Forty Years On

24 November 2003


Kennedy's Legacy -- Mr. Bush

This last week marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. To some (mostly aging liberals), his death marked the end of a glorious hope in America; to others (die-hard segregationists), it was no big loss. Yet none has remarked on the fact that Kennedy's presidency mirrors the current one. That is not a compliment to either man.

First and foremost, neither JFK nor Bush the Lesser won a convincing victory at the polls (there many Nixon and Gore fans who claim the election was stolen both in 1960 and 2000). Second, neither man showed much in the way of ability that would make one believe in presidential greatness prior to his election -- Senator Kennedy managed to lose the vice-presidential nomination in 1956 to the now-forgotten Senator Estes Kefauver (who), and Mr. Bush failed as an oil man and owned a losing baseball team before taking over the rather ceremonial job of Governor of Texas. Third, both men managed to get the country into a war through bungling and imperial over-reach. Fourth, the advisors of both men do not have the foresight and wisdom to make use of their exceptional intellectual talents.

Most troubling, though, in all of this, is the sheer lack of critical, reasoned opposition to both men. No one dared to say to Mr. Kennedy and his Boston mafia that Vietnam didn't matter one way or the other. Someone could have saved 58,000 Americans and about 3,000,000 Vietnamese if the war had been halted in 1961. So far, Mr. Bush has lost 400 odd potential military voters by getting them killed in Iraq, and there's no light at the end of the tunnel there (no should the thousands of dead Iraqis be forgotten). Such opposition as Mr. Kennedy faced and Mr. Bush faces is a sort of rabid, reactionary loathing that does nothing to appeal to the good sense of reasonable observers.

In his thousand days, JFK gave the US the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Blockade and Vietnam. Mr. Bush, in a bit more time, has fractured NATO, presided over an economic disaster, "won" a war he can't seem to end, and lost 3,000 citizens in the first attack on the continental US since the War of 1812. No president manages to create catastrophe's on his own, but these two callow, Ivy Leaguers will eventually be judged by historians who did not live under their administrations. When the bloom is off the rose, they both shall be found wanting.

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