John F. Kennedy Was A Conservative, Says Black Author, Lawyer, And Talk Show Host. (Video)

We already had this discussion 8 years ago. Maybe a few reposts from then will refresh your memory...

Exposing the Myth of JFK's Politics

Liberals decried him as president, then rewrote the record after Dallas.


By L. Gordon Crovitz

Nov. 17, 2013 5:57 p.m. ET


Fifty years after John F. Kennedy's assassination, a surprising fact has been rediscovered: In his time, he was not considered a liberal.

"Understanding Kennedy as a political conservative may make liberals uncomfortable, by crowning conservatism with the halo of Camelot," Ira Stoll writes in his new book, " JFK, Conservative." Yet "it could make conservatives uncomfortable, too—many of them have long viscerally despised the entire Kennedy family, especially John F. Kennedy's younger brother Ted."

Mr. Stoll makes a strong case that in 1960 "the anti-Communist, anti-big government candidate was John F. Kennedy. The one touting government programs and higher salaries for public employees was Richard Nixon, " he writes.

JFK's false image as a government-loving peacenik was created "partly because of the work of liberal historians, partly as a result of shifts in American partisanship," Mr. Stoll writes. The best-selling biographies of the president after his death were by two of his more left-wing advisers, Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

It's often forgotten how troubled left-liberals were by JFK. New York Times columnist Tom Wicker disdained as "bellicose" his Inaugural Address pledge to "pay any price, bear any burden" to defend freedom. Former Democratic aide Chris Matthews understood "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country" as "a hard Republican-sounding slap at the welfare state."

After making tariff reduction his top legislative goal for 1962, Kennedy announced that "the most urgent task confronting the Congress in 1963" was cutting marginal income-tax rates—not an antipoverty program or a civil rights law. "The soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now," he said. Liberal adviser John Kenneth Galbraith reported that Kennedy told him to "shut up about my opposition to tax cuts."

Kennedy's tax cuts were even to the right of the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, which worried that "the economic impact of lower taxes is a guess at best." But he was right. The tax cuts, enacted after his death, created years of strong economic growth. The editorial page later championed supply-side economics, and Ronald Reagan cited JFK's precedent in embracing the idea.

In 1981, Sorensen admitted that "most of us and the press and historians have, for one reason or another, treated Kennedy as being much more liberal than he so regarded himself at the time." This admission was made only in private, at a meeting of administration veterans at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Likewise, Kennedy's Treasury secretary, Douglas Dillon, called JFK "fiscally conservative," but only in a speech to the Century Association, a private club in New York City, in 1993.

"It was too late," Mr. Stoll said in an interview. "The myth had already been created." Asked whether the increased transparency of our digital era would make it hard to repeat the spin job that portrayed Kennedy as a liberal, Mr. Stoll said: "The Internet does make fact-checking easier and deception harder."

Mr. Stoll discovered via the Internet that Sorensen's and Schlesinger's biographies reversed the chronology of two key foreign-policy speeches to make it look as if the president drifted more dovish. But JFK's later speech, at the Berlin Wall, was hard-line. He referred to communism as an "evil system" and gloated that free countries "have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in." Reagan used "evil empire" and began his "Tear Down This Wall" speech by saying, "Twenty-four years ago, President John F. Kennedy visited Berlin."

The Internet led Mr. Stoll to a startling quote about Harold Christoffel, a United Auto Workers official who was sentenced to prison for lying to Congress about communist influence on a strike at an Allis-Chalmers plant in Wisconsin that made turbines for Navy destroyers. "The 1941 Allis-Chalmers strike was a commie strike," said Massachusetts Rep. John F. Kennedy. The source was a 1947 issue of the Dispatcher, the newspaper of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Mr. Stoll said it wasn't in the catalog of the Wisconsin Historical Society, but "a Google search did turn up the LinkedIn profile of the intern who listed on her profile the experience of having processed and cataloged the papers for the Society." That led Mr. Stoll to the old news story.

Getting history right is important: The political tradition of economic growth, limited government and peace through strength worked for JFK and Reagan, two of the most popular postwar presidents. Originally Posted by lustylad

It never hurts for you to relearn the lessons I taught y'all 8 years ago...

Recalling the Days When Democrats Cut Taxes

Hurrah for the 50th anniversary of the tax cut championed by JFK, signed by LBJ, to spur growth.


By Larry Kudlow and Brian Domitrovic


March 4, 2014 7:09 p.m. ET


Fifty years ago last week, on Feb. 26, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the sweeping tax cuts that had been championed by his predecessor, John F. Kennedy. The law brought the top marginal income-tax rate down to 70% from 91% and the bottom marginal rate down to 14% from 20%. The 22 rates in between also were cut.

The tax legislation of 1964 was one of three major across-the-board income-tax cuts in the 20th century. The others took place in the 1920s, during the Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge administrations, and in 1981 and 1986 during the Ronald Reagan administration. After the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the top marginal rate was all of 28%. Today it is 39.6%.

The 1920s, '60s and '80s were three of America's greatest decades of economic growth. Without them, growth since the inauguration of the income tax in 1913 averages less than 3% per year. Each of the tax-cut decades saw at least seven years of growth of 4%-5%, along with advances in entrepreneurship, employment, living standards and wealth. We would hardly speak of an "American century" if not for the economic expansions that came with these three historic tax cuts.

Today tax cuts are associated with the Republican Party. Yet half a century ago, it was the Democratic President Kennedy who said in his Dec. 14, 1962, address to the Economic Club of New York: "Our practical choice is not between a tax-cut deficit and a budgetary surplus. It is between two kinds of deficits: a chronic deficit of inertia, as the unwanted result of inadequate revenues and a restricted economy; or a temporary deficit of transition, resulting from a tax cut designed to boost the economy, increase tax revenues, and achieve—and I believe this can be done—a budget surplus. The first type of deficit is a sign of waste and weakness; the second reflects an investment in the future."

When JFK's tax legislation came before Congress, Democrats in the House voted for it 223-29 and in the Senate 56-11, while Republicans voted against it in the House 48-126 and for it in the Senate 21-10. The GOP candidate for president in 1964, Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, voted against.

And after jacking up tax rates during World War I, the Democratic Woodrow Wilson administration proposed the tax cuts that came to pass under the guidance of Republican Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon in the 1920s. Stretching back into the 19th century, it had consistently been Democrats who had been in favor of tax reductions—and Republicans who had been in favor of high rates.

As generations of schoolchildren used to be taught, the tariff—the principal means of federal revenue before 1913—was a Republican baby, while Democrats and other "populists" railed against this form of mass taxation and insisted that tariffs be reduced if not eliminated. Democrats of old realized that high tax rates and trade protectionism prompt exceptions and preferences to be written into the law—special deals that crony capitalists thrive on. When the income tax began to replace the tariff in 1913, little changed. High, stifling rates encourage lobbying for loopholes, special carve-outs and backroom deals. Nothing populist about that.

In the 1930s and '40s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, turned the tables by jacking up marginal income-tax rates (at one point all the way to 94% for the very top earners), expanding the reach of the income tax into the humblest of wage-earners, and withholding taxes from paychecks. Or as the authors of the textbook "Federal Income Taxation" put it in 1953, under FDR the income tax "changed its morning coat for overalls."

JFK understood that high tax rates, even on the rich, bring inequities into the nation's political economy that do not befit America's traditions of liberty and constitutional rule. He also understood that devaluing tax preferences, as tax cuts do, frees up capital to move to its most naturally productive purpose and spur economic growth.

Reagan had the good sense to use the JFK tax cut as a model for his own historic tax cut in 1981. It is a pity that President Obama, who has unsuccessfully tried massive infusions of government money to spur growth, didn't follow JFK and Reagan's lead and make lower marginal tax rates a priority. If he had, we'd likely be in the midst of a vigorous recovery, and on our way to another decade of impressive growth. Originally Posted by lustylad

The one touting government programs and higher salaries for public employees was Richard Nixon, " he writes.
Originally Posted by lustylad

So Nixon was progressive!

You cant really apply standards, morals etc of today [or anytime] and make comparisons of different eras. Im sure answers to these types of questions vary and change as time goes on.

In today's environment, JFK would at least be considered moderate leaning-right, compared to the Justice Democrats. Hell, Trump really is a blue-dog Democrat with a few recent changes in opinions on social issues.