Gene Healy rips apart a new JFK book:
There are, by now, thousands of books on the Kennedy presidency’s thousand days, and 2013 has brought dozens more to coincide with 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. But in JFK, Conservative, Ira Stoll, former managing editor of the New York Sun and current editor of FutureofCapitalism.com, has managed something truly original—and truly odd. This may be the first book-length attempt at Kennedy hagiography from the Right.
Stoll lays it on pretty thick:
in his telling, JFK was a great president, a good man, and—no kidding—a good Catholic. Moreover, Kennedy’s policies—his “tax cuts, his domestic spending restraint, his pro-growth economic policy, his emphasis on free trade and a strong dollar, and his foreign policy driven by the idea that America had a God-given mission to defend freedom”—show that he was, “by the standards of both his time and our own, a conservative.”
It’s a cramped, reductionist account of conservatism, one that collapses the entire political tradition into its neoconservative variant. But an even less charitable person than I could make the case that it’s a fair approximation of “actually existing conservatism,” and Stoll’s thesis has already received a fair bit of praise from commentators on the Right.
Larison agrees:
Treating his anticommunism as proof of conservatism is mistaken for obvious reasons that I’ve mentioned before, and that anticommunism led Kennedy to make a number of serious foreign policy errors that cost the U.S. and the other countries involved grievously over the decade that followed. In the end, it was what defined his record, and marked him as one of the worst postwar presidents. Kennedy wasn’t a conservative, but even if he had been conservatives should want to disown him.
David Greenberg lays out the case for JFK being an “unapologetic liberal.” Update from a reader:
I understand and appreciate the momentous nature of the Kennedy assassination, and I do not object to the extensive current coverage, given its 50th anniversary, and given its impact on US history. I do wish that, perhaps not right now but in general, some mention be made of Kennedy being an unremarkable president?
I have voted for more Democratic presidential candidates than Republican, so this isn’t an ideological slant. But when I think of Kennedy, I think of Vietnam and the Peace Corps, and the trading of missile withdrawal in Turkey for missile withdrawal in Cuba. OK, Apollo. By my reading, he was a follower rather than a leader regarding civil rights. That isn’t a great list. That should not get one on the half-dollar coin. I certainly appreciate that his life was tragically cut short and he was unable to become whatever he would have become, but he in actuality had not yet become that much. He has become a symbol without much substance, or perhaps an icon (of what?). As close to a computer avatar as a Hindu avatar. I simply object to so many pinning their hopes on what JFK could have become and then inferring he was a great president. Perhaps this email is better sent tomorrow, but here it is.
Another responds:
I think your correspondent who said Kennedy was undeserving of his spot on the half-dollar coin was right if one looks at Kennedy’s actual achievements, but that’s not why he’s on there. Kennedy made Americans dream. Apollo, Civil Rights, the Peace Corps … those were huge, arguably insane dreams at the time. If he’d lived, I’m not sure either Apollo or the Civil Rights Act would have succeeded when they did. In death, though, he somehow inspired the entire polity to see through what he probably couldn’t have. He reminds me a bit of Thomas Jefferson: a deeply flawed man whose redeeming grace was that he sold a nation on dreams far greater than himself.
The Dish 