Honestly I think this still gives him way too much credit
I think JFK’s politics are hard to summarise neatly. I mean he was still 100% US imperialist and anti-communist, like he started Vietnam and all the stuff with Cuba etc. Like all Presidents of the USA he sucked.
But there was sort of benevolent (if paternalistic) approach that he wanted to take to the global south/non aligned nations. One where independences movements weren’t violently squashed (take Lumumba in the DRC and Sukharno in Indonesia) and instead they were aided in their transition to independence and helped to industrialise, so that they could slot into the global market, still exploited with comprador governments, but less overtly.
Likewise that he wanted to thaw relations with the USSR, but more to avoid outright nuclear war, he still thought the USA would beat them economically and ideologically with time. That and wanting to curtail the CIA’s growing power. Like it’s bad he was killed for world geopolitics, but still very much the fact was he was terrible.
Like there’s a reason despite everything JFK did to Cuba, that Castro thought a second term JFK would be preferable to other presidents and when JFK was killed he outlined why the CIA killed in a speech.
He’s certainly tricky to pin down, much less a force for evil than many of his predecessors and successors, but how good he was is certainly debatable.
Yeah, he was a piece of shit in many ways and it’s only because he got his brains blowed out that people remember him as a perfect little angel
Getting shot was the best thing to happen for his image. The same people advising LBJ were advising Kennedy. Robert McNamara, for example, would have the same strategy for Vietnam regardless of JFK or LBJ. J. Edgar Hoover was still head of the FBI. If there was never an attempt on JFK’s life at all, it’s likely he would have been as unpopular as LBJ by the end of his second term. God help him if a scandal about his constant affairs ever became public.
No one would ever dare to write an alt-history like that
Though, I did come up for a funny idea where Oswald nails Jackie instead of John and JFK becomes a vengeful vigilante ala the Punisher
Still a better love story than Twilight, but points lost for Fridging.
He was a US president after all.
I do wonder if what semblance of a conscience he had caused him to inadvertently stumble a tiny bit to the left and that was enough for the CIA to “correct course”.
His thoughts were also just itching to get out and touch grass
Painting is fun
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