JFK had the major embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs, shortly to be followed by the triumph of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I guess more than made up for it.
I remember when he came on television to announce his actions towards the Cuban missiles. I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but my mother came into the living room from her beauty shop to listen to him and began to sing his praises. I thought she was overdoing it, but as I said, I didn’t fully comprehend what was going on the time.
He set a goal of reaching the moon by the end of the decade and his youth and vigor inspired a generation of young people, but he concealed his illness.
He seems to have been assassinated at just the right time, as countless people have written about what he was about to do or what he would have done if he had lived.
Would he really have gotten out of Vietnam? Would he have been able to press through civil rights legislation?
We’ll never know.
What we do know is that his death prompted a host of crazy nuts to invent a plethora of insane and mostly contradictory conspiracy theories that a gullible public seems to eat up because they don’t want to believe that the course of history can be changed by one lone gunman. A lot of those nuts have gotten rich over those nutty stories too.
