Most of the readers of this blog know the truth about "Camelot". A rather lackluster playboy of 43 years became the youngest elected to the presidency -- not the youngest to serve, an honor that goes to Teddy Roosevelt who took over from assassinated McKinley at age 42.
Other than having his PT boat run down by a Japanese destroyer, having a book ghostrwirtten for him by Ted Sorenson ("Profiles in Crime : The Kennedy Way" .... mis-titled "Profiles in Courage") and MOST of all having a nasty bootlegging Nazi supporter father that financed his rise to the highest office in the land. Jack's modest accomplishments were followed by REALLY modest "accomplishments" as president.
The Joe Kennedy quote that really shows how the Kennedys got us really sliding toward BOistan is "Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide." And he didn't ... he paid for a LOSS, but Richard Nixon was an honorable man that believed in America, so he conceded, realizing how long and nasty the exposure of how crooked elections really were would be. JFK was "elected" by the Chicago dead vote.
The whole linked column is not that long and a worthy read, but here is the hay-maker for me ...
Summarizing Kennedy's own evaluation of the aftermath of the Vienna conference in his 2003 biography of Kennedy, Robert Dallek writes that Kennedy "now needed to convince Khrushchev that he could not be pushed around, and the best place currently to make U.S. power credible seemed to be in Vietnam."And there you have it ... 58K young American lives sacrificed so a hapless president could attempt to "look tough" while doing infinite damage to US credibility.
Oh, the Kennedy legacy
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