Yesterday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe former JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen joined former LBJ speechwriter Doris Kearns Goodwin for a discussion of the similarities between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy. For those less mindful of their history one could only sense that any such comparisons the two made favorably of Obama with Kennedy would redound to the former’s benefit. Such should not be the case.

During Kennedy’s run for president against Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president Richard Nixon in order for the young Massachusetts senator to prove his bona fides on foreign policy as a Cold Warrior he resorted to playing what might rightfully be called the first lie about WMDs in US history. That was, of course, the so-called “missile gap” between the United States and Soviet Union in which Kennedy accused the Eisenhower administration of allowing the United States to fall behind the Soviets. Kennedy knew this accusation was untrue but he also knew that Nixon, as an administration member, could not use the intelligence gathered by the CIA through U-2 overflights to prove that Kennedy was lying about this crucial issue.

Now yesterday Sorensen and Goodwin went to great lengths to talk about how Kennedy’s muscular and shrewd diplomacy paid dividends during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 in convincing Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba and allowing Khruschev to save face at the same time by having the U.S. remove obsolete US missiles from Turkey. All of that is true as far as it goes. What goes unsaid, of course, is that the existence of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the first place owes its existence to Kennedy’s reckless fecklessness in the abortive Bay of Pigs Operation against Castro a short time before wherein the young president inherited a flawed plan hatched by the CIA and Cuban exiles to topple Castro. Kennedy signed off on this mission but after it began got cold feet and refused to commit US airpower to support it and the mission failed. To this very day Democrats have not recovered from damage done to the party’s reputation over that incident with Cuban-Americans. And it was Kennedy’s poor performance in that episode that was to embolden Khruschev to begin shipping missiles to Cuba precipitating the latter crisis as the Soviet dictator, based on Kennedy’s past performance, was convinced he could get away with it.

Upon entering the White House, Jack Kennedy was trying to prove his mettle as a tough guy and it backfired on him and nearly resulted in the closest that the USSR and the U.S. ever came to war during that “thirteen days in October” 1962 when the world held its breath. In some of his more strident comments such as “if Pakistan can’t or won’t act in the Frontier Tribal Areas we will unilaterally if necessary” Barack Obama echoes some of the same reckless statements. The example of another young president should dampen the enthusiasm some of Sen. Obama’s supporters might feel for comparisons of their man with an earlier U.S. Senator trying to become president of the United States.

~read more from Bill Harrison.…

I'm 53 and employed in the commercial real estate industry in Washington, DC. My academic training is in modern European history with an MA from the University of Virginia where I was a Governor's Fellow. I have written for the Richmond TImes-Dispatch, Continuity: A Journal of History and The American Spectator. I consider myself something of a European conservative as I'm not a huge fan of democracy, have no use for Bible thumpers of any stripe and abhor cultural and intellectual philistines.