JFK started out his first days in office with the Bay of Pigs. He had been firmly warned by Dwight Eisenhower to the effect that you should never start a war you don’t intend to win.
But, sure enough, he let the Cubans go in, and then chickened out and failed to back them up. He showed himself to be incredibly weak and incompetent.
And he spent the rest of his time in office trying to prove to the USSR that he really was tougher than he seemed, with very mixed results.
In the Cuban Missile Crisis he hemmed and he hawed, and finally he agreed to pull our medium range defensive missiles out of Europe. Thus he proved his weakness yet again, although of course the press portrayed it in quite another light.
Kennedy was a womanizing incompetent who stole the election with the help of LBJ and Mayor Daley. He was just about the last person to fit the honorable and knightly role of “Camelot.”
You summed him up, short and (not so) sweet!
The Berlin wall was another one of Kennedy’s “accomplishments”, possibly a result of his Bay of Pigs retreat.
Very well said! Having lived through those days I can attest to the absolute truth of your comments. His cowardice at the Bay of Pigs is one of the blackest marks on American history.
You forgot to mention that Team Kennedy got us into Vietnam.
More than a million died, 60,000 of them American boys who did not think that adventure was a good idea.
Result: Utter Failure!
The Jupiter missiles were already obsolete, and were intended as stopgaps until the ICBM’s came on line. The PGM-19 Jupiter was above ground launched and stored, and was fueled by kerosene and liquid oxygen. The latter required a cyrogenic facility - high maintenance. Since these were in vulnerable above ground facilities, the Soviets already knew where they were. The facility in Italy was overflown by a Bulgarian photorecon MiG.
At the time, it was clear that if the balloon went up, the Jupiters might not even make it to launch time. Also, the LGM-30 Minuteman ICBM’s were coming on line, as well as the Polaris submarines. As for the latter, solid fuel, fired off within a minute of reaching launch depth, and then where is that sub (unless the likes of John Walker was filling them in)?
The Jupiters were already being considered for decommissioning because of this obsolescence. So this was a convenient point to do so. Plus it gave Krushchev some face saving.