“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.”
—John F. Kennedy
Kennedy was the first president born in the twentieth century, and our only Roman Catholic president
As president, JFK took mind-altering drugs, many of them prescribed by a physician he called “Dr. Feelgood,” who later lost his medical license for malpractice
Kenney was assassinated by a Communist
John F. Kennedy is the most overrated president. He became a mythical figure—in every sense of the term “myth”—on account of his horrible assassination by a Communist. An entire industry (backed by the Kennedy family fortune) that initially had been assembled to promote JFK to the White House went into overdrive after Kennedy’s shooting to burnish his image and create the myth of “Camelot.” The JFK glamorization industry still operates and has allowed successive generations of the Kennedy family to stake their own claims to fame, fortune, and political power. John F. Kennedy became the original “hope and change” figure, the tragic would-be conquering hero for liberalism. Liberals’ perennial disappointment that utopia never arrives has fueled an extreme nostalgia for JFK: had he lived, liberals tell themselves, he would have delivered the nation into the promised land.
It has been a staggeringly successful marketing campaign. Even though Kennedy only served in office for 1,037 days (the one modern president to serve less time in office was Gerald Ford), opinion polls today often find Americans ranking JFK among our three or four greatest presidents (one 1991 poll had Kennedy tied with Lincoln as our greatest president). But academic opinion, while still dominated by liberals, has started to judge him more clearly. A 1983 survey of historians by American Heritage magazine, for example, found Kennedy to be the most overrated public figure in American history.
Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism by James Piereson (Encounter, 2007).
At age forty-three Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected to the presidency (Theodore Roosevelt was our youngest president at age forty-two, but first reached the office from the vice presidency upon the death of President McKinley). Kennedy had served fourteen undistinguished years in the House and Senate, neither compiling a legislative record of note nor exerting behind-the-scenes leadership. He was known in Congress for dodging key issues; the current joke was that the author of Profiles in Courage (the book that had been ghost-written for him) should show more courage and less profile. Eisenhower used to refer to Kennedy as “that young whippersnapper” and “Little Boy Blue.” One of JFK’s many sympathetic biographers, Richard Reeves, forthrightly concludes, “He was not prepared for [the presidency].” The only modern president with less preparation for the office is Barack Obama, and their cases are similar—in both elections, soaring oratory and carefully presented image disguised the thin background the candidates would be bringing to the job.
The “Kennedy mystique” obscures three key points of interest. First, the Kennedy administration, like Bill Clinton’s, underscores the importance of personal character in a president. JFK’s reckless behavior, which extended beyond mere womanizing, explains some of his poor performance in office. He made a number of bad decisions impulsively. Second, JFK was not the high-octane far-left liberal that the Kennedy myth-making machine has made him out to be (though there was also disconnect between his rhetoric and his actual decisions, as well as between the reality of his presidency and his posthumous reputation). The contrast between Kennedy’s views and actions in office and those of more recent liberals, especially his own younger brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, is stark. Third, Kennedy’s assassination essentially caused liberals to lose their minds.
Kennedy’s womanizing was on a scale that would have made Bill Clinton blush. His “extracurricular activities” in the White House were frequent and regular; the Secret Service had code names for some of the women with whom he trysted. “Fiddle” and “Faddle,” for example, were the code names for two young women on the White House staff that JFK would often see together. One of Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s aides remarked, “It was a revolving door over there. A woman had to fight to get into that line.”
Among the many women in that line was Marilyn Monroe, whose long-running involvement with Kennedy was one of Washington’s worst-kept secrets. Kennedy once requested that Monroe be his birthday present, and Monroe obliged with a breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday” at a party in New York from which Jackie Kennedy was pointedly absent. His relentless sexual escapades were not all just fun and games, though. One of his frequent sex partners was Judith Campbell Exner, who was simultaneously the mistress of Sam Giancana, a kingpin in the Mafia. Kennedy’s behavior made him highly vulnerable to blackmail, especially since the news media, which knew much of the behind-the-scenes story, covered up for him—and largely continues to do so to this day. In addition, Kennedy’s escapades may have literally put the nation in jeopardy, as he was on at least one occasion separated from the military aide who carried “the football,” the president’s command equipment for directing the nation’s nuclear defenses in the event of an attack. The Kennedy industry has worked very hard and with a high degree of success over the years to suppress critical books, documentaries, and film dramatizations that tell the seamy side of the Kennedy story.
A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy by Thomas C. Reeves (Free Press, 1991).
Kennedy’s womanizing was not the only aspect of his behavior that should have disqualified him from office. Although Kennedy famously projected an image of youthfulness and “vigor,” he was a remarkably unhealthy man for his age. He suffered from Addison’s disease, a degenerative hormonal disorder that causes muscle weakness and fatigue and ultimately destroys the adrenal glands. Treatment requires constant use of steroids, which in Kennedy’s case may have exacerbated his already out-of-control sexual appetite. But Kennedy didn’t stop at conventional treatment; he indulged in quack remedies from dodgy physicians (especially Max Jacobson, whom JFK referred to as “Dr. Feelgood”—Jacobson later lost his medical license for malpractice) who administered high doses of pain killers, amphetamines, and other mind-altering medications, including at least one anti-psychotic drug, in attempts to calibrate Kennedy’s mental and physical energy. JFK often wore a back brace on account of severe back pain. There are well-founded rumors that he smoked marijuana and abused other illicit recreational drugs. Had Kennedy escaped assassination, there is a high likelihood that his infirmities and reckless behavior would have made him obviously unfit for office or brought his administration crashing down in scandal. (His medical records were concealed from historical researchers for more than thirty years.)
It is hard to say exactly how much Kennedy’s physical infirmities and uncontrolled appetites for sex and drugs affected his judgment, decisions, and conduct. Kennedy’s acolytes always gloss over this question, and, as in the case of Bill Clinton thirty-five years later, insist on compartmentalizing questions of character. But Kennedy’s personal weakness found concrete expression in his undisciplined White House management style. Against Eisenhower’s direct advice, he abandoned the formal decision-making structure that Ike had set up in favor of informal, chaotic management that more closely resembled a college faculty meeting than an orderly business or military decision structure. This chaotic approach bore bitter fruit early in his presidency with the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, an operation originally contemplated under Eisenhower, but which the more careful former NATO and World War II commander would surely never have approved. The plan, which called for the U.S. to back a small force of Cuban exiles that would spearhead resistance to Castro, was poorly thought out, but Kennedy compounded his errors with a supreme act of cowardice, cancelling U.S. air support for the invasion after it was launched, thus dooming it to failure.
“I want readers to know that Kennedy could have prevented the Berlin Wall, if he had wished, and that in acquiescing to the border closure he not only created a more dangerous situation—but also contributed to mortgaging the future for tens of millions of Central and Eastern Europeans. The relatively small decisions that U.S. presidents make have huge, often global, consequences.”
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Frederick Kempe, author of Berlin 1961
The Bay of Pigs was the beginning of a series of foreign policy disasters for the tough-talking Kennedy. A few months later Kennedy held a summit meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, where by all accounts an ill-prepared Kennedy performed disastrously. Kennedy himself knew he had done badly, admitting that the summit was the “worst thing in my life—he savaged me.” Between the Bay of Pigs and Kennedy’s palpable weakness in Vienna, Khrushchev formed the view that Kennedy was weak and could be pushed around. Khrushchev threatened to go to war over the status of West Berlin, and a few weeks after the Vienna meeting decided to build the Berlin Wall instead. It took the Kennedy administration four days to send a note of protest to the Soviet Union after the Wall went up. It was one of the most debilitating retreats by the West in the entire Cold War.
Kennedy’s lack of a serious response to the Berlin Wall egged Khrushchev on to the next bold stroke—the placement of ballistic nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962, capable of striking the United States homeland in just minutes. The conventional wisdom about Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis is a prime example of the triumph of myth over reality. The resolution of the crisis has been portrayed as a political and diplomatic triumph for the U.S. and for Kennedy. Kennedy is said to have handled the matter “coolly,” as he succeeded in getting the Soviets to remove the missiles without having to attack Cuba and risk World War III. In fact the resolution of the crisis was a strategic and political defeat for the United States. This fact was not generally recognized at the time only because key concessions from Kennedy were kept secret from the American people and even from most of Kennedy’s top advisers at the time. Kennedy secretly agreed to withdraw American missiles from Greece and Turkey, something he had publicly stated he would not do. (When this concession leaked out years later, it was said the missiles had been “obsolete” and unimportant, a view the Soviets did not share at the time.) The biggest public concession, though, was Kennedy’s pledge that the U.S. would cease attempting to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba.
So, in exchange for removing the missiles, the Soviet Union secured the political future of Cuba, which went on to be a major threat to the interests of the United States in Latin America, and weakened the U.S. strategic position in Europe by removing our intermediate-range missiles. This aspect of the Cuban missile crisis became salient in the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan had to exert enormous political effort to place new missiles in Europe to counter the massive Soviet missile build-up that had occurred in the decade and a half after the Cuban crisis. One wonders whether the outcome of the Cuban missile crisis was the exact outcome the Soviets intended when they put missiles in Cuba in the first place. One of the oddest aspects of the whole story that few people have ever noted is that the Soviet missiles were left out in the open in Cuba, and easily spotted by American reconnaissance. The Soviets were masters of deception and camouflage when it came to their military arsenal. It is almost as if they feared Kennedy so little that they wanted the U.S. to see their missiles, knowing they could exact concessions from this weak young president. It is hard to imagine the Soviets risking these moves in Berlin or Cuba during those years if they had faced a President Nixon instead.
These failures highlight the difference between opinion and judgment in a president. One of Kennedy’s political virtues is that in principle he was an ardent, Truman-style Cold Warrior. He abhorred totalitarianism, loathed the Soviet Union, and had supported Senator Joe McCarthy while in the Senate. (The fact that JFK’s brother Robert Kennedy worked for McCarthy’s Senate committee is usually airbrushed from Kennedy histories.) JFK shared none of the self-doubt of the West and the “moral equivalence” between Communism and the free world that became so typical of liberals beginning only a few years later. Kennedy was about the last modern Democrat who sought to bolster America’s defense capabilities, and opposition to Communism was his chief reason for sharply increasing defense spending. Today JFK would be counted among conservative Democrats such as Joe Lieberman. (In this he stands in marked contrast, once again, to his far-left brother Ted.) But as we have seen, tough talk was about the best JFK had to offer. His actual performance in foreign policy was weak and vacillating. And his weakness led to his most irresponsible foreign policy decision—to commit the United States to the Vietnam War with an incoherent strategy based on wishful thinking and academic abstractions.
Correctly perceiving that his weakness had called America’s reputation for strength into question, JFK told Walter Cronkite that the U.S. needed to restore its credibility and toughness, and that Vietnam was the place to do so. Intervention in Vietnam, flawed from the start, began with Kennedy’s impulsive and disastrous decision to approve a coup against South Vietnam’s leader, Ngo Dinh Diem, a capable man whose only sin was an unacceptable human rights record and petty corruption entirely typical of Asian governments of the time. The North Vietnamese Communists rejoiced in Diem’s murder; they couldn’t believe their good fortune that the United States had connived to remove their most formidable political opponent in the South. The Joint Chiefs of Staff called Diem’s killing the “Asian Bay of Pigs.” Vice President Johnson was also scornful, calling it “playing cowboys and Indians in Saigon.” The Vietnam story was all downhill from there, though Kennedy would not be around to see his handiwork collapse in ignominious defeat for the U.S.
One of the ironies of Kennedy becoming the posthumous liberal hero is that many liberals distrusted him both as a candidate and while he was president, and Kennedy had to go to significant lengths to assuage liberal doubts about him, mostly by hiring liberals for high-profile jobs and offering them constant flattery, which usually works on liberal intellectuals. JFK was notably cautious on civil rights and often fretted that the civil rights movement would be politically damaging to him. While much of his voting record on economic issues in Congress followed the main Democratic Party line—pro-union, and for a higher minimum wage—Kennedy did not embrace redistribution or trade protectionism. On the contrary, Kennedy was for economic growth and believed that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” During the Eisenhower years the economy had grown at a steady rate of about 2.5 percent a year, slightly below the long-term U.S. average rate of more than 3 percent. And there had been three short and mild recessions. Kennedy felt this rate of growth was too slow, and advocated that the U.S. achieve 5 percent growth in the 1960s. Rather than adopt Keynesian-style government spending like FDR, or President Obama today, Kennedy proposed significant reductions in income tax rates, which were as high as 91 percent when he took office. Kennedy, who had gotten a C in economics at Harvard (probably to his great advantage), understood what came to be known as the supply-side effects of income tax cuts, as he explained in a major speech in 1961:
“There are no doubt some who would prefer to put off a tax cut in the hope that ultimately an end to the Cold War would make possible an equivalent cut in expenditures—but that end is not in view and to wait for it would be costly and self-defeating.”
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President John F. Kennedy, 1963 State of the Union Message
Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large Federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits. Surely the lesson of the last decade is that budget deficits are not caused by wild-eyed spenders but by slow economic growth and periodic recessions, and any new recession would break all deficit records.
In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now. . . . The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can bring a budget surplus. [emphasis added]
John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the leading liberals of the time, mocked JFK’s speech advocating tax cuts, calling it “the most Republican speech since McKinley.” He warned, “Once we start encouraging the economy with tax cuts, it would sooner or later become an uncontrollable popular measure with conservatives.” He was right; twenty years later, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and other “supply-siders” pointed to Kennedy’s example, much to the dismay and outrage of liberals.
The tax cuts didn’t pass until shortly after Kennedy’s death in 1964, but they worked just as Kennedy had forecast. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth accelerated to more than 5 percent a year following the tax cut—more than a full percentage point above the long-term post-war growth rate of 3.4 percent. Capital spending jumped by a third in the first two years after rates were cut; the personal savings rate increased 50 percent—the amount saved was greater than the cash delivered by the tax cut itself, suggesting that people were indeed reacting quickly to the increased relative reward for savings and investment over consumption. As supply-side theory would have predicted, productivity growth jumped by nearly a full percent. Even though top marginal income tax rates were cut from 91 to 70 percent, taxes paid by those earning more than $50,000 (which would be an income of about $350,000 today) increased nearly 40 percent between 1963 and 1965—a vindication of one of the key tenets of supply-side thinking, and a rebuttal to the main argument against tax cuts. Consumption rose less than predicted. Economist Lawrence Lindsey estimates that the tax cut generated three-quarters of the increase in the growth rate in the 1960s, while Keynesian-style increased demand accounted for only one-quarter of the higher growth. Lindsay concludes, “The tax cuts of 1964 were a major cause of the longest economic expansion then on record, which continued until 1970.”
Kennedy was also an ardent free-trader, which distinguishes him from today’s liberals, who mainly favor protectionism and resist free trade. He lowered tariffs on a number of products and sponsored a new round of international trade talks aimed at lowering trade barriers around the globe.
When President Franklin Roosevelt appointed millionaire businessman Joseph P. Kennedy (John F. Kennedy’s father) to be the first chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission, and many leading Democrats objected because of Kennedy’s shady business background, FDR replied, “Set a thief to catch a thief.”
But Kennedy’s economic performance was also marred by the kind of thuggishness and abuses of power that led British Prime Minster Harold MacMillan to observe that watching the Kennedy family in action was “like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable north Italian town.” Kennedy himself once said, “My father always told me that all businessmen were sons of bitches,” which is curious as his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had been one of the nation’s leading businessmen back in the 1920s and 1930s, when the family fortune was made. President Kennedy often abused his power to harass businessmen and businesses that resisted or criticized his economic policies. When the steel industry raised prices more than Kennedy wished, he used the FBI and the IRS to harass steel company executives until they rescinded the price increases. These interventions betray a lack of respect for free markets and the limits of executive power alike.
Our perception of Kennedy is and will always be shrouded by his horrible assassination, which enabled the myth of the young tragic hero whose immense promise was unfulfilled. The romantic haze that came to surround our memory of the man combined with political partisanship to create some frightful results. The increasingly paranoid left embraced wild conspiracy theories (think “Grassy Knoll”) on JFK’s killing, while the news media strove to blame the assassination on conservatives for supposedly creating a “climate of hate.” Neither the left nor the media—nor the Washington establishment for that matter—wished to face up to the unpleasant fact that a dedicated Communist killed Kennedy.
Political scientist James Piereson’s penetrating book on the aftermath of Kennedy’s killing, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, argues that that fact (as well as the liberal obfuscation of it) is as important for judging the totality of Kennedy’s effect on American politics as was his record in office. “The assassination of a popular president by a Communist should have generated a revulsion against everything associated with left wing doctrines,” Piereson writes. “Yet something close to the opposite happened. In the aftermath of the assassination, left wing ideas and revolutionary leaders, Marx, Lenin, Mao, and Castro foremost among them, enjoyed a greater vogue in the United States than at any time in our history.” Piereson argues convincingly that it was the reaction to the assassination within the mainstream American establishment, as well as among liberal intellectuals, that caused liberalism essentially to suffer a nervous breakdown.
That Kennedy was killed at the hands of a Communist should have had a clear and direct meaning: “President Kennedy was a victim of the Cold War.” But everyone had reasons for averting their gaze from this fact. For Lyndon Johnson, it would have carried frightful implications for foreign policy if it had turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald had links to Castro or the KGB (which Piereson suggests is remotely possible). And liberals didn’t want to dwell on this fact for a mix of other reasons, as well—among them, that they would have had to give up their cherished illusion that right-wing extremists were somehow responsible for the assassination. In the early hours after JFK was shot, we didn’t yet know of Oswald’s Communist background, and the media jumped to the conclusion that Kennedy’s killing must have been the work of right-wing extremists. The day after the assassination, James Reston wrote in the New York Times that the assassination was the result of a “streak of violence in the American character” and that “from the beginning to the end of his administration, [Kennedy] was trying to tamp down the violence of extremists from the right.”
This “meme,” as we would say today, took hold so quickly that it could not be shaken, even after Oswald’s noxious background began to come out. Indeed, the notion of collective American responsibility for political violence would be repeated five years later after Robert Kennedy was murdered by an Arab radical who professed deep hatred for America. Piereson’s analysis suggests that the phenomenon of liberal guilt owes its origin to JFK’s assassination: “Once having accepted the claim that Kennedy was a victim of the national culture, many found it all too easy to extend the metaphor into other areas of American life, from race and poverty to the treatment of women to the struggle against Communism.”
Besides implanting the idea of the collective guilt of American society, Kennedy’s assassination disoriented American liberals in several other ways. “The claim that the far right represented the main threat to progress and democratic order,” Piereson writes, “was no longer credible after a Marxist assassinated an American president.” The assassination “seemed to call for some kind of intellectual reconstruction” on the left. Instead, the left lost its mind.
Kennedy made only two appointments to the Supreme Court, with his first, former labor union lawyer Arthur Goldberg, stepping down from the Court after only four years to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In his brief tenure, Goldberg voted consistently with the liberals.
Kennedy’s second appoint was more interesting: Byron White, nicknamed “Whizzer” on account of his athletic career. White had been a college football star, and played for both the Pittsburgh Steelers and Detroit Lions in the NFL, with naval duty during World War II in between his stints with those teams. White, who served for thirty years on the Court, was often described in the media as a “pragmatist”—which means liberals couldn’t count on his vote. Indeed, White is the only Democratic appointment to the Supreme Court in the twentieth century who moved to the right while on the Court. He generally voted to uphold civil rights laws, but he voted against racial quotas and the Miranda decision, and in favor of the death penalty. Most significantly, he was one of the two dissenting votes in the infamous Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion on demand. White further disappointed liberals when he wrote the majority opinion in the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld Georgia’s statute outlawing sodomy. White’s opinion asked whether the Constitution creates “a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy,” and concluded the answer was “No”: “[T]o claim that a right to engage in such conduct is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ is, at best, facetious.”
John F. Kennedy probably put little serious thought into the judicial philosophies of either Goldberg or White, but his accidental pick of White mitigates some of his abuses of executive power, earning him a bump in his constitutional grade to a C-.