Barack Obama's youthfulness, soaring rhetoric and style make comparisons with John F. Kennedy inevitable. Sometimes, however, the Illinois Democrat invites the comparisons.
He's invoked Kennedy in several instances to defend his policy of meeting with the leaders of enemy nations without preconditions. In the most recent example at a campaign event in Oregon, he said, "Strong countries and strong presidents talk to their adversaries. That's what Kennedy did with Khrushchev."
If Lloyd Bentsen were alive, he'd be able to say it best: "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy: I knew Jack Kennedy; Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."
If Obama goes to the White House in January, he will do so with four years of national service. By the time Kennedy took the presidential oath in 1961, he had already served six years in the House and eight years in the Senate.
One of Obama's greatest claims to international expertise is four years of his youth spent in Indonesia. "Voters will have to judge if living in a foreign country at the age of 10," Hillary Clinton has mocked, "prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face."
In 1937 as storm clouds gathered over Europe, Kennedy traveled the continent as a college student. A year later, he joined his father, then U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, at the American embassy in London.
For most of 1939, he traveled Europe, the Soviet Union and the Middle East conducting research for his senior thesis. He was in Germany in August of that year, returning to London on Sept. 1 — the date of the German invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II.
Kennedy finished his thesis in 1940. Its title, conceived without the influence of George W. Bush, was "Appeasement in Munich," later published as the best-selling book "Why England Slept." In it, he argued that the democracies' slow response to Nazi militarization encouraged Hitler's aggression and made conflict inevitable.
Kennedy was a combat veteran and hero of the war in the Pacific. He spent more time in the military than Obama at this point has spent in the Senate. And all this before Kennedy set foot in Congress as an elected official.
Yes, Kennedy did go to Vienna in 1961 for a high-level summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. What Obama doesn't say or doesn't know is that despite a résumé that dwarfs his own, despite a keen understanding of the disadvantages democratic leaders face in encounters with totalitarian leaders, Kennedy left Vienna humiliated — and entered a more treacherous world.
Khrushchev dangerously misperceived his ability to embarrass the young president as a sign of American weakness. Within months, he gave the order to begin erecting the Berlin Wall. The following year, he began moving Soviet missiles into Cuba.
Talking with Khrushchev in Vienna — the kind of face-to-face, media-spectacle that Obama endorses — made the United States manifestly more unsafe and a dangerous world even more perilous.
Kennedy didn't salvage the Cuban Missile Crisis by negotiating with Fidel Castro — something Kennedy never did and which is the closest approximation to the diplomatic glad-handing Obama has endorsed for Hugo Chávez, Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Instead, he did so by exercising American military might and taking the nation to the brink of nuclear war with Russia while discretely negotiating Khrushchev back from the nuclear precipice with a secret American offer to remove American missiles from Turkey.
Kennedy, despite all his preparation, nearly stumbled into nuclear Armageddon with Khrushchev. Yet Obama, who in 20 years couldn't muster the fortitude to speak a critical word to the leader of the Church of G-d Damn America, is going to bowl over the likes of Chávez, Kim and Ahmadinejad?
Don't count on it.
