JFK and How History Turns
by Hal Lindsey
John Kennedy may be America’s most exaggerated president.
Vigor
How many times over the last few weeks have you heard about this “young and vigorous” president? James Blight at theDaily Beast last week wrote that Kennedy “was in reality one of the sickest, most physically compromised American presidents in U.S. history. He was given last rites by a priest at least four times, and possibly a fifth—the latter while he was president, in June 1961.”
Vigor was an exaggeration he personally cultivated during his life. He worked on his tan, smiled at exactly the right times, had pictures made of him playing with his kids, yachting and playing touch football with family at Hyannis Port. But he was not a well man. He suffered from Addison’s Disease, also known as “chronic adrenal insufficiency.” As the name suggests, the adrenal glands do not produce enough hormones. This left JFK with an assortment of symptoms, including a vulnerability to infection. He endured severe, almost debilitating back pain. In private, he often used crutches—occasionally doing so even in public. At times he depended on a back brace to remain upright. He had several of them. One of them probably kept him upright after the first hit in Dallas, making him an easy target for the last shot.
Hero
His status as a war hero is exaggerated. Hundreds of PT boats were used in World War II, but only PT 109 was struck by an enemy destroyer and cut in two. Two crewmen were killed, and two badly injured. Other commanders in the PT fleet tended to blame Kennedy. One said, “He lost the 109 through very poor organization of his crew. Everything he did up until he was in the water was the wrong thing.”
Goat
But those who make him a goat are also exaggerating. Everything he did before he went into the water may have been wrong, but after he hit the water, the former member of the Harvard swim team became a true hero. He kept his men together, and led them to the safety of an uninhabited island several miles away. He personally towed the worst injured of his mates for five hours against a strong current. When their food supply (coconuts) ran low on the first island, he led his men (again towing the worst injured) to another island. He swam out night after night into the channel trying to find help, perhaps another PT boat on patrol. During the first such excursion, he lost his lantern and swam all night in dark waters without visible landmark or bearing, not making it back until noon the next day. Yet, he went out again the next night, and each night thereafter. It was extremely dangerous, and he was very brave.
Great President
Public opinion polls sometimes rank him as America’s greatest president, but obviously that is also an exaggeration. His presidency lasted less than three years. He passed little of his agenda. We really don’t know what he would have done or what the world would have been like had his life not been cut short. In contrast, George Washington midwifed a new republic when there were no instruction manuals on how to do that. Abraham Lincoln saw us through the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt led Americathrough both the Great Depression and World War II. Yet public opinion polls often put Kennedy ahead of them all.
Inconsequential Presidency
Nevertheless, it is also an exaggeration to say his short presidency was inconsequential. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world stood on the brink of an unprecedented catastrophe. Most of the president’s advisors felt that an attack on Cubawas the best response. It may surprise you that the hawks included the president’s brother and Attorney General, Robert Kennedy.
Most accounts of the crisis depict RFK as dovish, but that’s not what the record shows. Bobby had always been a tough guy. He had been a fierce cold warrior — working for the Justice Department’s Internal Security Section investigating possible Soviet agents in the U.S., and later working for the infamous communist hunter, Senator Joe McCarthy. He worked as an aide to Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 presidential campaign, but voted for Dwight Eisenhower. He gained fame working as the chief counsel of the Senate Labor Rackets Committee in the late fifties. His battle with Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa put his toughness on display for the world. He ran John Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and later the Department of Justice, with a ruthlessness that shocks people today who think of him as nothing but soft, warm, and caring.
Consistent with his toughness, Robert Kennedy is heard in one of the recordings, saying, “It would be better for our children and grandchildren if we decided to face the Soviet threat, stand up to it, and eliminate it, now. The circumstances for doing so at some future time were bound to be more unfavorable, the risks would be greater, the chances of success less good.”
But President Kennedy rejected the advice of his military advisors and most others. Instead of an attack, he chose a naval blockade. He had just been reading Margaret Tuchman’s The Guns of August, an account of the series of human errors that led to World War I. He referred to it several times during the crisis. For that particular book to fall into John Kennedy’s hands just before the Cuban Missile Crisis is a modern miracle.
After the Soviet Union fell, we learned many things. One of the most shocking was that, unknown toU.S. intelligence, the Soviet Union had battlefield nuclear weapons on the scene in Cuba. Even more ominously, Soviet field commanders had already been given the authority to launch those weapons if fired on. Kennedy’s reticence to attack almost certainly saved the world from a nuclear holocaust.
It is an exaggeration to list John Kennedy among America’s greatest presidents, but in those thirteen days in October of 1962, he steered the world clear of a ruinous disaster, and for that we can all be thankful.
Other Exaggerations
There are many other exaggerations commonly associated with him. He was not a great champion of civil rights. What he did, he did reluctantly. It can be argued that he didn’t actually accomplish as much in that area as the presidents immediately preceding and succeeding him — Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, or Nixon. He loved his family, but he was not the wonderful family man depicted in the photos. He was a good writer, but not brilliant. Most of the great sayings associated with him came from Ted Sorenson.
His Death
John Kennedy’s achievements in life are greatly exaggerated, but the historic implications of his death are not exaggerated. The assassination was a blow to the optimism and idealism of an entire generation. There was a counterculture before the Kennedy assassination, but it became a cultural maelstrom in the years following his death. The Beatles, drug culture, even hippies were amplified in their impact because of the Kennedy assassination.
The Warren Commission report seemed at first to settle the burning question of the day. The Commission said the president had been killed by a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald, and no one else. But the vast investigation (the final report ran almost 900 pages) was hurried, and government agencies assigned to help them, were often a hindrance. The FBI, Secret Service, and CIA all had skeletons they wanted to keep buried. For these reasons and others, the Commission’s final report was a flawed document. Those flaws are hurting America to this day.
Members of the Commission included the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the “most trusted man in the Senate,” a future president, and the head of the CIA. If you couldn’t trust these men, you couldn’t trust the United States of America . . . and through the sixties and into the seventies, more and more Americans decided they did not trust them. Books came out by the thousands blaming the assassination on a vast array of conspiracies, often involving President Johnson himself.
That kind of basic mistrust changes a nation.
The death of John Kennedy had another unexpected consequence — it turned Robert Kennedy into a left-wing, secular saint. Bobby never liked Lyndon Johnson. He adamantly opposed the choice of Johnson as his brother’s vice-presidential running mate. Even after Johnson had been notified that he was the choice, Bobby tried to get Jack to change his mind. After the assassination, many members of Kennedy’s team saw Johnson as an accidental president — an interloper. They associated the assassination with Dallas, Dallas with Texas, and Texas with Johnson. John Kennedy had been the picture of suave self-assurance. By comparison, Lyndon Johnson seemed uncouth, unintelligent, and insecure.
Whole books have been written on the animosity between LBJ and RFK. My point here is the change it made in American politics. Bobby associated goodness in government with liberal social programs. But domestically, Johnson was the most liberal president of the twentieth century. For Bobby to exceed Johnson, he had to move to Johnson’s political left. That was easy on the Viet Nam war — just oppose it. But Bobby, a man who once worked for Joe McCarthy and voted for Dwight Eisenhower, moved hard to the left in every area. He wanted to be the civil rights champion his brother never really was. He wanted to create a society even greater than Johnson’s “great society.”
When Bobby moved hard left, he took the heart of the Democratic Party with him. For Hollywood and in much of academia, this new Bobby Kennedy set the agenda for right and wrong in government. When he, too, fell to an assassin’s bullet, it only cemented the idea of an unfulfilled left-wing utopia — waiting for someone to come along, pull the sword from the stone, and bring Camelot together again.
John Kennedy may be the most exaggerated man in history, but the consequences of his death have not yet been fully appreciated. Fifty years after the shooting, the impact of the bullet that struck Kennedy dead continues to tear through the bone and sinew of the American republic.
As a student of end-times prophecy, it fascinates me to see the great movements in history as we near the end — movements clearly and obviously fulfilling or leading to the fulfillment of Bible prophecy (a subject that greatly interested Kennedy). Yet these huge movements of history, hinge on small things, such as one man’s disdain for another, or whether a bullet hits directly or a couple of inches to the right.
One thing is certain. Only with divine help could someone on November 22, 1963 successfully predict what would happen to the world in the fifty years that would follow. Yet two thousand years ago, several men wrote incredibly accurate descriptions of these very times. How could they do that unless inspired by the Holy Spirit? If those parts of the Bible are true, then so are all the rest.
Subject: Watchman Warning: 11-21-2013 
Thu Nov 21, 2013 11:58 am
