Answer:
i have two arguments. why he was a good president and why he was a bad one. you choose which one you want to choose.
- he was a bad president:
John F. Kennedy's glowing reputation is bound up with a bullet. Being murdered made him into a kind of political saint, and makes us forget that his years in the White House were a disaster. Why? Because he almost brought about the end of civilization as we know it.
Contrary to our sentimental image of JFK as a progressive visionary, he was actually a committed proponent of the Cold War and a foreign police hawk. Early in his tenure, Kennedy pushed forward with a secret plan to take down Fidel Castro's new regime in the nearby island of Cuba. This plan involved training, arming and deploying 1,500 Cuban exiles to mount a covert invasion of the island, inspire a popular uprising and overthrow Castro.
-he was a good president:
It's all too easy for us to sneer at Kennedy's stance as a Cold Warrior, all these decades later. But he was a man of his times, when paranoia and suspicion ruled the day. In the frightening ideological battle against the Soviets, nobody was immune to rash and half-baked ideas. In fact, the Bay of Pigs fiasco had actually been planned by President Eisenhower, not Kennedy, and simply been inherited by the Kennedy administration.
Yes, Kennedy chose to go ahead with the plan, but what president wouldn't have? Cuba was regarded as a genuine threat, a foothold for the Soviets right on America's doorstep. Kennedy HAD to do something. As Jim Rosenberger, author of The Brilliant Disaster, describes the dilemma over the Bay of Pigs plan: "[Kennedy] had a lot of doubts about it, a lot of concerns about it, but he never could figure out a way not to do it."
And as for the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy absolutely deserves credit for averting total global calamity. Barraged with conflicting opinions from military advisors - some of whom were pressing for the US to trigger war against the Soviets - Kennedy DID keep a cool head, and he DID make the right deal with the Soviets to steer the world away from a nuclear holocaust. It's sheer good luck we had him in the driving seat rather than someone who might have listened to bad advice and gone with a military response.
Explanation:
hope this helps!
~mina
