Perlstein On JFK

These two posts by Rick Perlstein make some excellent points about JFK. A few comments:

• The take on the Cuban Missle Crisis seems right to me.  JFK’s actions when the crisis came to a head were admirable, but his actions leading up to the crisis are another story.
• The idea that JFK is some kind of “conservative” is absurd, the same kind of fallacy as the “Nixon and Eisenhower were more liberal than Obama” silliness.  Supporting demand-side tax cuts when the top marginal rate is 90% does not in fact mean you would have supported supply-side Republican upper-class tax cuts.
• What JFK would have done in Vietnam is obviously unknowable, and one advantage JFK’s historical reputation has is that it’s hard to imagine that he could have been worse than Johnson and Nixon.  But I share Perlstein’s skepticism about the “JFK would have pulled out” theory.   If LBJ primary priority had been foreign policy, I might buy it.  But LBJ was Nixon in reverse; he cared about domestic politics, and foreign policy was just something to be dealt with as a means of clearing space for the domestic initiatives he cared about.  What this suggests is that the political pressures within the executive branch, military, and much of the Democratic coalition were strongly pro-escalation.  Would JFK, fundamentally a hawk and very politically risk-averse, have resisted these pressures?  That seems exceedingly implausible to me.
• I think I’ll leave Oliver Stone’s JFK, one of the best American comedies of the last 25 years, to another post.