[DeltAlum]

I heard a presidential historian on NPR this morning talking about JFK.

He pointed out a lot of the stuff that JAM alluded to above.

Seems to me that on the plus side were his stand during the Cuban Missle Crisis, tax cuts, the jump start given to the Space Program (putting an American on the Moon) and some others.

There were a number of his programs that never made it to or through Congress -- some of which were the precursers of some of LBJ's successes.

While Kennedy did inherit the use of "advisors" in Viet Nam from Eisenhower, the historian this morning believed that he would not have gotten into that mess nearly as far as Johnson and Nixon did. No real was to prove that, though.

In terms of the pain medications and womanizing, we didn't hold our presidents up to the scrutiny and the standards that we do today back then. And Kennedy certainly wasn't the first documented case of a presidential extra-marital affair. Those go back to the founding fathers.

It would be hard for most of you on GC to understand how HUGE the fact that Kennedy was Catholic was. People said that if he won, the Pope would be running the country in no time.

Bobby may, in fact, have been the smartest of the three brothers, but he just somehow didn't have the charisma of John. Had JFK not been killed -- and later RFK -- Bobby would probably have been president as well. Ted just seemed to keep shooting himself in the foot.

In the end, the time they called Camelot was good for the country, I think. It started us on a number of roads that we still travel after the doldrums of the two world wars and Korea.

I tend to think of JFK fondly -- and as for where I was when I heard the news? I was in the PA/Radio room of our high school, and threw the switch when the principal made the initial announcement that the president had been shot -- and "aired" the bulletin from the Columbus Public Schools owned radio station when the superintendent announced that his wounds were fatal, and closed the district. On the following anniversary of his death, another guy in the Radio Club and I did a memorial program on the PA system, complete with music and sound effects which had people crying in the hallways during the passing period that followed.

It was a truly amazing time.