Look, JFK is one of the most overrated people in U.S. history, but the assassination was most certainly a bad thing for America. Kennedy didn’t really push a far-left legislative agenda (remember the tax cuts), and whenever he tried to, he was completely ineffective at getting anything accomplished. LBJ was an evil genius at handling Congress, and the JFK sympathy vote and Goldwater’s incompetence gave him a rubber-stamp Congress and a blank check for full-bore socialism. JFK may not have have been about to pull his advisors out of Vietnam as Oliver Stone would have you believe, but he could hardly have screwed things up worse than LBJ. On the home front, the riots, the drug culture, the crime, the moral collapse, and the all-around degradation of American culture and society from the mid-60’s on may well have happened if JFK had lived, but it’s hard to imagine that it would have been worse had he lived. In fact, because he likely would not have been able to massively grow the federal government as LBJ did, I expect things would indeed have been better.
JFK deserved his fate for the Bay of Pigs debacle alone.
Anytime a Kennedy takes a dirt nap, the country is better off.