![]() ![]() On civil rights, most historians agree that Kennedy, despite his inspiring rhetoric and some dramatic actions to enforce school desegregation in the South, moved hesitantly and made little effort to push his legislative proposals in a reluctant Congress. “The heritage of Vietnam-that must be laid at his door partly, certainly not wholly.” “I think his foreign policy has to be assessed in terms of what eventually came of it,” Yale University historian C. Defenders of Kennedy believe his sophistication and pragmatism would have kept him from expanding the conflict into a large-scale war, as Johnson did a few years later, but there is, of course, no way of knowing this for sure. In both, judgments tend to be negative.Īlthough there were only 16,000 American troops in Vietnam when Kennedy died, the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in an American-supported coup just three weeks earlier had ensured irrevocable U.S. In assessing the achievements of Kennedy, historians tend to focus on two areas: his role in setting policies that ultimately entangled the United States in Vietnam and his Administration’s record on civil rights legislation. That’s a little less grabbing, isn’t it, than if you feel it in your heart?” “As eons go by, take 50 years, take 100 years from now,” Murray continued, “the only way they will have to be able to understand what Kennedy did is by reading about it on a sheet of paper. ![]() He will never decline far, but he is not going to climb higher. “As people are removed from the Camelot years, as you move beyond that and are left to look at only the record of his actual achievements,” Murray said, “his reputation will inevitably decline, simply because the great achievements are not there. Murray, whose book, “Greatness in the White House,” is to be published next month, expects Kennedy’s standing to decline. Although their assessment of Kennedy did not reach the soaring heights of his general popularity, the scholars did place him in distinguished company. Polk, Kennedy and James Madison) were judged above average. Four others (Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson and Truman) were rated nearly great, and six (John Adams, Lyndon B. Roosevelt, Washington and Thomas Jefferson) as great. The historians ranked four presidents (Lincoln, Franklin D. He was rated 13th among 36 (Ronald Reagan and short-termers William Henry Harrison and James A. Murray conducted a survey in 1982, and found that 940 scholars ranked Kennedy as an above-average President. “He was no Lyndon Johnson or Robert Dole or Robert Taft, as a senator.” ![]() Murray, a Pennsylvania State University historian, observed. “People forget that Jack Kennedy was no Jack Kennedy, either,” Robert K. Quayle, who had described his own political background as much like Kennedy’s before 1960, was obviously deflated by Bentsen’s sharp thrust. The dynamism of Kennedy in American mythology was underscored by the single most memorable quotation of the 1988 presidential election campaign, when Democratic vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen chastised his Republican opponent, Dan Quayle, during their televised debate on Oct. Life magazine is reproducing its issue of that week in 1963, chronicling the President’s death, the mournful drama that followed and Jacqueline Kennedy’s famous lament to writer Theodore White, that “there’ll never be another Camelot again.” ![]() Some of the shows dredge up the most fanciful of the conspiracy theories about the crime. This popularity is powering a host of television shows and books commemorating the 25th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination this month. Kennedy was named most often-by 56% of those polled-followed by Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. In June, 1985, a Gallup poll asked a sampling of them to identify the three greatest presidents. There is no doubt what most Americans think about Kennedy. He represented the best of American idealism.” They recognize him as articulate and as a force who inspired the world. “The feeling of historians is that the Camelot myth was just a myth,” said Herbert Parmet of the City University of New York, a recent Kennedy biographer, “but historians are not about to denigrate him, either. ![]()
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