To be blunt, this is hokum. It’s true that Kennedy made a few decisions that angered one faction or another of the national security establishment; almost every president does at some point. But overall, Kennedy was a gift to that establishment, a militaristic, anticommunist hawk dressed up in the soft garments of trite, inspirational liberalism. Kennedy perpetuated the myth of a US-Soviet “missile gap” to win the 1960 election, despite almost certainly being informed it didn’t exist. (To be fair, there was a missile gap — it was just in the United States’ favor). Once in office, he then sharply increased military spending, expanded the US nuclear arsenal, and stationed nuclear-armed missiles around the world.
The Cuban missile crisis could have been avoided had Kennedy put a stop to the CIA’s ultimately disastrous Cuban regime change operation, including multiple assassination attempts against Castro. Sure, he resisted some of the most extreme elements of the national security establishment, but Kennedy was a reliable Cold Warrior. And while there’s evidence he had private doubts about Vietnam, so did almost every policymaker involved in that catastrophe. As it happens, Kennedy initially expanded the US presence there, despite his personal ambivalence. [...]
To some extent, this conspiracy theory is a funhouse mirror reflection of the Bush administration’s very real dishonesty and depravity. But it’s also a bizarre distraction from the administration’s very real, behind-the-scenes wrongdoing around September 11 — from the fact that Bush was on vacation all of August while warnings of an attack came in (some of which were simply ignored) to the administration’s very real conspiracy to lie its way into the Iraq War. In fact, to some extent the nuttiness of the inside-job theories helped delegitimize such critiques.
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