanted no part of the Civil Rights movement at that time.

JFK was vulnerable on a number of counts, not the least of which included his vacationing on the Cape while the East Germans and Soviets built the Berlin Wall one August weekend; and of course also the aborted Vienna Summit where Khrushchev humiliated the novice JFK by lecturing him on the Gary Powers U2 spy plane, and then stomping off in a pose of righteous indignaton.

The whole shebang got off to a crappy start in 1961 when JFK's weakness led him to sabotage the Cuban landings at the Bay of Pigs, thus setting Castro up for the next 40 years(so far).

And just for fun, don't forget the Steel confrontation when Big Steel wanted to raise prices to cover concessions to unions. JFK "jawboned" them into deferring this price raise, but ultimately US Steel did it anyway.

That prompted the whippersnapper president to snort "My father always said businessmen were SOB's and now I know why."

Lapel buttons reading "S.O.B." were sighted at Chamber of Commerce gatherings for the next year or so.