I was just telling my teenage kids (properly raised to be liberty-minded) that if JFK was alive toady he’d be considered a TEA party Republican.
-He believed in a strong America
-He cut taxes!
-He was anti-crime, pro-police
-He was an anti-commie cold warrior
-He supported civil rights—which was a Republican thing back then, since the democrats opposed all of it.
Well, hardly, but at least he generally had American interests at heart even though he and his advisors approached them from a Liberal perspective (that perspective would be termed "GOP Moderate" today) and was considered very "weak" on foreign policy. Most of his domestic and fiscal policies could at best be termed "neutral" or soft-left and he was also considered personally "weak", although urbane and glamorous, with much of the media cheering on he and Jackie's cultured behavior (which the East Coast media adored).
I was a senior in high school when JFK ran for President. I liked him more than Nixon even though my parents saw through his Massachusetts Irish blarney and told me he was no good. I should have listened closer, but I was young and idealistic and easily swayed by the gushing hype surrounding him.
Much of America turned on Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Berlin Wall went up and he and his advisors were (rightly) seen as soft on Communism abroad. By 1962 or 1963, I (and many others) had turned against him for these reasons.
If Kennedy had not been assassinated less than a year before the election, it is highly probable Goldwater would have easily won in 1964 as most of the country except the East Coast and the big city political machines had turned against Kennedy. Goldwater was extremely popular and JFK's popularity was rapidly waning at this point. But JFK's assassination killed Goldwater politically because of the emotional backlash of the murder and Johnson (not a popular politician at all, but a very canny and effective one) kept the emotion on and played on the assassination and Goldwater's "dangerous" military stance on North Vietnam and nuclear war (remember the "Daisy Ad"?) and won in a landslide because of the continuing national revulsion against the assassination - and the rest is unfortunate history.
LBJ essentially killed America with his radical Great Society, which nobody could stop. The Democrats won not only the White House but historic majorities in the Congress in 1964.
Kennedy was important in history because of his untimely assassination which upended American history and progress, not because he was a good President in any meaningful sense of the word.
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-He was anti-crime, pro-police
-He was an anti-commie cold warrior
-He supported civil rights—which was a Republican thing back then, since the democrats opposed all of it. <<
Which is probably what got him killed, by the RATs.