Today's Democrats have betrayed John F. Kennedy, Amity Shlaes writes in Forbes, by using his name in support of policies he abhorred. Reviewing...
Today's Democrats have betrayed John F. Kennedy, Amity Shlaes writes in Forbes, by using his name in support of policies he abhorred. Reviewing Ira Stoll's new biography, "JFK, Conservative," Shlaes concludes that Kennedy was right in saying, "I'm not a liberal at all." He "stood firmly opposed to a strong centralized government," Stoll writes, and he and "championed states' rights and strict constitutional interpretation." Kennedy campaigned for public aid to Catholic schools, warned early on that China was being lost to Mao, criticized "slave labor in Russia," and, as Shlaes notes, "expressed views on spending reminiscent of Calvin Coolidge." And of course Kennedy's famous tax cuts reflected his belief, expressed before the Economic Club of New York in 1962, that "the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now."
"Kennedy Strikes Back" by Amity Shlaes will appear in the December 2 edition of Forbes.
