John F. Kennedy a Half Century Later: A Legacy of Effectiveness and Cheating

John F. Kennedy is an American paradox.  His smiling visage was what New Dealers and their protegees imagined themselves to be.  But Kennedy also reflected the corruption and dishonesty behind the attractive facade and earnestly stated intentions.  Like his successor Richard Nixon, Kennedy mixed idealism and pragmatism well.  Both were effective presidents. But neither could escape the temptations of shooting a few rounds of dirty pool.

Kennedy was the perfect convergence of image, style, and accomplishment.  He was a genuine war hero, served respectably in the US Senate, and seemingly outpaced the shadow surrounding his bootlegger, Nazi sympathizing father.

The campaign of 1960 should historically bury John F. Kennedy's legacy in the same grave as Richard Nixon.  Falsely campaigning in the general election on the missile gap perpetuated a serious fraud on the voters.  Kennedy knew, via national security estimate provided as a courtesy, that the US was comfortably ahead of the Soviet Union in weaponry.  Yet he played on fears stoked by the Soviets that they had reached parity.  Nixon could not refute the claims without breaking national security laws.  His silence on the issue cost him.

But if Kennedy had campaigned honestly, would he have even won nomination?

Justice Allen Loughry of the West Virginia State Supreme Court of Appeals, penned a dissertation at American University that covered political scandals from 1960 until the 1990s.  The book published from it, Don't Buy Another Vote, I Won't Pay For a Landslide comes from Kennedy's glib reaction to accusations of cheating during that year.

Loughry's work draws from sources such as former political boss Raymond Chafin's Just Good Politics, among others.  It describes in detail how Kennedy campaign money appeared in southern West Virginia counties.  Once this money appeared, bosses supporting Hubert Humphreys overnight switched to Kennedy.   In those days, the bosses and their slate always won the day.  They had many loaves and fishes on the State Road Commission and public school system to distribute among helpful supporters.

And Ted Kennedy himself was in charge of Southern West Virginia, although no one has ever directly accused him of malfeasance.

Kennedy beat Nixon by a whisker in 1960.

Conservatives like to argue that Kennedy was not an effective president.  Setting aside one of the most corrupt presidential campaigns ever for now, did Kennedy govern effectively?

He did.  Kennedy understood that a strong national economy dovetailed into higher levels of respect for America around the globe, enhancing national security.  He also understood 15 years before Laffer drew his famous curve that lower taxes spurred economic growth.

That being said, he combined lower taxes with increasing domestic spending.  Chaffin actually demands the credit for giving Kennedy the idea about food stamps, but this could be a reach.  Domestic spending on welfare and development programs expanded, along with defense.  Kennedy wanted flexible response options, so his administration ratcheted up spending on weapons systems.

In foreign policy Kennedy was aggressively, maybe even recklessly interventionist in his thinking.  In 1961, he tried to convince his military leadership of the wisdom in deploying troops into Laos to fight Communist rebels.  This belies the liberal fairy tale that Kennedy would have avoided Vietnam.

In honesty, he may have torpedoed our main chance at victory by approving the assassination of South Vietnamese president Diem.  Imperfect as Diem was, that was a truly Roman Empire-esque action against an allied head of state.

The Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco does lay at Kennedy's door.  He was misinformed and inexperienced, but that was his fault.  Kennedy gets blamed for the Berlin Wall going up, but short of war no one could have stopped that.  The "ich bin ein Berliner" speech may have been awkward Deutsch, but Germans understood and remain thankful.

Kennedy's signature move represented leadership at its best.  After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy listened to advice from the president he abused through much of 1960, Dwight Eisenhower.  He listened to his advisers as a group rather than one on one, learning lessons from their disputes.  Kennedy preserved American respect and strength without firing a shot.  He deserves tremendous credit for that.

Kennedy did make powerful moves in the service of civil rights.  He helped to rekindle J. Edgar Hoover's old hatred of the terrorist Ku Klux Klan.  Attorney General Robert Kennedy allowed Hoover to open up a bag of tricks on the Klan reminiscent of the Czarist Okhrana, plus adding a few of his own.  Whether or not one agrees that the tactics were justified, they worked.  Under Kennedy's presidency, Hoover broke the Klan.

The Civil Rights Act, however, would not pass in its most effective form until the chief executive behind it spoke with a Texas accent.

Kennedy deserves credit for some notable achievements and blame for policy missteps.  Overall, he served as an active, dynamic, and effective president with vision and ability, same as Nixon.

Both men, on the other hand, had crimes committed on their behalf that struck at the heart of the American democratic system.  In Watergate, staff broke into a locked office to spirit away secret campaign files (this also happened to Republicans in Washington state in 2008.)  Kennedy's 1960 campaign suborned Democratic Party officials at the local level in West Virginia to steal primary support.

It wasn't "just good politics."  It was a crime.  And few people outside of West Virginia have any interets in adding this to Kennedy's legacy.

The passage of time mellows the most intense of hatreds and even some hero-worshiping.

We owe it to history to start getting the story straight on President Kennedy.

Some Items Left Out of Kennedy-Fest

Last week we saw endless praises and near canonizations heaped upon Senator Ted Kennedy. Someone, somewhere called him the "Lion of the Senate" and others compared him to Henry Clay and Daniel Webster as one of the greatest ever. Of course no Democratic funeral would be complete without utilizing it for political gain. The Kennedy family brought forth children to try and convince the nation to pass socialized health care that the man himself would never have used himself.


You would never, however, go through a Richard Nixon death without mention of Watergate. Kennedy's misdeeds similarly ought to follow praises of whatever it is he did that was great.


Most remember the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Nothing to say about this that readers of thise site do not know already.


What many people are not aware of is how damaging Ted Kennedy was to this state. In 1960 the future Senator took charge of John F. Kennedy's effort to win Southern West Virginia. The region already had an unsavory reputation for corruption. Most county bosses lined up behind Midwestern traditional liberal Hubert Humphries. At this point their influence, especially that of Raymond Chafin of Logan County, was very strong.


Chris Matthews said recently that John F. Kennedy's good looks won him the 1960 primary in West Virginia. In contrast to this rather insulting and condescending assertion, West Virginians themselves have tried to relate the real story of the 1960 primary. Two books in the past few years, West Virginia Tough Boys, by F. Keith Davis and Don't Buy Another Vote I Won't Pay For a Landslide, by former Gaston Caperton Administration official Dr. Allen Loughry, discussed in detail the drama that unfolded in that primary season. Basically what it boils down to is that the Kennedy campaign pumped tens of thousands of dollars into the hands of county bosses. This caused them to switch allegiances overnight to Kennedy and to use some of the funds to line up precincts for their new candidate.


Dr. Loughry also argues that the massive amount of funds injected into the hands of the bosses and by extension many corrupted voters raised the bar for voting irregularities. In essence, to purchase a West Virginia election, a candidate would need more cash than ever. This tied some more tightly to unsavory donors while making for others personal wealth and the willingness to use it in illegal ways more tempting than ever. Obvious fraud and corruption benefitted the status quo since voters reacted by growing ever more cynical. When you have a mindset that all politicians are crooks, you tend to adopt "the devil you know is better than the devil you don't" mentality.


And who should answer for this? Ted Kennedy's death removed a man who likely knew a lot, but never uttered a word about that scandalous year of 1960.

Lookin' For Ugleeeeeeeee

Those darned McGraws. They can't seem to avoid shadowy conspiracies. First the photographers roaming Marmet trying to take ugly pictures of Warren McGraw, now the Bush administration is plotting the demise of West Virginia's Attorney General.

West Virginia at one point brought suit against the manufacturers of painkilling products such as OxyContin, challenging the manner in which they had been advertised. OxyContin and like drugs are highly addictive and untold thousands suffer from this problem. At issue here is how the settlement money ended up being spent.

The Attorney General's office paid the lawyers who fought the case (fair enough) but placed the rest into the Attorney General's Consumer Protection Fund. The federal government argues that it ought to receive some reimbursement for the Medicaid dollars it pours into the state annually. State Legislators assert that McGraw violated the law because only the Legislature can disburse money.

What is worse is that the Consumer Protection Fund pays for billboards, pencils, and other items that feature the Attorney General's name. Allen Loughry, former Caperton administration official, has blasted this practice as taxpayer funded campaigning. McGraw's office paints this as a Bush administration political move to discredit his office.

Now come on. President Bush sits in his Oval Office every day trying to think of ways to discredit our state attorney general? Kind of unlikely. This money ought to go to the Legisture to be budgeted and sent out to the proper recipients.