...I looked him up on Wikipedia. It looks like he's a hereditary real estate developer with a nice and cute penchant for throwing some of the money that he was, um, born with on certain kinds of noble causes.
His chief political work seems heavily involved in getting other members of the Kennedy family elected to office.
I actually don't see a damned thing in his Wikipedia profile that would make me hungry for him to run for office. It's not like he's, um, Barack Obama or for that matter, Bill Clinton, both of whom started out life in far different circumstances.
I'm not going to apologize for high school history books; I tend to read serious histories in my own library or the two major university library systems in New Jersey.
You may think that John Kennedy's tenure was short, but it was certainly long enough to bring the world close to the brink of a nuclear war. For me that about sums up his "accomplishments." I will give him credit for one thing; which was for launching the "space race." This of course, began as a cold war gesture after he became President, probably to cover up that his campaign rhetorical cold war mongering about a missile gap clearly was a full line of shit with no basis in reality.
I note that he was too lazy to actually consult with real engineers and scientists before making this moon launch commitment, and is probably the case that the creation of the "race" challenged American engineers to climb to new heights, resulting in the invention of the modern computer. But, as was the case in the Civil Rights case, in which he was a bystander more or less, the actual execution of the task was accomplished under Lyndon Johnson, a far more capable man. Johnson deserves credit for his commitment to human rights, although again, Vietnam will always be a scar around his historical record. He was a better President in any case than the man he succeeded, by far.
I don't regard Woodrow Wilson, JFK, or Jimmy Carter has having been great Presidents in the 20th century, if you must know. None of these three could shine Barack Obama's shoes as President. They were also inferior to Bill Clinton, Harry Truman, and of course, FDR. I'd rank Obama, a 21st century President, with the latter four, even though racists are going to spend four years attempting in a Gotterdammarung orgy of destruction aimed at proving that they're mindless little bigots who can't stand the fact, the undeniable fact, that a black man was more competent, more educated, more decent, and more intelligent than their tiny skulls are competent to imagine.
(In my view the greatest Democrat of the 20th century was not a President at all; she was a first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt.)
Wilson only switched his opposition to the 19th amendment in 1918; this after nearly a century of hard work by people with whom he had very little to do, specifically those people who recognized that women were, in fact, fully competent human beings. It's absurd to attach any credit to him for this amendment.
The League of Nations was a failure; totally his brain child, and probably the palimpsest for the United Nations. He was not inspiring enough to sell it in his own country; and the United States never joined. It may have been a good idea, but it was ineptly handled; and in any case, it doesn't excuse the fact that while he may have been concerned for the rights of Czechs and Poles, he despised a large part of the American population, specifically its African American citizens. When he was President of Princeton University he declared that no African Americans would be admitted to that university since they were obviously (in his bigoted brain) inferior to the white male class to which he belonged.
As for Jimmy Carter, one cannot help but admire his years after he left office, but what I remember is that while talking superciliously about human rights, as President, his best international friend was a man running a police state with a savage secret police known for tortures too grotesque to describe, specifically the SAVAK, the secret police of the Shah of Iran. His energy ideas were not informed by either science or engineering, even though he had some engineering training. We are very, very, very very fortunate that his awful coal to liquids policies were never able to become mainstream, as we'd now be even worse off from a climate change stance than we are now, and trust me, we are in very, very, very, very, very, very bad shape. His biofuels policy may have been a marginal "success" but only at the expense of the complete destruction of the Mississippi delta ecosystem. The decay of the atmosphere is accelerating at the fastest rate ever observed and the quaint fascination that he had with so called "renewable energy," in particular solar energy, did in fact become very popular, but is demonstrably useless in the fight against climate change. The worst thing he did for climate involved demonizing the element plutonium. From my perspective, that element was the last best hope for the human race, but it is now far too late to retrieve the situation.
Have a nice Friday.
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