War; did not achieve a significant diversion of resources from armaments to the eradication of poverty... But expectations of Kennedy’s presidency were so high that disappointment was inevitable, and many of the subsequent criticisms of his actions (or inaction) owe much to hindsight. It is part of what Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman calls the ‘drive to replace history as celebration by history as indictment’. There is another way of looking at this. ‘Nothing really happened’ might be seen as a considerable achievement in the context of 1961-63. There was no nuclear war in 1962 over the placing of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Despite the tensions with the Soviet Union over Berlin, a modus vivendi was reached on a divided Germany, and a Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1963. The Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek did not, as he threatened, invade the mainland in 1962; border clashes between India and the People’s Republic of China did not result in war. Kennedy exploited a potentially dangerous Sino-Soviet split to promote useful détente with the USSR. His willingness to negotiate defused the Skybolt crisis of December 1962, when cancellation of a US nuclear missile project threw Britain’s independent deterrent capability into doubt. Of course, Kennedy did not do all these things single-handedly, and many of his plans went awry. But it is possible to argue that he left the world in a better position in 1963 than in 1961. The policies and decisions of the leader of the world’s greatest superpower affected everyone: whatever his failings or his faults, John F Kennedy was a symbol of hope for the future; a promise to try to do better. His most enduring legacy is perhaps his belief that this was possible: Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.
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