I had no idea that there were tapes of Kennedy discussing Vietnam.

[NNadir]

6. Probably the most overrated President in history.

Having managed to not blow up the world after stumbling recklessly into the situation that made the risk of this happening very real is rather like announcing that a drunk driver who causes a wreck is a hero for pulling victims from the burning other car out before they're seriously burned.

His performance at the Vienna summit after the Bay of Pigs marked him to the far more incisive Khrushchev as a puerile lightweight out of his league, which in fact he was.

He was, as his father reported to his friends during his campaign for the Presidency, no liberal and was, in fact, a dedicated, if sloppy, cold warrior, the only Democratic Senator to not vote to censure Joseph McCarthy. (RFK was Roy Cohn's assistant during the McCarthy hearings.)

Even as a Cold Warrior, he was ineffective, which is not to say being a cold warrior was a good thing. The result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, unadvertised at the time and ignored by the media, was that the United States was required to remove its missiles from Turkey, making the US less of a threat to the USSR than it was before the crisis.

I have taken flak for my views of Kennedy here and elsewhere, but I stand by them.

The world would have been a better place if Lyndon Johnson won the 1960 Democratic Nomination and had been elected President.