Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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One of the terrible things about Nixon's presidency was that when he got caught in Watergate, presidents stopped taping all their Oval Office conversations.

We are losing a generation of precious history. Nowadays, if you're anywhere national public office, you don't leave a paper trail and there are no smoking guns. Teams of lawyers followed Bill Clinton around getting affidavits from anybody that might have a chance of releasing anything salacious.

That's a shame, because presidents are all too human -- warts and all. In my mind JFK was a sexual predator and junkie, but it's better for history that we know the truth. Instead I fear that all we're going to get from 1975 onward is a plastic version of the people who occupied the office.

ADD: One point of interest about this particular U.S. President: Mimi Alford's story is nowhere near being unique. If anything, hers is a tame version of JFK's lifestyle. Dont' forget that Marilyn Monroe was a mistress, as were many other people. I've seen estimates of his sexual conquests that number in the hundreds. Then there's the drug use, including IV drugs administered in the White House by "Dr. Feelgood".

If anything, JFK's story reinforces for me the great amount of latitude we can have in a president without fearing that the world is going to blow up.

> If anything, JFK's story reinforces for me the great amount of latitude we can have in a president without fearing that the world is going to blow up.

For me, it underlines a stronger message, since JFK is widely considered to be one of our better presidents, and I personally rank him as one of the two or three best. It seems that how good of a person someone is, is not a good indicator of how good of a president that person will be.

Apologies for the directness, but JFK was ranked as some kind of awesome president because he was killed in office, not because of some magic power he had. Most people who weren't infatuated with the man at the time felt like he'd barely be remembered if it weren't for his tragic demise.

He was a terribly broken man. I doubt he would have been competent running a gas station at night, much less the country. His saving grace was that his family connections gave him a machine to govern with. There were tons of "special" insiders that helped facilitate both the philandering junkie and the presidency. It's those folks that carried the weight during his term. Those are the ones that did the awesome job.

Still, worked out very well. A good lesson in how regular humans can still be president, warts and all. As terribly flawed as the man was, he was nowhere near being the worst U.S. President. And that says something very interesting about the job.

Yes, he has a very high popularity ranking, and that's all it takes to be president: being popular.

>Apologies for the directness, but JFK was ranked as some kind of awesome president because he was killed in office, not because of some magic power he had.

Really? You're holding the secret microphone that allows you to speak for everyone else?

I can think of loads of reasons JFK stood out as an exceptional President, you sir are confused.

You can think of loads of reasons, but you haven't given any. Being assassinated young is probably the only thing most people know about JFK. It isn't rocket science to figure out that most people would see him as a sort of martyr because of it.

Thank you for that deep level of insight into other peoples thoughts.

You could start with his speech writers...

I think it'd be healthy if we realize and stop fetishizing the myth that the man makes the times not the other way round.

"I personally rank him as one of the two or three best."

Up there with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln? What did he do that puts him there, in your opinion? Because when I think of JFK I think of starting the Vietnam war, the disgrace of the Bay of Pigs, and jeopardizing national security by knowingly sharing a mistress with mobsters. He handled the missile crisis well enough, but not in the way that accords with the popular imagination: he agreed to remove our missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviet missiles being removed from Cuba. But I'm no historian. Please enlighten me.

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