There was no missile gap and when shown in private by Ike that there wasn't, he still continued to tell that lie.
He OK'ed the Bay of Pigs and at the last minute pulled the rug out from under them.
Voter fraud in West Virginia won him the primary and voter fraud in Chicago and Texas won him the presidency.
Fine all round democrat he was. A liar, a cheat and a womanizer.
He had some positive attributes, after all he really did believe in the equal rights stuff, it wasn't just a political play but an attempt to do the right thing in the face of stiff opposition (At the same time, it was not something Ike or even Truman had ignored, in fact both had been courageous about it, so Saint JFK was not exactly the inventor of fire or the wheel on this one).
He certainly did demagogue himself into a corner, and then lie rather than admit it, over the missile gap, and it does have to be said that his untimely end closed the book on his accountability for several foreign policy disasters or near disasters, a couple of which could have been apocalyptic if the coin had tipped the other way.
1. There were at least two different aspects of the Cuban crisis that could have directly gone nuclear, one from Soviet subs and the other from the Administration's blissfull ignorance that the Soviet general in Cuba had release authority for the missiles if we landed (Which came within an ace of happening).
2. The total balls-up over getting Diem knocked off in Viet Nam...proving we're pretty dangerous enemies, but even more dangerous friends.
3. The Bay of Pigs fiasco. There's really no excuse for how that was done, and how it played out.
4. Berlin crisis...a success in a way, while he was alive, but achieved at the cost of a 16-month massive mobilization of the Reserves (In a day when active duty soldiers and airmen were paid next to nothing because they were all draft-age single guys, which was emphatically not the case with the mobilized Reserves, suddenly trying to support families on as little as a tenth of the pay they had been receiving in their civilian jobs prior to mobilization). It got the Russians to back down in Berlin only in part because they realized Berlin would be a real fight (Which they would still unquestionably win in the short run) if they wanted it, and not a bloodless political victory...after burning one of our most vital moles to find out they weren't willing to go nuclear over Berlin, it has to be said. The episode made them realize JFK was actually willing to screw over the entire US economy for a year rather than signal any unwillingness to go to full mobilization, or war if it came to that. The terrible long-term unintended consequences of this almost-forgotten event (The large-scale mobilization, not the Berlin crisis itself) then directly shaped the decision NOT to mobilize any significant reserve component ground combat units for Viet Nam, which is widely regarded as resulting in both breaking the selective service system and destroying any illusion that we were seriously committed to winning that war. The reserves were in fact left in a completely broke-dick condition until the late 1980s when Reagan's team (And to give the Devil its due, Congress) got around to coming up with a better plan and fixing them into something useful, instead of just being an equipment and parts reservoir for the active component forces to plunder at need.
Really a lot of screwing up in a year and a half, when you get down to it.
