He didn’t do much in terms of passing legislation. The big civil rights and tax-cut bills associated with his name were actually pushed through Congress by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Partly that was because Kennedy did not actually have that much time in the Oval Office, serving as president only a thousand days.
He’s remembered as the hero of the Cuban Missile Crisis, resisting the advice of many security officials to destroy the Soviet launchers with military force. But Kennedy’s approval of the Bay of Pigs invasion at the beginning of his term was a mistake that might have led Cuban leader Fidel Castro to accept those launchers in the first place. And Kennedy escalated US involvement in Vietnam, increasing the number of US advisers in the country from a few hundred to 16,000 while opening the spigots of military and political aid.
Then there’s his womanizing. In recent decades, credible reports of his many mistresses have cast his personal life in a far different light.
But despite all this, in Gallup polls Americans have named Kennedy as the most outstanding US president of the modern age ever since the firm first asked that question in 1990.
In the latest Gallup poll, released this month, nearly three-quarters of respondents said Kennedy will go down in history as an outstanding or above-average US chief executive.
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