Reasons Not to Like JFK

Historian Michael Kazin’s review of the latest of more than 40,000 books on JFK offers good reasons not to admire the dead president.

Like Trump, Kennedy owed much of his success to being born well. While at Harvard, a pal of his father’s, the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, “polished” his senior thesis into a book, Why England Slept. The book gave Kennedy early, undeserved intellectual gravitas (the publisher of Time magazine, Henry Luce, wrote the introduction). During his political career Kennedy paid lip service to supporting African Americans while going out of his way to not offend white segregationists. He proposed nothing to legally guarantee civil rights. Kennedy was a womanizer whose many bedmates before and during his presidency included a 19-year-old intern. His only legislative accomplishment as president was a tax cut.

Kennedy began his political career during an era of rising national power led by men who shared the confidence that they could bend the world to what they believed to be their exceptionally virtuous will. His declaration on taking office as president, “that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” is a classic expression of that hubristic faith. …

Perhaps the admiration of Kennedy as the last white liberal icon will give way to a sober evaluation of how the relentless pursuit of global power by politicians like him too often betrayed the promise of their altruistic oratory. “Unhappy the land that needs heroes,” wrote Bertolt Brecht in 1939, a sly reference, in his play about Galileo, to the leader of his own nation and a warning to citizens of other lands too. Americans who have been divided, often quite bitterly, since Kennedy lost his life would do well to finally take that wisdom to heart.