No, JFK was a foreign policy disaster.
~No, JFK was a foreign policy disaster.~
True, a kind of Obama, adjusted to that era when a community organizer like a current president couldn’t move beyond a burger flipping job. Famous but incompetent. Commies flew circles around Kennedy.
Sorry bud, but I was around then. I also have studied his term. Most of his screwups were domestic.
The bay of pigs was the big foreign policy mess and after that he could do nothing right.
What happened there was a lot like Vietnam, and should have been a warning. There were problems getting all the military brass and the CIA on the same page, and Kennedy was unable to put it all together. He screwed up and authorized the mission anyway. A second round of airstrikes was cancelled, and that was a critical aspect of the plan so the plan failed.
BTW, the plan was not Kennedy’s idea. It was drawn up in the prior admin but the desire to eliminate Castro was akin to charting the human genome at the time.
4 months after the incident with the Russians over the intermediate range nukes was over, he was assassinated.
Appointing Bobby to Attorney General was the big issue domestically. Nobody liked it and he was taking a lot of incoming from both party’s. Kennedy’s presidency, short as it was, was embroiled in political back stabbing and infighting as if it was a second term.
He really was firm with Khrushchev, and kicked his ass back to the USSR by calling his bluff. In my view, attacking him on foreign policy only when he was still executing Eisenhower’s left over’s and only just starting to make his own, is not a valid thing to do unless you also bring in the Eisenhower admin.
I have done that to some degree. Eisenhower was no great foreign policy guy either, in spite of his experience. He made a lot of mistakes, but he had more successes then mistakes.
When Kennedy took the reigns, there was a sequence of CIA failures that involved damages from Russian spies. Those spies were sleepers from the Eisenhower days, some going back to WWII. In any case the relationship with the CIA and Kennedy started out very badly and after the Bay of Pigs, a CIA op failed,(due largely to leaks that made it to Cuba through the Cuban community) and some bad strategy calls, there was outright war between Kennedy and the CIA.
The result of that, post Kennedy was that the CIA tried to repair it’s damaged image. So much of the blame was shifted to Kennedy. But there are some facts here that I have already mentioned that need repeating again.
Kennedy never served out his first term. Had he done so and perhaps received a second, he may well have been proved to be a policy screwup.
But that never happened.