Was John F. Kennedy the flat-out absolute worst U.S. president of the 20th century?

While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his
favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he
returns. This originally ran on July 15, 2011.

As I studied the Vietnam war over the last 14 months, I
began to think that John
F. Kennedy probably was the worst American president of the previous century.

In retrospect, he spent his 35 months in the White House
stumbling from crisis to fiasco. He came into office and okayed the Bay of Pigs
invasion. Then he went to a Vienna summit conference and got his clock cleaned
by Khrushchev. That led to, among other things, the Cuban missile crisis and a
whiff of nuclear apocalypse.

Looming over it all is the American descent into Vietnam.
The assassination of Vietnam's President Diem on Kennedy's watch may have been
one of the two biggest mistakes of the war there. (The other was the decision
to wage a war of attrition on the unexamined assumption that Hanoi would buckle
under the pain.) I don't buy the theory promulgated by Robert McNamara and
others that Kennedy would have kept U.S. troops out. Sure, Kennedy wanted out
of Vietnam -- just like Lyndon Johnson wanted out a few years later: We'll
scale down our presence after victory is secure. And much more than
Johnson, Kennedy was influenced by General Maxwell Taylor, who I suspect had
been looking for a "small war" mission for the Army for several years.
Indochina looked like a peachy place for that -- warmer than Korea, and farther
from Russia.

(As a side note, there's another coup that JFK supported
earlier in 1963: the Baathist
one in Iraq that chucked out a pro-Soviet general. Events in subsequent
decades obviously are not Kennedy's fault, but it still is interesting to look
at the documents. Here's a State Department sitrep
from, of all dates, Nov. 21, 1963: "Initial appraisal cabinet named November 20
is that it contains some moderate Baathis. Of twenty-one ministers, seven are
holdovers from previous cabinet, thirteen are civilians, four are from moderate
Shabib-Jawad faction of Baath (Defense --
Tikriti; Communications -- Abd al-Latif; Education -- Jawari; Health -- Mustafa)
and a number of technician-type civil servants." Did you notice the name of
that defense minister? I think this might have been Saddam Hussein's uncle.)

Anyway, I think his track record kind of makes even old
Herbert Hoover look good.

Tom Ricks, was born in Massachusetts and is the grandson and
great-grandson of Democratic politicians there.