America marked the 40th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s
assassination last month, and much verbiage was spent in
proclaiming him the hero of the party today epitomized by his
youngest brother Teddy. Yet the memory of Kennedy resonates with
virtually all Americans — not merely those on the left — and with
reason; indeed, reasons his brother’s acolytes would rather
forget.
JFK was no conservative, yet he was hardly the poster boy for
today’s left. In two key areas — totalitarianism and tax cuts —
JFK wasn’t even a liberal by the standards of his time, let alone
ours.
Scholars call Kennedy a Cold Warrior. They’re right. JFK saw
Communism as he did Nazism, as a totalitarian monstrosity
threatening life and liberty everywhere. Rejecting accommodation as
appeasement, he embraced the containment doctrine that guided
America after World War II.
Like Kennedy, most liberals of that era rejected appeasement.
Yet Kennedy went further, striking right at the jugular of the
Roosevelt and Truman administrations. Having criticized FDR’s
people for handing Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta in 1945, he
joined Republicans in blasting the Truman administration and the
State Department for their culpability in China’s collapse before
the Communists four years later. Speaking from the House floor, he
said, “The responsibility for [this] failure…rests squarely with
the White House and the Department of State.”
Kennedy also confronted Communist subversion at home. As a House
labor committee member, he helped convict a Communist union
official. While in the Senate, he backed Senator Joseph McCarthy’s
investigations. In January 1955, after McCarthy had fallen from
power, JFK walked out on a banquet speech by McCarthy-hating
journalist Edward R. Murrow. Three years later, at a Harvard
dinner, when a speaker compared McCarthy with convicted Soviet spy
Alger Hiss, JFK exclaimed, “How dare you couple the name of a great
American patriot with that of a traitor!,” and stormed out of the
building.
Eventually, Kennedy came properly to lament McCarthy’s methods.
Yet unlike most of his liberal Democratic contemporaries, JFK
refused to deny the obvious: the high-level Communist penetration
of FDR’s State Department in the 1930s and 1940s. For this courage
he almost paid dearly. In 1960, Eleanor Roosevelt tried mightily to
deny him the Democratic presidential nomination, and New York’s
Liberal Party almost withheld its endorsement of him as well.
As with totalitarianism, so, too, with tax cuts. Midway through
his presidential term, JFK proposed a sweeping across-the-board tax
cut, dismaying liberal Democrats, who preferred wasteful spending
binges to “stimulate” the economy.
Today’s liberal historians equate JFK’s tax cut proposals with a
demand-side stimulus, but that’s not what JFK said while arguing
for them. Here’s what he said: “The present rates ranging up to 91%
not only check consumption but discourage investment and
encourage…the avoidance of taxes [rather] than the production of
goods.” He went on: “Our present tax system…reduces the financial
incentives for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking.”
This was supply-side economics, pure and simple. Here was a
Democratic president advocating a pre-New Deal, conservative
Republican direction on taxes. And here were proposals that fit the
rhetoric: a massive across-the-board cut, coupled with a
26-percentage-point reduction of the highest rate from 91% all the
way to 65%.
Needless to say, liberal Democrats reacted to this about as
cordially as they had to JFK’s courage in standing against them on
totalitarian Communism years before. Thus, forty years ago last
month, at the time of his assassination, the tax-cut bill was stuck
in Congress. It took LBJ to get it through Congress the following
year, an homage to the slain young President.
Now it must be said, when it came to Communism, JFK as president
did not exactly practice what he had preached while in Congress.
For example, Kennedy convinced the Russians to withdraw
(not-yet-armed-or-operational) missiles from Cuba, but only by
agreeing to remove our (fully-operational) missiles from Turkey.
And surely he had more than his share of other flaws, some
all-too-reminiscent of the later President he once inspired at Boys
Nation.
Yet on both totalitarianism and taxes, time has been kind to
Kennedy — and cruel to the left. Following Soviet Communism’s fall
in 1991, out came the KGB files and the rest is history. The old
allegations were true: a half century ago, at high levels,
Communists had indeed infiltrated the State Department, and other
institutions as well. And as for tax cuts, the JFK cuts did what
they were supposed to do and more. Productivity soared, revenues
doubled, and prosperity returned, foreshadowing the more dramatic
Reagan cuts to come. And as for today, President Bush’s tax
policy’s impact on the post-9/11 economy becomes more apparent by
the day.
John F. Kennedy’s standing as a president continues to be
debated; but even so, one thing is clear: on tyranny and taxes, JFK
was no liberal. His leftist admirers would do well to learn from
the real JFK, not the made-up one of their fertile
imaginations.
