One of those inconvenient facts that historians neatly sweep under the rug.
Perhaps the single most unethical--and stupid--thing that Kennedy did was to order the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam and our close ally in the Vietnamese war. He did so partly, one suspects, because Diem was Catholic and one of JFK's principle concerns was to bend over backward to prove that his Catholicism (such as it was) had no influence on his conduct of the presidency.
That was a major turning point, which could be said to have lost the war, because it meant that Lyndon Johnson had to send in more troops and take over most of the fighting from the demoralized South Vietnamese. More Americans fighting instead of training our allies; more people drafted; more deaths; more grist for Jane Fonda, John Kerry and their pals to sabotage the war effort.
Interestingly, the truth about the assassination was revealed by the Pentagon Papers. The NY Times printed the whole damned thing as a supplement, and I must have been a glutton for punishment, because I sat there and read the whole damned thing.
What I learned was that JFK had assassinated Diem and committed all sorts of other foreign policy stupidities. But the headlines of the Times somehow made it seem that printing the Pentagon Papers was a glorious victory for the liberals, and that they somehow proved that Nixon was an evil man.
No such thing. There was nothing embarrassing to Nixon in the Pentagon papers, except that they were stolen under his watch by the Times and its friends. But there was plenty embarrassing to JFK. Somehow, it never made it into any of the headlines or the nightly news, which were busy every day bashing Tricky Dick.
Thanks for your report in post #12. I think very few of us read the Pentagon papers, or knew the truth.