On the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination--a few thoughts

John F. Kennedy's image, as crafted (at no inconsiderable expense) by his extraordinarily wealthy and even more extraordinarily ambitious father, was that of a war hero, an intellectual and best-selling author, a devout Catholic, a faithful husband and good family man.  Some of this is true (he was indeed a war hero); some is debatable (was he really an intellectual? how much of *Why England Slept...* and *Profiles in Courage* was his own work?); some of it is spectacularly false.

What about his convictions?  Well, JFK was a staunch Cold War anti-communist, that much is true. He was not a vigorous (to use a favorite Kennedy family word) or especially enthusiastic supporter of civil rights, though he was finally pressed into announcing that he would introduce a civil rights bill. It was Lyndon Johnson who aggressively pushed civil rights legislation through Congress. In economic policy and other areas Kennedy tended to be pragmatic rather than doctrinaire. Elected by the narrowest of margins (and perhaps only on the basis of fraud in Illinois and Texas), Kennedy sought to govern in a bipartisan and non-ideological fashion, appointing Republicans C. Douglas Dillon and Robert McNamara to key positions (Treasury and Defense, respectively) in his cabinet.

Fifty years after his assassination there are still people who seem to believe that Kennedy was killed by "a climate of right-wing hate." Of course, the truth is that he was killed by a communist. A few years before killing JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union. After he returned, he became a strong advocate of "fair play for Cuba" and was deeply hostile to, and concerned about, Kennedy's efforts to topple Fidel Castro--perhaps by engineering his assassination.