8/16/00 6:25 p.m.
Undead Kennedys
What was so great about JFK anyway? Well, he did cut taxes.

By Ramesh Ponnuru, NR senior editor

onservatives have been getting ridiculed a lot for worshipping at the altar of Ronald Reagan. And it's true that our nostalgia for Reagan has taken some counter-productive forms. (If Reagan were active in politics today, he wouldn't be sitting around waiting for another Reagan to come along.) But Reagan has been out of power for only 12 years, and he changed the country and the world in ways that affect us every day. The world is a much better place for his presidency.

So what's the Democrats excuse for their love affair with John F. Kennedy? Every four years Ted Kennedy goes to the party convention to summon his brothers' ghosts. Last night we heard from him and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg about how many people Kennedy inspired to lives of what was euphemistically called "public service," about how Al Gore is keeping the spirit of the New Frontier alive, about how the dream goes on.

But what did President Kennedy actually accomplish, or even try to accomplish? For the public, that is — scoring with Marilyn Monroe and mafia molls doesn't count. Kennedy's crackpot theories of counter-insurgency and his ouster of Ngo Dinh Diem deepened our involvement in Vietnam even as they reduced the likelihood of our success. His executive order authorizing collective bargaining for public-sector employees had the result that every incoming administration faces a bureaucracy that is not its servant but its primary constituency. And let's not forget that Kennedy brought us quite unnecessarily to the brink of nuclear war.

The emotional attachment Catholics, and particularly Irish Catholics, felt for Kennedy is understandable. And I suppose Democrats can look back on his administration as the last Democratic presidency that did not end in failure or squalor. My colleague Jay Nordlinger suggests that Kennedy is venerated because he was good-looking and because he was assassinated. Neither of these things reflects any particular credit on him.

Of course, Kennedy also cut taxes, which set off the boom of the '60s. Somehow I doubt that's what his relatives were talking about last night.