He's got the "dull" thing going though.

It's all pure luck and being in the right place at the right time. If Iraq and Afghanistan had gone as per plan, oil was too cheap to meter and the world throwing flowers at our doorstep, we'd be refashioning Teddy Roosevelt's head into Bush's right now.

Jon.

joule,

I find your remarks quite distasteful. The Kennedy family has been tested time and again...the result has at times been finely tempered steel. Clearly, they all have had their faults...from womanizing to drinking to whatever. Nonetheless, few American families have given quite so much of their own blood...when it could have easily retired to the pampered life.

To compare them to Mao or Hitler reveals that you neither lived through those dangerous times, nor do you have any conception of what it ideals they followed.

I shudder to think how you would have handle the Cuban crises or what position you would have stake out during the segregation crisis.

Neither really accomplished all that much, though JFK did manage to almost blunder into nuclear war with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

My understanding of history is that the leaders of the military were determined to carry out air strikes and/or an invasion of Cuba as a response. JFK wisely chose the response that they were least enthusiastic about, using naval forces to blockade Cuba.

I saw a show on the history channel where a former Soviet submarine commander talked about how they had nuclear tipped torpedoes. They would have used them to decimate the American fleet had the US attacked Cuba and a shooting war started. IMO that would have almost certainly led to an all out nuclear exchange so I find your statement highly misleading. JFK prevented a nuclear war from occurring.