JFK is our best post-war Republican president, after Reagan, and Richard Nixon is the dream modern Democrat.
Hold the skepticism, especially as it bears on the current election.
Kennedy’s signature achievement is his permanent cut in personal and corporate tax rates, implemented in 1964. It is a story told admiringly by supply-sider, stalwart Reaganite, and Trump’s former director of the National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow.
As Kennedy assumed the presidency in 1960, leaving aside the inevitable rebound from WW2 in the 1950s, America had not enjoyed a sustained growth economy since the roaring 1920s, and certainly not one befitting America’s post-war political dominance.
In these doldrums, Kennedy understood better than the Democrat grandees and party leadership that America was a growth engine and a nation of innovation, capable of landing on the moon. “The most direct and significant kind of federal action aiding economic growth is to make possible an increase in private consumption and investment demand — to cut the fetters which hold back private spending.” Sound familiar? Kennedy was MAGA when Trump was a teenager.
Present-day Democrats demand higher taxes without end. By contrast, Kennedy explained that the tax cut must be permanent, not a “quickie” in his words. The U.S. high tax regime “exerts too heavy a drag on growth”; “siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power”; and “reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking.” The alternative of stimulus from increased federal spending “would soon demoralize both the government and our economy.” Words for a nation to live by, reviled in today’s Democrat party.
On foreign affairs, few Republicans have said it better: “The road to a world at peace runs through a revitalized and growing American economy, through the arduous construction of defenses so powerful that the communists know that peace is their only alternative.”
Yes, Kennedy sent a small cadre of military advisers to Vietnam, but the emphasis is on “small.” Kennedy’s 18,000 military advisers compare to the 2.5 million Americans who ultimately served in Vietnam, in a war owned by Lyndon Johnson and his vainglorious secretary of defense, Robert McNamara. Vietnam did not advance American security, as the country was not a domino, then or now, of China.
In sum, the Kennedy zeitgeist was optimism, the recognition that America’s greatest days lay ahead, delivered by a brilliant communicator. In policy terms, domestically, it was the tax cuts and an unshakable belief in the dynamism of the American private sector. Internationally, Kennedy’s foundational belief was a strong, growing, funded military. Not incidentally, he believed to his core that communism stands square against American freedom. By any realistic standard, and especially viewed at present, Kennedy is a model Republican.
Like all presidents, Kennedy was imperfect, personally and politically, especially his mistaken belief in arms control, which our adversaries have always violated. But taken as a whole, his presidency was a boon to America, and but for his Camelot image, it is a presidency entirely unwelcome in today’s Democrat party.
Now compare that record to Nixon. First and foremost, Nixon was a prime mover in expanding the administrative state. The laundry list is daunting. “[Nixon] pushed through extensive regulation of the economy, ended the gold standard, created the Occupational Health and Safety Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, passed the Endangered Species Act and expanded the Clean Air Act; increased Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, in addition to establishing Supplemental Security Income for the elderly and disabled.”
Beyond all this, to his enduring shame, he supported wage and price controls, Democrat shorthand for Nirvana.
To cement his legacy, Nixon sought the grand. China in the 1970s was a communist-run nightmare, mired in poverty, lacking technology, and suffering from severe resource misallocation. Its leadership was desperate for a break-out strategy. Providence arrived in the person of Henry Kissinger. Like Nixon, Kissinger was a man of vast ego, too large for his times, and thus a mark easily seduced by the communists. Kissinger in turn seduced Nixon into believing that together they would author what Kissinger modestly termed “a revolution.”
Indeed they did, but not the anticipated balancing of China against Russia. Instead, in exchange for selling a few more cola drinks in China, the Chicoms stole, extorted, and copied the industrial and military know-how of the West and now ready themselves to wield the world’s most threatening military.
Yet even with the future now visible, China mesmerizes today’s Democrats, the China of Tim Walz’s still unexplained thirty trips, Senator Feinstein’s twenty-year employed spy — Governor Newsom’s beloved China (“I do not want to see this relationship deteriorate”). Befitting her roots in this insidious, all too convivial California/China axis, Kamala Harris last year went on CBS’s Face the Nation to deliver her always inspiring insight. On our relationship with China, “It is all about de-risking. It is about understanding.”
Nixon and Kissinger would respond in fury, but the fact remains that they delivered China into the world as our most powerful and determined enemy, for which they richly deserve Democrat adoration.
Last but not least, Nixon allowed a group to form in the White House to plug government leaks, the so-called Plumbers. Two insanely inept missions followed. There was the botched attempt to burglarize the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist — and, if possible, an even more incompetent break-in to tap the phone of Democratic National Committee chairman Larry O’Brien, broken up, of all things, by a passing security guard who noticed tape on the door lock to O’Brien’s Watergate office.
From this sadly comical origin, Democrats have seized political power and successfully demonized Republicans for fifty years. More significantly, Watergate morphed into a standing ideology used to dismantle U.S. institutions, customs, and standards, not least the profession formerly known as journalism.
There is a terrible addendum to Watergate. Deep Throat was none other than the number-three official at the FBI, Mark Felt, bitter at Nixon for being passed over for promotion to FBI director. So begins the modern corruption of the FBI and CIA as a weapon advancing Democrat interests, most notably the Russian collusion scandal, for which Democrats paid no price.
In popular imagination, Nixon will never be a Democrat favorite, especially given his bombing of Cambodia, but he richly deserves the place. Equally, Nixon should be loathed by Republicans. Or, as memorably put by conservative pundit M. Stanton Evans, “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate.”
Historical interest aside, Nixon and Kennedy shed considerable light on the current election.
By these lights, Donald Trump is the farthest thing from the Democrat fantasia of a “threat to democracy.” Rather, in policy terms, he is best understood as a non-ideological, middle-of-the-road politician, borrowing freely from both sides of the aisle. He has Kennedy’s love for country and the private sector. He is perfectly at home with Nixon’s big spending ways. His love affair with tariffs makes sense against China but otherwise is a Democrat staple. A secure border and strong military used to be universal American political values. As a bonus, unlike cringy, awkward Nixon, Trump is blessed with comedic timing and the ability to connect with voters. Will Rodgers would approve.
The best that can be said of Harris is that neither Nixon nor Kennedy would have spent even a day in her company. She is as witless a candidate as will ever appear in U.S. political life, installed by coup, every word, every appearance a disgrace to the nation and the former Democrat party. While easy to mock, Harris is a committed leftist and an entirely willing tool of those who would destroy America.
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