JFK made America a better place Will Trump?
HE WAS A GOOD PRESIDENT
It's all too easy for us to sneer at Kennedy's stance as a Cold Warrior, all these decades later. But he was a man of his times, when paranoia and suspicion ruled the day. In the frightening ideological battle against the Soviets, nobody was immune to rash and half-baked ideas. In fact, the Bay of Pigs fiasco had actually been planned by President Eisenhower, not Kennedy, and simply been inherited by the Kennedy administration.
Yes, Kennedy chose to go ahead with the plan, but what president wouldn't have? Cuba was regarded as a genuine threat, a foothold for the Soviets right on America's doorstep. Kennedy HAD to do something. As Jim Rasenberger, author of The Brilliant Disaster, describes the dilemma over the Bay of Pigs plan: "[Kennedy] had a lot of doubts about it, a lot of concerns about it, but he never could figure out a way not to do it."
And as for the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy absolutely deserves credit for averting total global calamity. Barraged with conflicting opinions from military advisors - some of whom were pressing for the US to trigger war against the Soviets - Kennedy DID keep a cool head, and he DID make the right deal with the Soviets to steer the world away from a nuclear holocaust. It's sheer good luck we had him in the driving seat rather than someone who might have listened to bad advice and gone with a military response.
Picture shows: During the Vienna summit in Austria, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, United States president, meets with USSR Premier and Council head Nikita KHRUSHCHEV during the height of the Cold War, June 3, 1961. Taken from The Sixties: The World On The Brink.
What about Kennedy's importance on the domestic front? He founded the Peace Corps, an organisation of volunteers which works to improve the lives of people across the world, and is still going strong to this day.
He also set America on the path to the Moon landing, proclaiming in 1961 that "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth." This seemed like science fiction at the time, but Kennedy's vision was so strong, so convincing, that the goal was indeed achieved.
And, most importantly of all, Kennedy directly paved the way for civil rights in the United States. His speech in 1963, in which he tackled the plight of black Americans head on, was a landmark moment. "We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution," Kennedy said to the nation. "One hundred years have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free."
The speech was praised by none other than Martin Luther King as "the most sweeping and forthright ever presented by an American president". Following Kennedy's assassination, his successor Lyndon Johnson pushed forward with the sweeping Civil Rights Act, saying that "No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory".
Kennedy may have been a flawed president, but - constrained by his turbulent times - he made a difference, and he made his nation better.