Is Kennedy's legacy just a smoke-screen?

That is, people say a lot of great things about him. People will say he handled the Cuban missile crisis well. That he did. However, he also caused the Cuban missile crisis.

In 1962, the Soviet Union was desperately behind the United States in the arms race. Soviet missiles were only powerful enough to be launched against Europe but U.S. missiles were capable of striking the entire Soviet Union. In late April 1962, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev conceived the idea of placing intermediate-range missiles in Cuba. A deployment in Cuba would double the Soviet strategic arsenal and provide a real deterrent to a potential U.S. attack against the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, Fidel Castro was looking for a way to defend his island nation from an attack by the U.S. Ever since the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, Castro felt a second attack was inevitable. Consequently, he approved of Khrushchev's plan to place missiles on the island. In the summer of 1962 the Soviet Union worked quickly and secretly to build its missile installations in Cuba.

library.thinkquest.org...

This is quite funny because people usually give credit to Kennedy for preventing the Missile Crisis from getting worse. It's funny because he actually started it. Kind of ironic isn't it?

And on top of that, Kennedy started the Vietnam war.

In 1961, President Kennedy sent a team to Vietnam to report on conditions in South Vietnam and to assess future American aid requirements. The report, now known as the "December 1961 White Paper," argued for an increase in military, technical, and economic aid, and the introduction of large-scale American advisers to help stabilize Diem's government and crush the NLF. As Kennedy weighed the merits of these recommendations, some of his other advisers urged the president to withdraw from Vietnam altogether, claiming that it was a "dead-end alley."

In typical Kennedy fashion, the president chose a middle route. Instead of a large-scale military buildup as the white paper had called for or an immediate withdrawal, Kennedy sought a limited partnership with Diem. The United States would increase the level of its military involvement in South Vietnam through more machinery and advisers, but would not intervene whole-scale with troops. This arrangement was problematic from the start, and soon reports from Vietnam indicated that the NLF was increasing its control in the countryside. To counteract the NLF's success , Washington and Saigon launched an ambitious and deadly military effort in the rural areas. Called the Strategic Hamlet Program, the new counterinsurgency plan rounded up villagers and placed them in hamlets constructed by South Vietnamese soldiers. The idea was to isolate the NLF from villagers, its base of support. This plan was based on the British experience in Malaya, but conditions in South Vietnam were distinct, and the strategic hamlet concept produced limited results. According to interviews conducted by U. S. advisers in the field, the strategic hamlet program had a negative impact on relations between peasants and the Saigon government. In the past, many rural Vietnamese viewed Diem as a distant annoyance, but the strategic hamlet program brought government policies to the countryside. Many villagers resented being forced off of their ancestral farm land, and some have suggested that the failure of the strategic hamlet concept actually increased cadre ranks in the NLF.

vietnam.vassar.edu...

I just find it ironic that our country worships a war-monger. Well perhaps it doesn't worship it. The country does however seem to really like this guy... whenever I read about Kennedy's history and what he did it gives me vibes. He challenged us to go to the moon but does that excuse all the other things he did? Well?

I want to ask you if his legacy is a smoke-screen. If it's meant to keep us in the dark of all the other things he's done.

reply to post by Frankidealist35


JFK was a decent president, but people focus on him due in part to his charisma, and due to his being assassinated in office.

If he was to be held to the same standards, as say, Bill Clinton, he may have been removed from office.

The guy's father was a pirate and a mobster. Specifically, he was the head mobster. The nastiest sort of criminals.

If you read about Capone hating the Irish, he meant Kennedy's people. Capone's wife was Irish. Kennedy was the type of mobster that would kidnap other gangsters for ransoms.

Take his boat around to the little islands of the carribean and rape and pillage for sport.

You think Camelot needs some black bastards? Because, I'm sure you could find some.

I think a lot of it jst stems from the fact that he was killed and really people don't like to say bad things about dead people. He came from a criminal family was an infidelic douchebag.

Even nasty (*^(&^)(_ are allowed to have some good ideas.

When the USA cleaved itself from the Empire, King George III was the regent. He had an idea of the First Family. The first family was supposed to set an ideal, of how rulers and heros were meant to comport themselves.

The USA seems to have taken this away with them. Americans have a standard of heros and rulers. To fail it, and to be nasty or human means that nothing is okay.

Which simply isn't so. It would sure be nice if it was that simple, but it isn't.

So if Kennedy isn't perfect, than nothing he did was okay. If he was a severe (&*()*^$%$% then everything he did was wrong.

In reality, he did do something that were good. He did try and overcome a few practices in campaign financing that are long overdue. And he floated to power on the back of his raping pillaging thug father, and a mother with views of greatness.