By almost any measure, John F. Kennedy was a middling president at best, and an occasionally disastrous one. The Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban missile crisis, setting the nation on the wrong course in Vietnam, his nepotism, the spying on political rivals â?? all must weigh heavily in our judgment of his presidency. And while Kennedy the president was a middle-of-the-range performer at best, Kennedy the man has been relentlessly diminished by the eventual revealing of the facts of his day-to-day life.
Conservatives who see in Kennedy a committed combatant in the Cold War and a supply-side tax-cutter must keep in mind his bungling at home and abroad. Liberals who see in Kennedy a receptacle for all they hold holy must keep in mind his calculating cynicism â?? for example, his opposition to civil-rights legislation when he believed its passage would strengthen the Republican president proposing it. Kennedyâ??s virtues â?? his vocal anti-Communism, his assertive sense of the American national interest, his tax-cutting â?? would hardly make him a welcome figure among those who today claim his mantle. His vices, on the other hand, are timeless.
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