Forty eight years after communist loving, Castro sympathizing Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy (D), Ross Douthat examines "The Enduring Cult of Kennedy" in Sunday's New York Times, turning the dreams of the aging 60s generations into nightmares.  The first premise is that Kennedy was a very good president, and might have been a great one if he'd lived. Few serious historians take this view: It belongs to Camelot's surviving court stenographers, and to popularizers like Chris Matthews, (snip) Wow!  Heads are exploding already.  In reality, the kindest interpretation of Kennedy's presidency is that he was a mediocrity whose death left his final grade as "incomplete." The harsher view would deem him a near disaster -- ineffective in domestic policy, evasive on civil rights and a serial blunderer in foreign policy, who barely avoided a nuclear war that his own brinksmanship had pushed us toward. (And the latter judgment doesn't even...(Read Full Post)