The Dish recently noted the right-wing distaste for JFK during his presidency, but Ira Stoll insists that “Kennedy was a conservative by the standards of both his time and today”:
Liberals claim that Kennedy’s tax cuts were somehow different from Reagan’s and Bush’s, and it is true that Kennedy was cutting the rates from higher levels (though loopholes and deductions meant that few actually paid the statutory high rates). But the arguments Kennedy rejected in pursuing his tax cuts sound awfully familiar to the arguments used by liberals today. The Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, from his perch as ambassador to India, opposed tax cuts and advised increasing government spending instead. Kennedy told him to shut up. Senator Albert Gore Sr. called the Kennedy tax cut a bonanza for “fat cats.” Kennedy, frustrated, privately denounced Gore as a “son of a bitch.”
Even Kennedy’s signature initiatives, the Peace Corps and the effort to send a man to the moon, are best understood as Cold War efforts to best the Soviet Union in the frontiers of the developing world and of space. As Kennedy said in one tape-recorded meeting about the NASA budget: “Everything that we do really ought to be tied into getting onto the moon and ahead of the Russians … Otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money, because I’m not that interested in space.”
The Dish 