Two years ago, I have inaugurated a new irregular series on my blog assessing the merits of UK prime ministers (illustrated through the lens of a single board game each). The rating system seemed robust enough to apply it...

Two years ago, I have inaugurated a new irregular series on my blog assessing the merits of UK prime ministers (illustrated through the lens of a single board game each). The rating system seemed robust enough to apply it to other countries/leaders (at least if they are more or less democratic). Thus, we branched out to American presidents and a German chancellor. Today’s subject is another US president – John F. Kennedy, an almost mythological figure despite – or because? – his short tenure. And which game could be more appropriate for him than 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis (Asger Harding Granerud/Daniel Skjold Pedersen, Jolly Roger Games)?

The Rating System

Some caveats ahead: The presidents will be rated by the knowledge of their time. If they or their contemporaries could not have known about the effects of something, I will not use my hindsight to mark it as a mistake of theirs. The assessment is focused on their conduct as president, but includes their life after holding the office (in which they will still be regarded in the public eye as (ex-)presidents).

Now, to the system itself: There are three policy field categories (foreign, domestic, and economic policy) and three more general ones (vision, pragmatism, integrity). A president can earn from one to five stars in each category (for a total sum of up to 30). In detail, the president is assessed as follows:

Foreign policy: Did the president increase US influence in the world and the security of Americans at home? Did the president wield US power responsibly and with positive results for the regions affected (the latter counting for a greater deal in times of US power being great)?

Domestic policy: Did the president increase the liberty of Americans to express themselves and to participate in the political process? Did the president promote domestic security and shape the framework for fair justice dealing with offenses?

Economic policy: Did the president facilitate the prosperity and economic security of Americans (including in the mid- and long-term)? Was the president’s economic policy based on mutual benefit of those involved or did it unduly burden one side?

Vision: Did the president have an idea of what the United States and the world (the latter counting for more in times of US influence being great) should look like beyond the immediate future? Did the president’s policies steer the United States (and, if applicable, the world) in this direction?

Pragmatism: Did the president succeed in seeing his policy through from inception to completion? How well did the president manage the support from Congress, society, the administration, the media (the latter counting for more in more recent years)?

Integrity: Did the president understand the office as a means to benefit himself, special interest groups, the entire country, or another community? Did the president respect the boundaries of the office?

Kennedy’s Early Life

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917. Both his paternal and maternal ancestors had played important roles in business and politics within the community of Boston’s Catholic Irish Americans – and his grandfather John Fitzgerald and father Joseph Kennedy (Sr.) envisioned that the next generation could break out of this religious/ethnic niche onto the national stage. Their hopes, however, did not rest on “Jack,” as the family called him, but on his older brother Joseph (Jr.). While Joseph (Jr.) seemed to succeed at everything he touched, Jack developed a rebellious streak at school and suffered from frail health (particularly back and intestinal problems) from a young age on.

Jack enjoyed the opportunities his privileged background offered to him: He enrolled at Harvard University and travelled through Europe. His contacts there – his father was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambassador to the United Kingdom – provided him with a wealth of information on the brewing crisis in Europe, which coalesced into his senior thesis attacking British appeasement policy (finished in 1940, when World War II had already begun). One year later, Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor.

Britain and France had tried to attempt Nazi Germany with the Munich Agreement. One year later, they were at war with Germany anyway. This failure of appeasement informed John F. Kennedy’s foreign policy stance through his life.

Jack, still unsure about his own path in life, had entered the United States Naval Reserve just weeks before the attack. He now zealously took up his service in the hopes that his military prowess would support Joseph (Jr.)’s later political career. While his physical state would have still prevented him from a frontline role, his father pulled some strings to have him assigned to the command of a patrol torpedo (PT) boat, one of the few parts of the Navy enjoying success against the Japanese early in the war.

From April 1943 on, Jack commanded PT-109 in the South Pacific. In August of that year, his boat collided with a Japanese destroyer and was cut in half. Jack and his crew swam to an island several miles away from the wreckage, with Jack towing one of the injured sailors by the strip of a life vest he held between his teeth. They swam out to find help in the following days, until they encountered a native with a canoe whom they entrusted with a message to bring to the American forces nearby. The stranded were rescued after seven days on the island, and the story immediately garnered lots of press attention. Jack became a war hero.

As Jack had injured his back again during the collision, he spent most of the rest of the war receiving medical treatment and was decommissioned in March 1945 already – half a year after Joseph Jr. had died flying an experimental plane in the European theater of operations. Jack was now the heir to the Kennedy ambitions.

The Congressman

After a brief stint in journalism, Jack Kennedy ran for Congress in 1946 and was elected to the House of Representatives in a working-class, Catholic Boston district. Despite these local advantages, his election made some waves – after all, Kennedy’s Democrats had received a shellacking elsewhere, owing to the unpopularity of sitting president Harry S. Truman. While Kennedy was aware that his influence in the House was limited, he used his position to travel the world and get more foreign policy experience, and – helped by his large staff, paid for with his father’s financial assistance – ingratiate himself with the local voters. The House was only to be the first step for him.

In 1952, Kennedy ran against the incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge to represent Massachusetts in the Senate. While Lodge could rely on his experience and the momentum (the Republicans would win the presidential election of 1952 both nationally and in Massachusetts), Kennedy ran the more dynamic campaign. It was a family affair: His mother and sisters organized events focusing on women voters, his younger brother Robert managed the campaign, and his father bankrolled everything. Kennedy won a close race, and, at age 34, he was a United States Senator.

Many politicians have waved and smiled, but rarely has anyone done it as charmingly as John F. Kennedy.

Once more, the Senate was only supposed to be a stepping-stone. Not least importantly for a man who wanted to become president, Kennedy got married during his time in the Senate – to the glamourous Jacqueline Bouvier (Kennedy). Jack Kennedy did not introduce any remarkable legislation during his time in the Senate (and spent a good deal of time in treatment for his worsening back, taking ever more medication, and even receiving last rites at one point). He did, however, gain some national stature and made sure the voters looked upon him favorably. When the Democrats selected their presidential ticket in 1956, Kennedy ran for Vice President, but was narrowly defeated on the third ballot by Estes Kefauver. This setback might have been to Kennedy’s advantage: Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson and Kefauver went down in the worst electoral showing for a Democratic ticket in decades. The unscathed Kennedy won his own Senate reelection with the biggest landslide in Massachusetts history two years later.

The stage was set for his presidential campaign. Once more, Robert managed the campaign and Joseph Sr. funded it. Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson was Kennedy’s toughest opponent for the Democratic nomination, yet the Texan’s appeal outside of the South was limited. Kennedy clinched the nomination and made Johnson his running mate. They faced off against sitting Vice President Richard Nixon and Kennedy’s old rival Henry Cabot Lodge on the Republican ticket. In one of the closest races of American history (the two tickets were separated by a mere 113,000 votes nationwide), Kennedy’s charm (and funds) prevailed. At age 43, John F. Kennedy was the youngest person ever to be elected President of the United States.

Early Presidential Setbacks

Kennedy dedicated himself chiefly foreign policy – by inclination, but also because the bipartisan coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans in Congress blocked his legislative initiatives for housing, health, and tax reforms. He had inherited several crises from his presidential predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower. Closest to home was the Cuban revolution, during which Fidel Castro had not only deposed the US-aligned dictator Fulgencio Batista, but also nationalized the assets of US enterprises. The Eisenhower administration had started planning the overthrow of Castro by an invasion of Cuban exiles, which were to be supported by CIA and US forces if necessary. Kennedy distanced himself from the planning process, but approved the operation anyway. The results of the landing in Cuba’s Bay of Pigs were disastrous. Not only did the invasion fail, it also damaged the goodwill which the nations of Latin America held toward the new president, and made Castro actively seek Soviet support to maintain his rule.

The Bay of Pigs invasion damaged American leadership in the world and narrowed foreign policy options as the United States was now locked into hostility with Cuba.

A few months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy first met with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna. Kennedy took a rhetorical beating (and Khrushchev threatened action over the divided city of Berlin). Yet while Khrushchev was concerned over the ongoing exodus from East German via Berlin, he did not want to risk war, and so he authorized the building of the Berlin Wall instead (to the relief of Kennedy). Kennedy signaled the willingness of the United States to secure the rights of the West Berliners, and thus strengthened American ties with its European allies. All the while, Kennedy worked on a military build-up to reduce US dependence on its nuclear arsenal – in his words, to give him a “wider choice than humiliation or all-out war,” the beginning of what would be called the “Flexible Response” doctrine.

Soviet plays for Berlin had been common since the immediate post-war era. In Khrushchev’s earthy language: “West Berlin is the testicle of the West. When I want the West to scream, I squeeze West Berlin.”

The military buildup was helped along by economic recovery. Unemployment receded and growth picked up while inflation was low. Then some of the large steel firms hiked their prices right after the unions had agreed to a very modest, non-inflationary pay raise. Kennedy met the challenge head on, having the FTC investigate the price fixing, the IRS launch a tax probe, and the Department of Defense announce that it would only buy from companies which had not raised prices. The firms quickly rescinded the price hike.

Civil Rights and Cuban Missiles

Civil rights were the dominant domestic issue of the day. While Kennedy insisted that Black Americans were given more opportunities and visibility in public service, he was not willing to spend political capital to advance their cause outside of the federal government. On a day-to-day basis, he was mostly concerned with the problems racial discrimination presented to his foreign policy (for example, in reaching out in the new post-colonial nations of Africa) – both the discrimination itself and the protests against it, which in Kennedy’s eyes created disharmony.

Kennedy’s attention was soon to be grabbed by foreign policy anyway: Khrushchev, emboldened by Kennedy’s weak showing in Vienna, had found a willing partner in Castro to establish a strategic balance by stationing nuclear weapons on Cuba (in Khrushchev’s own colorful imagery, “planting a hedgehog in Uncle Sam’s underpants”). That would have left the United States vulnerable to Soviet medium-range missiles. When a U-2 spy plane took pictures of the missile site, the most dangerous two weeks of the Cold War began. Kennedy almost continually met with closest advisers to explore possible responses. Initially, most of them favored an unannounced airstrike on the missile sites (possibly followed by a full-scale invasion) before the missiles were ready. Kennedy thought such a course of action would not only taint the reputation of the United States (as Pearl Harbor had done for Japan), but also entail a high risk of escalating into full-scale nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Instead, he opted for a “quarantine” – ships entering or leaving Cuban waters would be stopped and searched by the US Navy. In the meantime, he and Khrushchev exchanged letters and public announcements. Tensions ran high when US ships forced Soviet nuclear-armed submarines to surface with depth charges and when an American plane was shot down over Cuba on October 27, 1962 (“Black Saturday”). Sobered by these near-brushes with nuclear war, Kennedy and Khrushchev agreed that the missiles would be removed from Cuba (in exchange for the secret removal of the older American missiles in Turkey, which Kennedy had wanted to remove anyway).

The Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved with both superpowers’ reputation intact, yet in practice Kennedy got what he wanted without giving anything away that he would have liked to keep.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy pursued a policy of détente with the Soviet Union. He established a direct communications connection between the White House and the Kremlin, and in summer 1963, concluded the first nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets.

In the meantime, the Civil Rights situation became ever more urgent. Universities now turned into flashpoints of the struggle for equal rights – federal marshals and troops had to protect James Meredith’s right to enroll at the University of Mississippi as the first black student there ever; Alabama governor George Wallace personally barred the door of the enrolment office to black would-be students at the University of Alabama. The clashed between federal and state forces, Civil Rights protesters, and segregationists escalated – state police used dogs and fire hoses on peaceful Civil Rights protesters, and segregationists bombed black churches and killed protesters. Kennedy could not evade the issue any longer. Strengthened by his successful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he threw the weight of the presidency behind the Civil Rights movement (while still urging them not to act too radically): He announced a legislative program which would provide equal access to public schools as well as the ballot box.

As his Civil Rights package went into Congress, Kennedy had to deal with another foreign policy issue: The United States had taken an ever greater role in Southeast Asia as the former colonial power France withdrew from the region. By the early 1960s, the United States propped up the deeply unpopular Southern Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem against the challenges of Communist North Vietnam to reunify the country on their terms. An ever-growing force of American “military advisers” flowed into the country – during Kennedy’s tenure alone, their number expanded from 1,000 to 17,000. As Diem grew both more authoritarian and less effective, Kennedy authorized American tacit support for a military coup against him.

While Kennedy still explored options for Vietnam (ranging from sending more troops to pulling them out entirely) and his Civil Rights legislation was far from complete, his presidential tenure ended abruptly: On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated while on a trip to shore up political support in Dallas. The circumstances of the assassination remain contested. He was only 46 years old.

The Rating

Foreign policy:

Kennedy’s tenure began with the Bay of Pigs disaster and ended with the crisis in Vietnam out of which America’s greatest military defeat would develop. There were, however, no US combat forces in Vietnam when Kennedy was in office, and we can only speculate if he might have failed as abjectly in resolving the issue as his successors. In between these bookends, Kennedy’s foreign policy was successful – he made the American toolbox to deal with security crises more flexible, strengthened the relationship with the European allies and reached out to the newly decolonized nations of Africa, resolved the single greatest challenge of the Cold War (the Cuban Missile Crisis) both peacefully and advantageously for the United States, and initiated the détente with the Soviet Union which would permanently lessen the risk of nuclear war.

Kennedy’s only summit with Khrushchev was a failure, but the young president learned from it and pursued a pretty successful foreign policy afterward.

Domestic policy:

Kennedy was a latecomer to the dominant domestic policy issue of the day. While he supported Civil Rights verbally and in the federal government, he saw it otherwise as a distraction which would drain political capital from more important tasks like foreign policy. Only when the situation in the South had made a massive federal intervention inevitable did Kennedy rise to the occasion. He was unable to pass Civil Rights legislation before his death.

Only late in his tenure did Kennedy realize that responding to protests was not necessarily a nuisance, but could provide momentum for policymaking.

Economic policy:

As with Civil Rights, Kennedy was no successful legislator in matters of economic policy. The cross-party conservative coalition in Congress defeated his early initiatives. Yet the American economy was fundamentally sound and did not need major legislation. When presented with the biggest economic challenge – the steel price hike – Kennedy met it firmly, and the specter of inflation fueled by corporate greed was defeated.

Vision:

Kennedy came to the presidency by personal ambition rather than ideological conviction, and his approach to the office was decidedly tentative. He held varying positions on the same topic over time – from Vietnam to Cuba – and shifted his priorities ad hoc (for example with Civil Rights). In his short tenure, he did not develop any policy hallmark – yet it is conceivable that détente with the Soviet Union might have become just that.

Pragmatism:

Here Kennedy’s performance is ambiguous. On the one hand, Kennedy’s skill as a legislator were minimal. He never got a good grasp on Congress (despite his own fourteen years of experience there) and was unable to secure any major legislation. On the other hand, Kennedy’s winning personality ensured popular support for himself (even when his policies failed, for example the Bay of Pigs invasion). He thrived in the modern politics-media environment to whose establishment he contributed – as the winner of the first televised presidential debate as well as the inaugurator of the free-flowing, question-and-answer presidential press conference.

Kennedy was a gifted communicator, and beloved by the electorate. He has both the highest average job approval of any US President since polling began in 1945 (70%), and the highest floor (never polling below 56% approval, which is better than most presidents’ average).

Integrity:

During the 1960 presidential election campaign, many of Kennedy’s political opponents alleged that he would be beholden to his Catholic and Irish-American brethren, or even a puppet of the Pope. None of this turned out to be true. Nonetheless, Kennedy regarded politics a little too much as a family business – naming his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver head of the Peace Corps and his brother Robert Attorney General (a practice which has since been made unlawful). 

Overall:

In the words of Kennedy’s biographer Robert Dallek, his life was “unfinished.” So was his presidency. Public opinion, of course, is not bound by the confines of historical scholarship, and in this sphere, Kennedy lives large as the promise of a youthful, vigorous, optimistic America, not yet tainted by the disaster of the Vietnam War, or the Watergate Scandal. Historical scholarship, however, is left to assess Kennedy’s short, and sometimes contradictory time in office. Here Kennedy shows himself to be a president whose flashes of brilliant leadership (most notably during the Cuban Missile Crisis) are not the norm, but the exception in an overall solid presidency.

All leader ratings so far:

Franklin D. Roosevelt 25/30 Winston Churchill 25/30 Robert Walpole 24/30 Harry S. Truman 21/30 John F. Kennedy 17/30 Ludwig Erhard 11/30

How would you rate Kennedy? Let me know in the comments!

Further Reading

Dallek, Robert: An Unfinished Life. John F. Kennedy 1917—1963, Little, Brown and Co., Boston, MA 2003.

As always when it comes to American presidents of the 20th century, see the respective chapter in Leuchtenburg, William E.: The American President. From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, pp. 386-424.

For a quick introduction to the Cuban Missile Crisis, see Hershberg, James G.: The Cuban Missile Crisis, in Westad, Odd Arne/Leffler, Melvyn (eds.): The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Volume 2. Crises and Détente, Cambridge 2010, pp. 65—87.

A detailed treatment of the crisis can be found in Fursenko, Aleksandr/Naftali, Timothy: „One Hell of a Gamble“: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958—1964, John Murray, London 1997.

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