General Discussion

Last edited Thu Apr 9, 2026, 06:37 PM - Edit history (1)

...to be the initiating cause of almost stumbling into nuclear war. Ironically, just as the real cause of the Iran war was the Epstein Files the case has been made that the disaster at Vienna was Kennedy's exhaustion from the well known exercise of his sexual pecadillos. That may or may not be true.

I consider Kennedy to be the worst Democratic President of the 20th century other than Woodrow Wilson. A saving grace, the only saving grace, was that he was not Richard Nixon.

I put no credit at all in the argument that Vietnam was something of Eisenhower's creation. The people who ruined Johnson's superior Presidency were Kennedy's "Best and Brightest" to steal Halberstom's famous and accurate sarcastic locution. Most people are unaware that the Ford executive Kennedy hired to run the Defense Department, the infamous Robert McNamara, derived his total military experience as a desk bound aid to none other than Curtis Lemay, where he worked to plan bombing strategy in the war against Japan.

I note that Eisenhower did nothing to prevent the French defeat at Dien Bein Phu, because he was a distinctly anti-Imperialist President, shown by his actions in the Suez crisis.

Kennedy sought Eisenhower's views on the Bay of Pigs after it went bad, and I can imagine Eisenhower shaking his head and agreeing with none other than Eleanor Roosevelt that "that boy" was a rube in over his head, albeit for very different reasons.

I do not credit the exculpation of Kennedy in the Diem assassination either. There are tapes of him ruminating on the subject. The effort by historians to pawn off responsibility on Henry Cabot Lodge and others strikes me as disingenuous. The fact is that he had his fingers all over Vietnam and was perfectly willing as a highly politicized person and an unrepentant cold warrior, to not repeat the onus wrongly attached to Truman for "losing China" as if China were an American colony.

To my mind Kennedy holds the onus for almost stumbling into nuclear war. While he reaped all kinds of praise for narrowly avoiding it, reaping praise for "winning," the reality is that credit really belongs more to Khrushchev for being the bigger man, who did not publicize the American concessions on the Turkish missiles.

The Cuban Missile Crisis cost Khrushchev his job ultimately. I consider that somewhat nobler than Kennedy's willingness to do nothing that threatened his job. (He watched the "I have a dream" speech on television even though he was blocks away, worrying that the whole affair would cost him votes. No Lyndon Johnson, he.)

Khrushev was a rough hewn bird, a survivor of Stalin, with bloody hands, but he strikes me a greater man than Kennedy in some ways.

The case can be made that the crisis, into which Kennedy stumbled, the missile crisis, drove the nuclear arms race that Brezhnev ramped up.

That Kennedy avoided some wars of opportunity is weak sauce. Every responsible President does that, a demonstration of course, that the orange pedophile is irresponsible. To say that Kennedy is better than Nixon or the orange pedophile is obvious but couldn't possibly be fainter praise.