perfidy

Mike and Buckethead, I don't disagree with JFK's: Catholicism; Irishness; hawkishness; tax-cutting-ness; influence; sexual potence; or Democratic nature. Hell, every couple weekends on the way to the House of Blues I walk down John F. Kennedy Street, Past the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Just a few miles from there is the Kennedy Museum and Library, not to mention Ted Kennedy, who is visible from orbit as well as from my comfortable home on the distant rocky coast.

What I'm disagreeing with is a) Mike's favorable opinion of Kennedy as a president, and b) Buckethead's assertion that we need more like him. Now, there have been worse presidents, but Kennedy is way overrated. I take a dim view of his civil rights record, war record, indecisiveness, and ham-fisted management of the various Communist-related crises of his administration. Had he been more forceful, decisive, and competent in all arenas, I think that all the things LBJ gets credit for would have come to pass several years earlier, and we wouldn't have had that Bay of Pigs/11:59:59 on the Doomsday Clock funtime twofer, either. More Hawkish, Tax Cutting, Democrats? Well, Ok. More like Kennedy, no please. Just my two cents.

As for Reagan, I think you're both right, not wrong. Reagan can rightly be credited with amazing gains in foreign policy, helping to end the cold war, bringing the USA out of the stagflation doldrums of the Ford/Carter years. But at the same time his policies, like Thatcher's in Britain, could be stunningly callous. If he didn't care about it, or understand it, it may as well have not existed. So, while he was freeing the world from Communism and such, at home great cities slid into ruin. In terms of Greatness, Reagan had it. In terms of Goodness, he's a mixed bag. My bottom five include:

• Nixon, his lapdog Agnew, and his button-man, Kissinger. He was a paranoid, self-aggrandizing career buffoon whose ambitions amounted only to making Richard Nixon powerful. Don't try to tell me that KSU was solely an Ohio problem. That same year there were incidents in New York and Birmingham AL (where ELEVEN black students were killed, before the Kent State four, but since black southern teens weren't blue-collar rust-belt northern teens, nobody seemed to care). Nixon and Agnew: mastered the litany of superiority and exclusion ("Nattering Nabobs of Negativity," "Silent Majority, " Agnew on Kent State: "the powder keg exploded, resulting in tragedy that was predictable and avoidable," Nixon: "when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy"); utterly destroyed the last shred of Americans' trust in the Federal Government; and kept Vietnam burning. Special demerits to Nixon for allowing that ghoul Kissinger anywhere near a seat of power. A final note: If you scramble the letters in "Spiro Agnew," you get "grow a penis."
• Andrew Johnson. Rarely has history called on a person to give so much, and gotten so little in return. Presidential Reconstruction was a disaster.
• Hoover. Depression.
• Clin-ton. Also a self-aggrandizing career buffoon. History will show that our current problems, though not necessarily started by Clinton, are as bad as they are because Clinton chose to let them slide rather than risk his image in dealing with them. Also responsible for sucking the Democratic Party dry.
• James Buchanan. See Andrew Johnson above. Lacked the "vision thing," and utterly failed to understand that sectional tensions could not be papered over with words and a couple judicial appointments. Consequently, a shooting war over slavery and states' rights was made inevitable.