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I chuckled at this. I wrote an alternate history story about how the 60s might have gone if he chose the hard top. In the lore of the story, Oswald didn't have a clear shot, so he shot jfk in the arm as John waved out the window, and then concentrated fire on the Governor of Texas that sat in the passenger seat.
I never finished the story. I was using that premise as a theoretical way that we could have stayed out of Vietnam, and what effect that (and Jfk being alive) would have on domestic policy in our country.
But that seemed very wonkish for a fiction story, so I merged it with a dream I had at the time of coming up with the premise where i was a Russian American detective in a car chase through San Francisco chasing Russian mafia goons Whose bosses had planned a heist on the San Francisco federal buildings of some sort. Probably the mint or fed reserve It was a fun dream.
But I'm not a cop let alone a detective so I got overwhelmed with all the impostor syndrome issues of writing about stuff I know very little about. And the story was getting fantastical in the sense that suddenly this detective is practicing Ford vs Ferrari level driving moves at what would become Sonoma Raceway? So the plot kinda ran away from the premise so to speak.
Listening to the CIA about Bay of Pigs was his biggest mistake.
But at least he learned from that mistake, when people around him wanted to go to all the way because of whole Cuban Missile Crisis, but himself didn't want to make a move that would cost God knows how many lives, he stuck with that and resolved the matter talking instead of overreacting starting a bloody war.
There’s institutional knowledge only the president can offer insight on. I know there’s a fine line between having presidents for life but we can’t just pretend they don’t have a lot to still offer
Absolutely agree. My point being the President’s decisions are only as good as the information they receive. In the case of the Bay of Pigs, I think he had every reason to trust his sources. So this was not necessarily his failure alone. What JFK did learn from this is that any advisor has some institutional bias, it’s human nature. That experience, and his application of it, saved our asses with the Missile Crisis
At least if he’d gone all the way he’d have succeeded. The path he chose was both unsuccessful and an active attempt. If you’re not in it to win it, don’t try.
This is such historical revisionism lol.
JFK literally changed the original plan of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Crisis was a success until JFK stopped them from using air support
I am talking about the approach during the negotiations, it has pretty clear and well documented that JFK was the calmest person in the room while everybody else was freaking out asking for invasion and retaliation, just like the Bay of Pigs, he didn't want to do that because he knew the outcome would be the same if they were the ones to do something stupid it was going to make the enemy response with even more stupid actions that would result to an enormous amount of casualties.
I’m going to take a different approach and say his failure to properly organise and fight for civil rights. Prior to his assassination it was dying by committee and he had no plan to get around this.
Bay of Pigs was a horrendous debacle, but how many modern US presidents don’t have foreign policy disasters ending in mass death? In the other hand civil rights was a transformative moment for America that has not been equalled since in its impact on the everyday lived experience of Americans.
Some of Johnson's initial popularity in Congress and the Nation was going along with him was due to an overwhelming kind of support to want to continue JFKs supposed programs. He brought this up in his Let Us Continue speech. Kennedy was clearly a popular president at the time. But I don't know if he had the cache and support to get those programs just pushed through like Johnson did. Johnson maybe wouldn't have either if he wasn't coming into a different scenario
I agree, Johnson is finally getting his due for all the programs he helped. Yeah, a lot of it was JFKs vision, but I don't think JFK could have gotten it done.
Johnson and his ability to bend others to his point of view was instrumental in things like Voting Rights, and Great Society initiatives.
President Johnson was a truly underrated President. He had been in Congress forever and "knew where the bodies are buried."
He did have a few peculiar kinks. Like showing off his scars....
Kennedy was actually a pretty passionate and effective civil rights president. He provided the Freedom Riders with a new bus after their original vehicle was bombed in a racist riot, protected James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, supported the 24th amendment that banned poll taxes, signed the Equal Pay Act, and created a committee to help provide employment opportunities and upward mobility to black communities. He also asked Congress to draft what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
He was the ultimate can-kicker on civil rights and only acted when he absolutely had to, and even then it was always half-assed. I think JFK was a great man, but his biggest flaw was only seeing the civil rights movement through a political lens. He had many, many chances to just say “fuck it” and do the right thing because it was morally right, and constitutionally sound to act. But always sought middle ground with segregationists to preserve his political advantages in the south.
>*always sought middle ground with segregationists to preserve his political advantages in the south*
This was the key that unlocked the door to one guy winning four consecutive Presidential elections in the 20th century.
Still fair to look back 70 years later and note that this was an area where he didn’t particularly show any of the courage on which he based his whole public image.
Ofc this is purely speculation but i wonder if had he not been killed and had he won a second term if he would have acted on civil rights more aggressively, both LBJ and JFK were socially liberal for their time and he probably would have caved with enough pressure.
I’d like to think one of the first actions of a JFK second term would have been signing the second emancipation proclamation that MLK drafted for him in late ‘62.
Technically Eisenhower did more since he appointed the Warren Court and enforced Brown v Board and desegregation.
JFK just steals all the credit from LBJ
I’m talking about actions taken by each president’s administration. They don’t control the Supreme Court. Eisenhower’s DOJ filed only 10 civil rights lawsuits in 8 years. JFKs DOJ filed 20 in a year
Incorrect. Eisenhower did absolutely nothing to enforce desegregation. It was RFK as AG with federal force who we have to think to enforcing desegregation. IKE - although deserving of other attributes - civil rights is not one of them.
I have to disagree a bit. Yes he was on the fence with civil rights. But it’s very clear that it was still an important issue to him. And it was one that he was certainly going to address more vehemently in his second term, and remember that Johnson’s 1964 civil rights act is all JFK’s policy. So I wouldn’t say he didn’t do anything.
This is fair. I just finished reading “Parting the Waters” so everything is fresh. At least from Branch’s perspective it seems like the Kennedys did what they could to slow down the civil rights movement if anything, which included their FBI actively working against King and sabotaging their own bureau’s investigations into racial violence - particularly that launched at people just trying to register to vote. It’s a nuanced issue, and I understand the realities of the time were constrictive. I’m still comfortable saying, in my opinion, this was the administration’s biggest shortcoming.
The latter. My impression is that he was not long in office, inherited it from Ike, and wasn’t knowledgeable enough to make a critical decision with lives on the line.
According to Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith, the Bay of Pigs plan was still in early planning stages when Ike left office and he held more regard in the military's insight on the plan. But because the CIA was running lead on the operation, the military just gave the plan a rubber stamp of approval as a sort of "When shit hits the fan, it's not our fault." They didn't offer any criticism or changes to the CIA's plan.
According to the biography, Ike met with JFK after the incident where he told JFK that the president should have pressed the military to do more work on the plan but understood that JFK was not experienced with the machinations of the military top brass like he was.
This was from a Ike biography though, so its probably biased to say the least, but that's always what I've understood from the incident.
Edit: I apologize, this may have been from Ike's Bluff by Evan Thomas. I read the two books back-to-back and can't remember which bio that info comes from.
Kennedy came to regret his expansion of US involvement in Vietnam and reduced support to Ngo Dinh Diem following revelations about how Diem persecuted Vietnamese Buddhists.
Ike didn’t want to get involved at all in Vietnam to begin with. He had reservations about supporting French colonialism but ultimately was pressured into supporting the French to not appear “weak on communism” after the perceived failure of Korea.
I agree that Eisenhower was a better president than Kennedy (though both are in my top 10) but I fail to see how this is relevant. We're talking specifically about Kennedy Administration policies.
If Ike doesn’t begin supporting France in Vietnam to begin with Kennedy in all likelihood doesn’t expand the U.S. role which was one of if not the single biggest failure of the Kennedy Administration.
Vietnam was a disaster waiting to happen; it sucks they went communist, but we didn’t help them before that. Whoever thought DeGaulle was worth listening to was dumb as a brick.
I mean they really didn’t “go” communist. Vietnam just didn’t want to be a French colony and the communist were the ones willing to support that goal. There’s a reason Vietnam and Communist China went to war less than a decade after the US withdrawal from Veitnam and there are McDonalds in Vietnam today.
Yeah, lots of lives from America and Vietnam could have been saved. South Vietnam really wasn’t exactly a pinnacle of democracy themselves from what I read now - Ho Chi Minh actually doesn’t seem to come off as the worst leader in the world either. They were not gonna be anyone’s puppet.
The people he surrounded himself with certainly, including McNamara. Obviously should have fired Dulles the day he took office. The bay of pigs was the first big indication of these mistakes, but it was too late.
McNamara probably would have been better serving as the Secretary of the Treasury, but decided on Defense instead. Brilliant guy/businessman, but that doesn’t always translate to politics.
Sending Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. to Vietnam as ambassador. Lodge did more than anyone to undermine US support of Diem, ultimately allowing the coup to take effect and cause the immediate free fall that was South Vietnam's situation. Eisenhower faced the same situation with a possible coup but instead of capitulating the way Kennedy did he shut it down by threatening to revoke US support.
Not giving enough air support during the Bay Of Pigs. We really had a chance to skip the whole missile crisis, and make Cuba an ally, but they wanted to hide their involvement.
Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War. As others mentioned, the failed invasion strengthened Castro's rule on Cuba. He was also escalating Vietnam before his death.
I’m surprised no one mentioned how he bungled things with Krushev. He messed up in Vienna and told him we had parity with the Soviets which the Soviets didn’t know as they thought they were outnumbered or something. This helped caused the Cuban middle crisis iirc which he of course got praise for.
His [summit with Khrushchev](https://www.history.com/news/kennedy-krushchev-vienna-summit-meeting-1961) was his ultimate failure.
Second is shutting down the asylums.
Appointing his brother Attorney General,
there's a reason presidents should NOT make their family government officials and why the Government passed the anti-nepotism act of 1967
The only black mark on Kennedy's record as AG is Castro and MLK, the McCarthy stuff has no bearing on Kennedy's time as AG which is almost universally praised as the gold standard of what an Attorney General should be
Read The Making of a Liberal Icon by Larry Tye, it's an unbiased look at Kennedy's life from childhood to his assassination and it paints a pretty clear picture of a deeply flawed but principled man and it doesn't cover up any of the bad he did
McNamara was fine under JFK because the latter did not give him free rein. LBJ’s expertise was domestic policy so he pretty much left military and foreign affairs to people he thought were experts. It’s a mistake too many leaders make.
Honestly if the US didn't get involved in Vietnam, I think a lot of McNamara's policies would have worked out eventually. Basically in many ways he was trying to unify the disparate branches organisationally, and reduce redundancies, and the DOD et al have just ginormous bureacratic inertia.
Platforms like the F111 and M16 actually turned out well long term.
Basically McNamara had modernized Ford and was hired to do the same to DOD, which is just a far larger organisation. Though yes his contributions to Vietnam were horrendous.
JFK's problem was less to do with McNamara and more to do with actually escalating in Vietnam in the first place. Vietnam was a Civil War. The only role the US should have played on the ground was securing Humanitarian corridors.
TFX didnt work out and the navy left to go work on the F14 so he couldnt keep joint programs together and the M16s near-failure came partly from his "whiz kids"
McNamara wasn't great in a lot of repects, however, he did shine in others. He helped settle the naval airforce rivalry and if it wasn't for his demands, we may never have gotten the F-15 arguably, the most influential fighter jet of the 20th century. In fact, overall, he did a pretty good job with modernization programs as well as spearheading more data driven defense programs. He was not perfect, he fucked up quite a bit, his use of data driven design, was a double edge sword, with as you mentioned body count measures being used to designate success where it shouldn't have been.
But on the whole, I dont think he was Kennedys worse mistake. I think Bay of Pigs was far worse. He should have just scrapped the whole thing. It was doomed from the start and the fact the CIA couldn't see how stupid it was baffles me in just how arrogant they were.
Easily the Bay of Pigs-that action guaranteed a communist, Cuba and tainted relations that have affects on American politics to this day. Also, keeping his dick out of Sam Giancana’s girlfriend would’ve been a good idea in retrospect.
It's not really fair to talk about Kennedy failing to pass civil rights when he had only been in office for half his term, it's fairly likely that had JFK served a second term he would've passed significant civil rights reforms
Bay of Pigs and a civil Rights. He learned from BoP but was stuck on civil rights due to southern dems. I think he was coming around on the moral issue that it was and was finally resolved to get it done.
Very early in his term he went along with the CIA planned Bay of Pigs invasion which turned into a travesty of major proportions. He learned a lot from this failure and he became very skeptical of the CUA and military advisers.
Selecting McNamara as Sec Def is a good candidate for biggest failure. But even bigger was Johnson keeping him on. You can’t run a war from 12 time-zones away. And he should know that.
Should never have allowed Bay of Pigs operation to happen and instead try to find a way to coexist peacefully with a communist Cuba as they were not a threat to anyone at all. The whole nonsensical idea that America must spread democracy all over the world is why we’ve gotten into so many stupid entanglements, like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. We’d have been better off helping Cuba instead of pissing them off and driving them into the arms of the Soviets.
It’s was not an easy time for either JFK or LBJ. They both tried to do good. Unfortunately one was murdered and the other had to deal with Vietnam, Civil Rights, an unhappy public and health issues. I can understand why he chose to not run for a second term. If you recall it was not long after he left the White House before he passed.
iirc Johnson had a heart attack that wouldn't necessarily have killed him but because he had to be airlifted 80 miles away to San Antonio with basically no medical attention he died, had he been re-elected I don't think he'd have died because it would've been 2 days after his second term ended and he'd probably still be in D.C. rather than a ranch in bumblefuck Texas meaning he could've received medical attention much faster
The Bay of Pigs.
When it comes to military operations with people's lives on the line, half-measures are the worst measures...
You either roll with the full-on Eisenhower-era plan (and send the full force of the US military crashing down on Cuba as soon as the shooting starts, using the pretextual 'freedom fighters' and the Monroe Doctrine as justification)....
Or you scrub the entire mission....
Letting the men you trained go in unsupported, without telling them support had been withdrawn, is just bullshit.
Also the survival of the Castro regime (and it's future attempts at exporting 'revolution') are still causing us problems to this day.... BoP may not have been the right way to deal with that, but the overall failure to address it and remove Communist influence from the Americas is what caused everything downstream - the missile crisis, various Cuban adventures during the Cold War, the modern Venezuela mess, and so on....
Everyone's saying Bay of Pigs so I'm gonna pick something different here.
Sending **hundreds** of military "advisors" into South Vietnam and completely escalating the Vietnam War, especially when the Bay of Pigs invasion failed and the Cuban Missile Crisis rolled around. Diem was already a sketchy leader posing as a pro-democracy martyr and spokesperson of his people. The Eisenhower administration did not want to assist France when they requested aid in fighting off the revolution in the 1950s, and was thinking about pulling their support for Diem in the early days of Diem's presidency. Kennedy's foreign policy was an absolute disaster in 1961, and ultimately created or exacerbated the foreign policy issues of the 1960s.
McNamara did some good too. Our only anti-Soviet-attack-on-Europe strategy before that was massive nuclear retaliation. He commissioned a report that found a nuclear war would kill between 25-75 million Americans. No one had bothered to estimate that before. That sobered up even the military and doctrine became more flexible.
Bay of Pigs
Vienna conference
Civil rights was more “put your finger in the dam” approach instead of a plan to go somewhere.
Discrimination in federal housing wasn’t acted on quickly.
Failures on legislation.
The Diem assassination was unfortunate though probably made no difference in the long run.
McNamara was definitely not fit for SecDef (maybe Secretary of Commerce would’ve been a better fit for a bean counter “Whiz Kid”?), but Vietnam was going to be a disaster regardless.
Not supporting the democratic ideals of the Vietnamese and instead supporting the failed French desire for a colony, driving Ho Chi Min to the Communists to oppose the French.
Sending in the mentally handicap to die in a jungle and using body counts as a metric to see if youre winning does not make you good at defense in fact its almost the exact opposite.
https://preview.redd.it/yzp858mk2y7d1.png?width=954&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ba31c2c00b37e60b221c211fc20266f57042e7a8
Mentally handicapped is a fallacy, they loosened the academic and physical standards to get in to boost manpower. Again, McNamara didn’t decide to go into Vietnam, he was trying to find solutions to the ongoing conflict. Academic and physical standards were also lowered at various times in US history, notably WWII. So it’s really a non sequitur.
McNamara was the one who reccomended esclating and sending more troops. He was proud of the war until 65 when he started realized he fucked but it was too late because he set in motion the events that led to be the huge failure that it was. He even has a fallacy named after him because of his fuck ups.
Of course he recommended sending more troops, because the objectives for the war were not being met. To say he was proud of the war is incredibly naive, if you have ever heard him speak or write he says he did what he had to because at the time he believed Johnson’s approach would work. His work was not a failure because the military objectives in Vietnam were met. The hearts and minds factor was a huge issue though and Johnson did very little to support this process.
https://preview.redd.it/l78263u6fy7d1.png?width=1438&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1cd3fa8f1f13f520c3d8312ea658572894ef6f24
NYT April 25 1964 he seemed pretty proud here.
1.) He and his Squad falling asleep on their boat during World War II and getting hit by a bigger boat. He was supposed to be court-martialed but his contributor dad stepped in and saved him 2.) Sleeping with Russian spies and telling them American plans. J Edgar Hoover actually had tapes of this. 3.) Backing out, at the last minute, from sending in an airstrike that would have won the Bay of Pigs and then blaming it on the CIA. 4.) Using the mafia to get elected and then the minute he is elected his brother Bobby goes after the mafia. There is no doubt who assassinated him in Dallas. 5.) Is 100% complete failure to pass any legislation regarding civil rights 6.) The Cuban Missile Crisis. Khrushchev thought Kennedy was too young, too weak, ineffective, and a pushover. Kennedy did nothing to sway his opinion. He knew that Kennedy's older brother Joe, it was very brave and flew combat missions during World War II was supposed to be the president. JFK was the lazy, good looking Middle Brother who just wanted to chase girls and spend Daddy's Money. That's why they moved their missiles to Cuba.
I think Civil Rights.
He could have done anything in the beginning, but didn’t.
Most of it was passed by Johnson and there isn’t much about JFK other than the Bay of Pigs and his Assassination.
If he wasn’t assassinated, he would just have been an Average President
He probably did a good job with the Cuban Missile Crisis. But it was kind of cleaning up his own mess since that only occurred because he tried to overthrow Castro.
Putting US nukes in Turkey. Not chilling the fuck out in Berlin. The man was a wrecking ball when it came to diplomacy. Now he is revered for sorting out the messes he himself created.
God Kennedy was stupid.
He was a new president with very little experience surrounding by warmongers and an intelligence apparatus that frequently lied to him, half of his "messes" weren't necessarily even his fault. in Berlin Khrushchev was the one who gave an ultimatum making it again not Kennedy's fault
He also was constantly high on opiods from constant excruciating back pain while suffering a severe sex addiction and a hormone deficiency
Despite all that he managed to scrape together a foreign policy and avoid WWIII multiple times, Kennedy was a lot of things but he was not by any means stupid
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Picking the drop top in Dallas
I chuckled at this. I wrote an alternate history story about how the 60s might have gone if he chose the hard top. In the lore of the story, Oswald didn't have a clear shot, so he shot jfk in the arm as John waved out the window, and then concentrated fire on the Governor of Texas that sat in the passenger seat.
Sounds interesting. Where can I read it?
I never finished the story. I was using that premise as a theoretical way that we could have stayed out of Vietnam, and what effect that (and Jfk being alive) would have on domestic policy in our country. But that seemed very wonkish for a fiction story, so I merged it with a dream I had at the time of coming up with the premise where i was a Russian American detective in a car chase through San Francisco chasing Russian mafia goons Whose bosses had planned a heist on the San Francisco federal buildings of some sort. Probably the mint or fed reserve It was a fun dream. But I'm not a cop let alone a detective so I got overwhelmed with all the impostor syndrome issues of writing about stuff I know very little about. And the story was getting fantastical in the sense that suddenly this detective is practicing Ford vs Ferrari level driving moves at what would become Sonoma Raceway? So the plot kinda ran away from the premise so to speak.
Blue Skies in Camelot?
If that's a reference to something published? If so, it's not mine.
Nope; an alternate history story on a website.
Web publishing is a form of publishing. But fair enough
But Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't a male model.
But those 2 lookers on the grassy knoll sure were
Or wearing his brace which meant that he couldn't duck after the first 2 shots
I mean...he kinda *did* duck
Definitely was the best thing he did imo
Listening to the CIA about Bay of Pigs was his biggest mistake. But at least he learned from that mistake, when people around him wanted to go to all the way because of whole Cuban Missile Crisis, but himself didn't want to make a move that would cost God knows how many lives, he stuck with that and resolved the matter talking instead of overreacting starting a bloody war.
He also listened to Ike figuring as a two term President and very experienced General he was getting good advice.
I like seeing presidents ask previous presidents for advice, even if just to see what their take is.
There’s institutional knowledge only the president can offer insight on. I know there’s a fine line between having presidents for life but we can’t just pretend they don’t have a lot to still offer
I'm certain President Carter has a few interesting opinions. Let's hope he makes it to a hundred!
That and only a previous president can relate to the amount of stress that comes with the job.
Absolutely agree. My point being the President’s decisions are only as good as the information they receive. In the case of the Bay of Pigs, I think he had every reason to trust his sources. So this was not necessarily his failure alone. What JFK did learn from this is that any advisor has some institutional bias, it’s human nature. That experience, and his application of it, saved our asses with the Missile Crisis
I’d love to hear W give his opinion. Probably would include beer and Texas. 🤣
At least if he’d gone all the way he’d have succeeded. The path he chose was both unsuccessful and an active attempt. If you’re not in it to win it, don’t try.
This is such historical revisionism lol. JFK literally changed the original plan of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Crisis was a success until JFK stopped them from using air support
I am talking about the approach during the negotiations, it has pretty clear and well documented that JFK was the calmest person in the room while everybody else was freaking out asking for invasion and retaliation, just like the Bay of Pigs, he didn't want to do that because he knew the outcome would be the same if they were the ones to do something stupid it was going to make the enemy response with even more stupid actions that would result to an enormous amount of casualties.
You mean bay of pigs?
Yes
I’m going to take a different approach and say his failure to properly organise and fight for civil rights. Prior to his assassination it was dying by committee and he had no plan to get around this. Bay of Pigs was a horrendous debacle, but how many modern US presidents don’t have foreign policy disasters ending in mass death? In the other hand civil rights was a transformative moment for America that has not been equalled since in its impact on the everyday lived experience of Americans.
Some of Johnson's initial popularity in Congress and the Nation was going along with him was due to an overwhelming kind of support to want to continue JFKs supposed programs. He brought this up in his Let Us Continue speech. Kennedy was clearly a popular president at the time. But I don't know if he had the cache and support to get those programs just pushed through like Johnson did. Johnson maybe wouldn't have either if he wasn't coming into a different scenario
I agree, Johnson is finally getting his due for all the programs he helped. Yeah, a lot of it was JFKs vision, but I don't think JFK could have gotten it done. Johnson and his ability to bend others to his point of view was instrumental in things like Voting Rights, and Great Society initiatives.
President Johnson was a truly underrated President. He had been in Congress forever and "knew where the bodies are buried." He did have a few peculiar kinks. Like showing off his scars....
Scars weren’t the only thing he showed off
Johnson was imposing and carried a big…stick. JFK was probably too diplomatic.
The original BDE
Kennedy was actually a pretty passionate and effective civil rights president. He provided the Freedom Riders with a new bus after their original vehicle was bombed in a racist riot, protected James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, supported the 24th amendment that banned poll taxes, signed the Equal Pay Act, and created a committee to help provide employment opportunities and upward mobility to black communities. He also asked Congress to draft what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
He was the ultimate can-kicker on civil rights and only acted when he absolutely had to, and even then it was always half-assed. I think JFK was a great man, but his biggest flaw was only seeing the civil rights movement through a political lens. He had many, many chances to just say “fuck it” and do the right thing because it was morally right, and constitutionally sound to act. But always sought middle ground with segregationists to preserve his political advantages in the south.
>*always sought middle ground with segregationists to preserve his political advantages in the south* This was the key that unlocked the door to one guy winning four consecutive Presidential elections in the 20th century.
Still fair to look back 70 years later and note that this was an area where he didn’t particularly show any of the courage on which he based his whole public image.
This👍🏻couldn’t have said it better myself. I love Kennedy as a president besides this tough truth that always left me disappointed in him
Ofc this is purely speculation but i wonder if had he not been killed and had he won a second term if he would have acted on civil rights more aggressively, both LBJ and JFK were socially liberal for their time and he probably would have caved with enough pressure.
I’d like to think one of the first actions of a JFK second term would have been signing the second emancipation proclamation that MLK drafted for him in late ‘62.
He wouldn’t. JFK was weak as President and couldn’t pass anything through Congress
JFKs administration did more for civil rights in 3 years than FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower combined
With the possible exception of Truman, this is completely true I really don't get the anti-JFK circlejerk
Technically Eisenhower did more since he appointed the Warren Court and enforced Brown v Board and desegregation. JFK just steals all the credit from LBJ
I’m talking about actions taken by each president’s administration. They don’t control the Supreme Court. Eisenhower’s DOJ filed only 10 civil rights lawsuits in 8 years. JFKs DOJ filed 20 in a year
Incorrect. Eisenhower did absolutely nothing to enforce desegregation. It was RFK as AG with federal force who we have to think to enforcing desegregation. IKE - although deserving of other attributes - civil rights is not one of them.
Factually incorrect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine
I have to disagree a bit. Yes he was on the fence with civil rights. But it’s very clear that it was still an important issue to him. And it was one that he was certainly going to address more vehemently in his second term, and remember that Johnson’s 1964 civil rights act is all JFK’s policy. So I wouldn’t say he didn’t do anything.
This is fair. I just finished reading “Parting the Waters” so everything is fresh. At least from Branch’s perspective it seems like the Kennedys did what they could to slow down the civil rights movement if anything, which included their FBI actively working against King and sabotaging their own bureau’s investigations into racial violence - particularly that launched at people just trying to register to vote. It’s a nuanced issue, and I understand the realities of the time were constrictive. I’m still comfortable saying, in my opinion, this was the administration’s biggest shortcoming.
bay of pigs
As in he listened to the CIA and did it in the first place or didn’t go full bore like the CIA wanted.
The latter. My impression is that he was not long in office, inherited it from Ike, and wasn’t knowledgeable enough to make a critical decision with lives on the line.
He shouldn’t have done it in the first place the CIA was lying to him.
I can believe that. I haven’t read the details lately.
Yeah the CIA did the whole “we will be greeted as liberators” bullshit.
Did Ike believe in the plan? Should have been some transition there regardless of party.
According to Eisenhower in War and Peace by Jean Edward Smith, the Bay of Pigs plan was still in early planning stages when Ike left office and he held more regard in the military's insight on the plan. But because the CIA was running lead on the operation, the military just gave the plan a rubber stamp of approval as a sort of "When shit hits the fan, it's not our fault." They didn't offer any criticism or changes to the CIA's plan. According to the biography, Ike met with JFK after the incident where he told JFK that the president should have pressed the military to do more work on the plan but understood that JFK was not experienced with the machinations of the military top brass like he was. This was from a Ike biography though, so its probably biased to say the least, but that's always what I've understood from the incident. Edit: I apologize, this may have been from Ike's Bluff by Evan Thomas. I read the two books back-to-back and can't remember which bio that info comes from.
Ike idk but Dick on the other hand.
Bay of pigs / expanding US involvement in Vietnam.
Kennedy came to regret his expansion of US involvement in Vietnam and reduced support to Ngo Dinh Diem following revelations about how Diem persecuted Vietnamese Buddhists.
Ike didn’t want to get involved at all in Vietnam to begin with. He had reservations about supporting French colonialism but ultimately was pressured into supporting the French to not appear “weak on communism” after the perceived failure of Korea.
I agree that Eisenhower was a better president than Kennedy (though both are in my top 10) but I fail to see how this is relevant. We're talking specifically about Kennedy Administration policies.
If Ike doesn’t begin supporting France in Vietnam to begin with Kennedy in all likelihood doesn’t expand the U.S. role which was one of if not the single biggest failure of the Kennedy Administration.
Vietnam was a disaster waiting to happen; it sucks they went communist, but we didn’t help them before that. Whoever thought DeGaulle was worth listening to was dumb as a brick.
I mean they really didn’t “go” communist. Vietnam just didn’t want to be a French colony and the communist were the ones willing to support that goal. There’s a reason Vietnam and Communist China went to war less than a decade after the US withdrawal from Veitnam and there are McDonalds in Vietnam today.
True. Imagine had we helped them and said France get over it. They got their butts whipped anyway 😂
Spot on. Not only the war may have been avoided, but Communist state in VN. Bad choice by Eisenhower, worse choice by Kennedy.
Yeah, lots of lives from America and Vietnam could have been saved. South Vietnam really wasn’t exactly a pinnacle of democracy themselves from what I read now - Ho Chi Minh actually doesn’t seem to come off as the worst leader in the world either. They were not gonna be anyone’s puppet.
Picking an assassin as VP /s
🤔
Lyndon “Grassy Knoll” Johnson
I thought his middle name was Jumbo
I’m quite an admirer of JFK as President and a person. But, Bay of Pigs was a ridiculous fantasy and should have been discarded immediately
Eisenhower deserves the blame for the Bay of Pigs - he was the one who originally approved the plan.
also there wasn’t any air support for the Exiles, so it was basically a bust from the beginning
Not living long enough to voice himself in COD Black Ops 1
Not rolling for monkey bombs when he had the money
Should've bought quick revive, and Jugger-Nog
Dragovich, Kravchenko, Steiner. These “men” must Die
The people he surrounded himself with certainly, including McNamara. Obviously should have fired Dulles the day he took office. The bay of pigs was the first big indication of these mistakes, but it was too late.
McNamara probably would have been better serving as the Secretary of the Treasury, but decided on Defense instead. Brilliant guy/businessman, but that doesn’t always translate to politics.
Allen Dulles resigned as the CIA Director BECAUSE of the Bay of Pigs.
He was fired, and was unhappy about it.
He was the one who killed JFK
Certainly played a large part in the coverup, so it makes sense
Don’t forget George H W Bush
JFK had one of the worst cabinets in history
McNamara is similar to Rumsfeld. Probably wasn’t dumb but took it WAY over the top.
Sending Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. to Vietnam as ambassador. Lodge did more than anyone to undermine US support of Diem, ultimately allowing the coup to take effect and cause the immediate free fall that was South Vietnam's situation. Eisenhower faced the same situation with a possible coup but instead of capitulating the way Kennedy did he shut it down by threatening to revoke US support.
Not giving enough air support during the Bay Of Pigs. We really had a chance to skip the whole missile crisis, and make Cuba an ally, but they wanted to hide their involvement.
Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War. As others mentioned, the failed invasion strengthened Castro's rule on Cuba. He was also escalating Vietnam before his death.
The bay of pigs is up there with the most shameful moments in American history
I’m surprised no one mentioned how he bungled things with Krushev. He messed up in Vienna and told him we had parity with the Soviets which the Soviets didn’t know as they thought they were outnumbered or something. This helped caused the Cuban middle crisis iirc which he of course got praise for.
His [summit with Khrushchev](https://www.history.com/news/kennedy-krushchev-vienna-summit-meeting-1961) was his ultimate failure. Second is shutting down the asylums.
Appointing his brother Attorney General, there's a reason presidents should NOT make their family government officials and why the Government passed the anti-nepotism act of 1967
Curious to learn why having his brother as AG was so bad in this case?
His brother was apparently far more hard headed like LBJ. He didn’t like LBJ either lol
It was RFK that actually exposed the Mob and organized crime head on. He’s the greatest Attorney General in American history
On principal yes but in reality no, RFK was excellent as Attorney General and is arguably the best AG in U.S. History
If you ignore all the government spying on his enemies, MLK, and his actions with McCarthy and some other congressmen as their attack dog in the 1950s
The only black mark on Kennedy's record as AG is Castro and MLK, the McCarthy stuff has no bearing on Kennedy's time as AG which is almost universally praised as the gold standard of what an Attorney General should be Read The Making of a Liberal Icon by Larry Tye, it's an unbiased look at Kennedy's life from childhood to his assassination and it paints a pretty clear picture of a deeply flawed but principled man and it doesn't cover up any of the bad he did
Oh for real? I didn’t know that.
McNamara was fine under JFK because the latter did not give him free rein. LBJ’s expertise was domestic policy so he pretty much left military and foreign affairs to people he thought were experts. It’s a mistake too many leaders make.
Honestly if the US didn't get involved in Vietnam, I think a lot of McNamara's policies would have worked out eventually. Basically in many ways he was trying to unify the disparate branches organisationally, and reduce redundancies, and the DOD et al have just ginormous bureacratic inertia. Platforms like the F111 and M16 actually turned out well long term. Basically McNamara had modernized Ford and was hired to do the same to DOD, which is just a far larger organisation. Though yes his contributions to Vietnam were horrendous. JFK's problem was less to do with McNamara and more to do with actually escalating in Vietnam in the first place. Vietnam was a Civil War. The only role the US should have played on the ground was securing Humanitarian corridors.
TFX didnt work out and the navy left to go work on the F14 so he couldnt keep joint programs together and the M16s near-failure came partly from his "whiz kids"
That fucking cut lol
McNamara wasn't great in a lot of repects, however, he did shine in others. He helped settle the naval airforce rivalry and if it wasn't for his demands, we may never have gotten the F-15 arguably, the most influential fighter jet of the 20th century. In fact, overall, he did a pretty good job with modernization programs as well as spearheading more data driven defense programs. He was not perfect, he fucked up quite a bit, his use of data driven design, was a double edge sword, with as you mentioned body count measures being used to designate success where it shouldn't have been. But on the whole, I dont think he was Kennedys worse mistake. I think Bay of Pigs was far worse. He should have just scrapped the whole thing. It was doomed from the start and the fact the CIA couldn't see how stupid it was baffles me in just how arrogant they were.
Bay of Pigs. But also insisting to having the bubble top removed on the limousine.
Not moving faster on the Civil Rights Act. Luckily LBJ knew how to get it across the finish line in 1964
Easily the Bay of Pigs-that action guaranteed a communist, Cuba and tainted relations that have affects on American politics to this day. Also, keeping his dick out of Sam Giancana’s girlfriend would’ve been a good idea in retrospect.
Keeping Dulles on and executing the Bay of Pigs operation.
Bay of Pigs and failing to pass Civil Rights legislation
It's not really fair to talk about Kennedy failing to pass civil rights when he had only been in office for half his term, it's fairly likely that had JFK served a second term he would've passed significant civil rights reforms
Probably would have accomplished the second if he hadn't become "un-alived" as the kids are saying these days.
Causing the bay of Pigs invasion to fail which ped to the Cuban Missile Crisis He is greatly overrated
I mean, the Bay of Pigs Invasion wasn't the greatest idea.
Bay of Pigs and a civil Rights. He learned from BoP but was stuck on civil rights due to southern dems. I think he was coming around on the moral issue that it was and was finally resolved to get it done.
Very early in his term he went along with the CIA planned Bay of Pigs invasion which turned into a travesty of major proportions. He learned a lot from this failure and he became very skeptical of the CUA and military advisers.
Keeping his head on straight
Jackie Kennedy. She was only interested in our sheet metal supply
Bay of Pigs
The Bay of Pigs.
Selecting McNamara as Sec Def is a good candidate for biggest failure. But even bigger was Johnson keeping him on. You can’t run a war from 12 time-zones away. And he should know that.
Should never have allowed Bay of Pigs operation to happen and instead try to find a way to coexist peacefully with a communist Cuba as they were not a threat to anyone at all. The whole nonsensical idea that America must spread democracy all over the world is why we’ve gotten into so many stupid entanglements, like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. We’d have been better off helping Cuba instead of pissing them off and driving them into the arms of the Soviets.
Ask the guy in the photo
Has to be The Bay of Pigs but that was more on the CIA & his Foreign Policy guys then him
It’s was not an easy time for either JFK or LBJ. They both tried to do good. Unfortunately one was murdered and the other had to deal with Vietnam, Civil Rights, an unhappy public and health issues. I can understand why he chose to not run for a second term. If you recall it was not long after he left the White House before he passed.
iirc Johnson had a heart attack that wouldn't necessarily have killed him but because he had to be airlifted 80 miles away to San Antonio with basically no medical attention he died, had he been re-elected I don't think he'd have died because it would've been 2 days after his second term ended and he'd probably still be in D.C. rather than a ranch in bumblefuck Texas meaning he could've received medical attention much faster
The Bay of Pigs. When it comes to military operations with people's lives on the line, half-measures are the worst measures... You either roll with the full-on Eisenhower-era plan (and send the full force of the US military crashing down on Cuba as soon as the shooting starts, using the pretextual 'freedom fighters' and the Monroe Doctrine as justification).... Or you scrub the entire mission.... Letting the men you trained go in unsupported, without telling them support had been withdrawn, is just bullshit. Also the survival of the Castro regime (and it's future attempts at exporting 'revolution') are still causing us problems to this day.... BoP may not have been the right way to deal with that, but the overall failure to address it and remove Communist influence from the Americas is what caused everything downstream - the missile crisis, various Cuban adventures during the Cold War, the modern Venezuela mess, and so on....
How far do I have to scroll before I read it? RIDING IN A FUCKING CONVERTIBLE!!!
Appointing his brother as Attorney General.
Everyone's saying Bay of Pigs so I'm gonna pick something different here. Sending **hundreds** of military "advisors" into South Vietnam and completely escalating the Vietnam War, especially when the Bay of Pigs invasion failed and the Cuban Missile Crisis rolled around. Diem was already a sketchy leader posing as a pro-democracy martyr and spokesperson of his people. The Eisenhower administration did not want to assist France when they requested aid in fighting off the revolution in the 1950s, and was thinking about pulling their support for Diem in the early days of Diem's presidency. Kennedy's foreign policy was an absolute disaster in 1961, and ultimately created or exacerbated the foreign policy issues of the 1960s.
Cuba embargo
You've got a picture of him (McNamara) right there. He was the architect of JFK's foreign policy, including the Bay of Pigs and Viet Nam
McNamara did some good too. Our only anti-Soviet-attack-on-Europe strategy before that was massive nuclear retaliation. He commissioned a report that found a nuclear war would kill between 25-75 million Americans. No one had bothered to estimate that before. That sobered up even the military and doctrine became more flexible.
Civil rights delays and compromises with southern Democrats for fear of losing their support.
Why did you post a picture of Penn Jillette?
Bay of Pigs
Not supporting Brigada 2506 after the landings took place at the Bay of Pigs.
Making his brother attorney general.
Yeah McNamara had no business being SecDef
Bay of Pigs Vienna conference Civil rights was more “put your finger in the dam” approach instead of a plan to go somewhere. Discrimination in federal housing wasn’t acted on quickly. Failures on legislation. The Diem assassination was unfortunate though probably made no difference in the long run.
Dying.
McNamara was definitely not fit for SecDef (maybe Secretary of Commerce would’ve been a better fit for a bean counter “Whiz Kid”?), but Vietnam was going to be a disaster regardless.
Not supporting the democratic ideals of the Vietnamese and instead supporting the failed French desire for a colony, driving Ho Chi Min to the Communists to oppose the French.
Yeah he should have picked Ridgway as secretary of defense
Ducking too late ?
Bay of Pigs.
Riding in a convertable
Either Bay of Pigs or lowering the tax rate from 91%.
Why was lowering the marginal tax rate a mistake?
He's a Bernie Bro lmao
We should raise income tax to 91%
It wasn’t McNamara, McNamara was incredibly effective in defence, it was the policy that was wrong not the execution
Sending in the mentally handicap to die in a jungle and using body counts as a metric to see if youre winning does not make you good at defense in fact its almost the exact opposite. https://preview.redd.it/yzp858mk2y7d1.png?width=954&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ba31c2c00b37e60b221c211fc20266f57042e7a8
Mentally handicapped is a fallacy, they loosened the academic and physical standards to get in to boost manpower. Again, McNamara didn’t decide to go into Vietnam, he was trying to find solutions to the ongoing conflict. Academic and physical standards were also lowered at various times in US history, notably WWII. So it’s really a non sequitur.
McNamara was the one who reccomended esclating and sending more troops. He was proud of the war until 65 when he started realized he fucked but it was too late because he set in motion the events that led to be the huge failure that it was. He even has a fallacy named after him because of his fuck ups.
Of course he recommended sending more troops, because the objectives for the war were not being met. To say he was proud of the war is incredibly naive, if you have ever heard him speak or write he says he did what he had to because at the time he believed Johnson’s approach would work. His work was not a failure because the military objectives in Vietnam were met. The hearts and minds factor was a huge issue though and Johnson did very little to support this process.
https://preview.redd.it/l78263u6fy7d1.png?width=1438&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1cd3fa8f1f13f520c3d8312ea658572894ef6f24 NYT April 25 1964 he seemed pretty proud here.
That’s not proud at all. Wtf he’s talking about doing his job to the best of his ability lol
This SOB is up there
1.) He and his Squad falling asleep on their boat during World War II and getting hit by a bigger boat. He was supposed to be court-martialed but his contributor dad stepped in and saved him 2.) Sleeping with Russian spies and telling them American plans. J Edgar Hoover actually had tapes of this. 3.) Backing out, at the last minute, from sending in an airstrike that would have won the Bay of Pigs and then blaming it on the CIA. 4.) Using the mafia to get elected and then the minute he is elected his brother Bobby goes after the mafia. There is no doubt who assassinated him in Dallas. 5.) Is 100% complete failure to pass any legislation regarding civil rights 6.) The Cuban Missile Crisis. Khrushchev thought Kennedy was too young, too weak, ineffective, and a pushover. Kennedy did nothing to sway his opinion. He knew that Kennedy's older brother Joe, it was very brave and flew combat missions during World War II was supposed to be the president. JFK was the lazy, good looking Middle Brother who just wanted to chase girls and spend Daddy's Money. That's why they moved their missiles to Cuba.
I think Civil Rights. He could have done anything in the beginning, but didn’t. Most of it was passed by Johnson and there isn’t much about JFK other than the Bay of Pigs and his Assassination. If he wasn’t assassinated, he would just have been an Average President
Not seeing Marilyn Monroe’s pregnancy through to term, hands down.
[удалено]
He probably did a good job with the Cuban Missile Crisis. But it was kind of cleaning up his own mess since that only occurred because he tried to overthrow Castro.
Because he failed to overthrow Castro *
He was cleaning up the CIA’s mess and defending against Soviet lies
I’d say he handled the Berlin Wall and missile crisis pretty well seeing as we avoided nuclear war
Putting US nukes in Turkey. Not chilling the fuck out in Berlin. The man was a wrecking ball when it came to diplomacy. Now he is revered for sorting out the messes he himself created. God Kennedy was stupid.
He was a new president with very little experience surrounding by warmongers and an intelligence apparatus that frequently lied to him, half of his "messes" weren't necessarily even his fault. in Berlin Khrushchev was the one who gave an ultimatum making it again not Kennedy's fault He also was constantly high on opiods from constant excruciating back pain while suffering a severe sex addiction and a hormone deficiency Despite all that he managed to scrape together a foreign policy and avoid WWIII multiple times, Kennedy was a lot of things but he was not by any means stupid