We remember the 54th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination this week.  There is something about President Kennedy's legacy, as Alan Brinkley wrote a few years ago: President Kennedy spent less than three years in the White House. His first year was a disaster, as he himself acknowledged. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Communist Cuba was only the first in a series of failed efforts to undo Fidel Castro’s regime. His 1961 summit meeting in Vienna with the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was a humiliating experience. Most of his legislative proposals died on Capitol Hill. Yet he was also responsible for some extraordinary accomplishments. The most important, and most famous, was his adept management of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, widely considered the most perilous moment since World War II. Most of his military advisers – and they were not alone – believed the United States should bomb the missile pads that the Soviet...(Read Full Post)