What’s all the fuss about?

At the risk of sounding like an old cynic – – what’s all the fuss being made about the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?

What possible impact does that assassination have on today’s world?

Nobody alive today, under the age of 55, has any recollection of him.   Nobody under the age of 70 even voted for or against him.

This infatuation with the Kennedy’s is a Baby Boomer fantasy of a world that never was.

At worse, Kennedy was a spoiled rich kid who rode his daddy’s money into the White House.   He was a skirt chaser and womanizer, who kept two mistresses in the executive mansion.

At best, Kennedy was out of his league in national and international affairs.    He is remembered to this day only because he was assassinated at a young age.

His short two and a half years as president was filled with events which he was unable to handle.   A steel workers strike, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, civil rights battles in the South, and for most of his presidency, the country was mired in economic stagnation.

Kennedy was unable to get any of his programs through Congress.

It was his vice president and later president Lyndon Johnson who pushed most of Kennedy’s bills through Congress.   Johnson was a big supporter of NASA and pushed the space program.   It was Johnson who got the civil rights bill and the voting rights bill passed into law and began making inroads into eliminating legalized racism.

As far as Vietnam goes, history re-writers would have us believe that Kennedy wouldn’t have gotten bogged down in the jungles and swamps of Asia.  But, everything we know leads us to believe that he wouldn’t have been much different than Johnson or Richard Nixon about Vietnam.

So, celebrate Kennedy’s death if you wish.  But, he wasn’t a god and he wasn’t a national icon.   Once the Baby Boomers die off, few will remember him.

And history will rank him in the lower half of this nation’s presidents.