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lol, JFK is a New Deal Democrat, they were kicked out of the party by the Wall Street Clintonites in the 1990s as the party moved to the right. The majority of Democrats in Congress dont even support single payer Medicare-for-all anymore. They pushed for cuts to SS under Obama until the grassroots revolted. The GOP is just an extension of the Chamber of Commerce and the Koch brothers network at this point.
nixon was to the left of bill clinton on the economy , the GOP are far right since the mid nineties , no way would nixon fit in there today , democrats are centre right
Yah, President JFK did well @ delivering speeches, & struck poses. He did launch & cheerlead the US effort to the moon, a good thing all around. The person I actually miss, though, is President LBJ. He was a homely fellow, & he was never going to charm anyone to death.
He knew the GOP would reap votes in the South upon the passage of the CRA, & he stumped for it anyway - & lots of the War on Poverty. He was perfectly aware of what he was doing - & he did the right thing anyway.
There aren't many people left in government who would walk away from it all, rather than do injustice. In the long haul, I think LBJ was heroic in his political judgment - & his willingness to sacrifice his career for the common good of the country. We'll never know about JFK - he might have changed his mind about Vietnam. Too much lies buried with him.
Bless the man, wherever he may be.
LBJ was certainly a braver president than JFK , accomplished much more
Just had advisors?
By November 1963, there were 16,000 American military personnel in South Vietnam, up from Eisenhower's 900 advisors
America backing regime change yet again
Waaaaaaaal, I sure don't want to get in any disputes about JFK. Anyone who reads my posts knows I'm not afraid of 'discussion.'....... But, JFK was the President of the USA, and not really my business. But 16,000 'advisors' in 1963 was pretty much small time compared to what followed under LBJ wasn't it?
The important thing about JFK for me, and my generation, is there is before JFK, and after. Things were never the same again after he was murdered. I do believe there were many things going on in his time like Cuba, the Berlin Wall, and of course the start of the war in Vietnam. He had a lot on his plate, and was learning from some mistakes made. I believe he was a great man, and would have been a great President in his second term.
And, as English Dave said, there was before JFK and after JFK. If you lived through it, you know it was the end of an era.
One of his flaws was that he cared too much and pushed too hard. That alienated the powers that be...special interest groups, money lovers, rotten uncaring people whose insatiable greed was thwarted by his actions.
JFK was a womanizer... he and his brothers were more successful with the ladies than Trump. He wasn't a perfect president either. Much of his persona was created by his widow and America just gobbled up all the images of his beautiful family at the funeral. Honestly, I consider him a mediocre president at best.
Waaaaaaaal, I sure don't want to get in any disputes about JFK. Anyone who reads my posts knows I'm not afraid of 'discussion.'....... But, JFK was the President of the USA, and not really my business. But 16,000 'advisors' in 1963 was pretty much small time compared to what followed under LBJ wasn't it?
Dave, you're whitewashing.
Anybody who doesn't want war wouldn't escalate from 900 to 16,000.
At that time, Kennedy saw the USSR a real threat to the world, and he didn't want it spreading further. He was committed to fight in Vietnam.
Kennedy shouldn't have gotten us into war in Vietnam. Much like Bush 43, he got us into a bad war thinking he was doing the right thing.
Anybody who doesn't want war wouldn't escalate from 900 to 16,000.
At that time, Kennedy saw the USSR a real threat to the world, and he didn't want it spreading further. He was committed to fight in Vietnam.
Kennedy shouldn't have gotten us into war in Vietnam. Much like Bush 43, he got us into a bad war thinking he was doing the right thing.
It depends what you read about Kennedy and Vietnam Pedro. He did want to contain communism, and lots of war hawks were whispering in his ear. It's easy for us to talk here, knowing what happened after LBJ took office.
The question is, would JFK have followed the same route as LBJ did? From some I have read JFK seemed reluctant to go to a full scale war. It is difficult once the war drums start banging to pull back, as Bush found out.
We'll never know what JFK would have done after winning in 1964. He depended on his brother Bobby for advice, and he was against the war by 1968, as he stated in his speech that year. Even in 1965, he seemed uneasy about the way the war was escalating.
I'm not saying President Kennedy wouldn't have escalated the war himself, but would he have allowed it to go the way LBJ did? Would Bobby have helped convince his brother to withdraw in 65/66? Or would it have gone exactly the same way? We'll never know now of course.........
It's now a century since the birth of John F. Kennedy's birth, and when I heard that on the radio, I couldn't help contrasting, with a pang, JFK and Trump.
Like Trump, JKF came from wealth, and even similarly had some corruption in his family. But his presidency was a model of grace and classiness in comparison.
First, of course, there was Kennedy's physical grace, his jauntiness, in comparison with Trump's lumbering stance. Then there was the grace of Kennedy's speech. Not only was he articulate, unlike Trump, but he had a kind of confidence - the kind that comes from knowledge and experience, not bluster. Unlike Trump, there was no vulgarity to his public speech. He would never have uttered the crude and insulting remarks that Trump has done - in fact, Kennedy even spoke decently of people like Nixon. And Kennedy had a sense of humor. Kennedy's witty remarks, often off-the-cuff, are often quoted. Trump's rare attempts at humor seem to only be insults.
Trump has never had any version of what most of us would consider a job, where you are answerable to someone else above you, which has given him the outlook of a dictator. Kennedy, despite his wealth, had been in the military and service in Congress and the Senate, where he was answerable to higher-ups. So he never showed quite the insufferable arrogance of Trump. Although both Trump and Kennedy came from money, there was nothing greedy about Kennedy. He had no fixation on money. And he certainly didn't brag about it. If anything, sometimes he poked fun at the family money, like his famous quip about his father being unwilling to pay for a landslide.
Unlike Trump, Kennedy had endearing family relationships. Of course, he was also a philanderer, but he had the decency to keep that private. Publicly, he was not only happy to express pride at his wife's culture and eruption (both lacking in Melania), but at a time when men often didn't have close relations with their children, he set aside time even in the White House for his, and they clearly delighted in each other. In contrast, you can see even with Barron, that there's not much of a relationship there.
What else? Well, Kennedy was a voracious reader, and was well-versed about many things, including history. Being human, he must have sometimes said dumb things, but I've never heard of any, nor have I ever heard of Kennedy blatantly lying for the purposes of self-inflation.
And, maybe above all, even in some very scary times, he managed to mostly convey a kind of cheer, of optimism - and maybe that's what drew so many people to him.
Kennedy was able to keep all that philandering private because the press didn't report on it. They also probably didn't report on the bad things he may have said about opponents. It was a different world then.
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But, JFK was the President of the USA, and not really my business. But 16,000 'advisors' in 1963 was pretty much small time compared to what followed under LBJ wasn't it?
