Finishing Up JFK

The month of JFK comes to an end.  I learned a lot reading about our 35th President.

First of all, I am not interested in assassination speculation.  It's all a waste of time.  Until hard evidence surfaces, a mysterious man named Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President Kennedy from the 6th floor of the then Texas Schoolbook Depository.  He acted alone though influenced by his pro-Cuba anti-Americanism of the times.  Case closed.

JFK saved the world by his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  He learned to distrust the military and CIA during the Bay of Pigs disaster.  You have to think this played a part in how he handled the Cuban crisis.  He successfully jawboned the steel industry into lowering its prices.  He sucessfully handled Berlin crisis.  The wall went up, but better a wall than a war.  He was a late-comer to the civil rights movement.  JFK was something of a pragmatic liberal, controlled by events rather than he controlling events.  He mishandled the Oxford crisis.  If he had done right things, there might not have been a riot and two people killed.  Conservatives try to claim him, but they are wrong.  He was not a heart-felt, passionate liberal, but he was liberal nontheless.  He came into office toally focused on foreign affairs, lessening tensions with the Soviet Union, and without a domestic agenda.  I did not realize the extent of this until I began reading.

As time goes on, his stock will improve with professional historians, and deservedly so.  The sad thing is that he was so hated in the South because of race.  The country was not united behind his idealism; only part of the country was united.  This is one of the great misnomers of his administration.

The Camelot stuff is fantasy.  Reality is rarely fantasy.

JFK was a rich kid who never had to work a real job a day in his life.  My reading makes clear how his domineering daddy bankrolled everything Kennedy ever did. 

He was witty; he was articulate; he was inspiring.  Too bad I was too young and I grew up in the South and therefore missed the Kennedy mystique.