Was Kennedy a Good President?

People love Kennedy.  He was handsome (at least when he wasn't an anemic kid.)  He had an affair with Marilyn Monroe.  He got killed so nobody could know how much of a fuck-up he truly was or wasn't going to be.

What's not to like?

Well, people obviously hear things about Kennedy.  People say that he was trying to end the Federal Reserve, that's why he got killed.  He was trying to bring us out of Vietnam, that's why he got killed.  He was trying to end some national oil subsidy, and that's why he got killed.

Some or all of those probably played a part.  LBJ being a homicidal maniac who was quite possibly going to get dropped from the ticket in '64 probably also played quite a big role, if not the biggest.  (For more information on this, check out The Men Who Killed Kennedy parts 9 and 8, and 7.  It was aired one time by the History Channel, then pulled.)

But what's the reality of it?  An article in the NY Times opinion section got me thinking.

Here's a section:

The first premise is that Kennedy was a very good president, and might have been a great one if he’d lived. Few serious historians take this view: It belongs to Camelot’s surviving court stenographers, and to popularizers like Chris Matthews, whose new best seller “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero” works hard to gloss over the thinness of the 35th president’s actual accomplishments. Yet there is no escaping the myth’s hold on the popular imagination. In Gallup’s “greatest president” polling, J.F.K. still regularly jostles with Lincoln and Reagan for the top spot.

In reality, the kindest interpretation of Kennedy’s presidency is that he was a mediocrity whose death left his final grade as “incomplete.” The harsher view would deem him a near disaster — ineffective in domestic policy, evasive on civil rights and a serial blunderer in foreign policy, who barely avoided a nuclear war that his own brinksmanship had pushed us toward. (And the latter judgment doesn’t even take account of the medical problems that arguably made him unfit for the presidency, or the adulteries that eclipsed Bill Clinton’s for sheer recklessness.)

The second false premise is that Kennedy would have kept us out of Vietnam. Or as a character puts it in “11/22/63,” making the case for killing Lee Harvey Oswald: “Get rid of one wretched waif, buddy, and you could save millions of lives.”

Ok, so what's the reality of the situation?

We've probably all heard of the Kennedy tax cuts that took the top marginal income tax rate down from over 90% to 70%, and brought in more revenue as a result.  Ok, that's good.

Was Kennedy trying to eliminate the Federal Reserve?  This actually seems to be a myth, although a myth that I've heard a million times and I've never heard argued against until now.

After just doing a Google search, the info wasn't making sense to me.  I saw a comment on Zero Hedge that said someone had heard G. Edward Griffin had said EO1110 was a bunch of bunk and didn't get Kennedy killed.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say:

This executive order delegated to the Secretary of the Treasury the president's authority to issue silver certificates under the Thomas Amendment of the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

[...]On November 28, 1961, President Kennedy halted sales of silver by the Treasury Department. Increasing demand of silver as an industrial metal had led to an increase in the market price of silver above the United States government's fixed price. This led to a decline in the government's excess silver reserves by over 80% during 1961. President Kennedy also called upon Congress to phase out silver certificates in favor of Federal Reserve notes.

[...]The reason for the move was that the President had just signed legislation repealing the Silver Purchase Act. With this repeal, the Treasury Secretary could no longer control the issue of Silver Certificates on his own authority. However, the issuance of certificates could be controlled under the President's authority. Hence, for administrative convenience, President Kennedy issued Executive Order 11110.

[...]Ironically, the purpose of the order and the legislation was to decrease the circulation of Silver Certificates, with Federal Reserve Notes taking their place.  [...]If anything, E.O. 11110 enhanced Federal Reserve power and did not in any way reduce it.

So, I no longer believe this Federal Reserve thing.  Seems like a lot of bunk.

About this whole oil depletion allowance, at first I thought it was ending a subsidy, but in reality it seems to be about ending a tax loophole.  I'm much less favorable to ending tax "loopholes" than I am towards ending subsidies, although I could see how it could be good.  I'm not going to read the mountains of pages it would take to understand it.  If you would like to, you can.  Crazy person.

Kennedy was also a bit of a medical socialist.  He supported Medicare, although it wasn't enacted under him, and pushed for "universal health care," (a.k.a. forcing everyone to buy health insurance, or else to subsidize other people.)  Bad.

He approved of wiretapping Martin Luther King, Jr.  Bad.

Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which was just like the 1964 act but better because it didn't try to control private businesses.  Bad.

He pushed for an expanded role of the federal government into education.  Bad.

He issued Executive Order 10988 "to promote unionism and collective bargaining in federal employment."  Bad. 
Here's another tidbit:

As Salinger recounts, one evening fellow cigar smoker Kennedy called Salinger in and asked him to go out and buy 1,000 of Kennedy's favorite Cubans by the next morning. When Salinger reported to work the next morning with 1,200 of the fragrant smokes under his arm, Kennedy pulled the bill enacting the embargo from his desk drawer and signed it, making purchases like those his press secretary had made at his orders henceforth illegal.

Bad.

From what I can see, he was looking to pull out of Vietnam, which would have been good.

He of course bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion (bad), but did keep us from getting blown up in the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Good.

Total government spending as a percent of gdp actually did seem to go down during Kennedy, which is good thing.  However, real government spending during Kennedy increased 4.6% a year.  Bad.

My assessment of Kennedy leans towards bad.

HAVE A GOOD DAY!!!!!