Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country" was "a hard Republican-sounding slap at the welfare state." WOW!

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Exposing the Myth of JFK's Politics
By L. Gordon Crovitz, November 17, 2013

Fifty years after John F. Kennedy's assassination, a surprising fact has been rediscovered: In his time, he was not considered a liberal.

"Understanding Kennedy as a political conservative may make liberals uncomfortable, by crowning conservatism with the halo of Camelot," Ira Stoll writes in his new book, " JFK, Conservative." Yet "it could make conservatives uncomfortable, too—many of them have long viscerally despised the entire Kennedy family, especially John F. Kennedy's younger brother Ted."

Mr. Stoll makes a strong case that in 1960 "the anti-Communist, anti-big government candidate was John F. Kennedy. The one touting government programs and higher salaries for public employees was Richard Nixon, " he writes.

JFK's false image as a government-loving peacenik was created "partly because of the work of liberal historians, partly as a result of shifts in American partisanship," Mr. Stoll writes. (Disclosure: I'm on the board of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which published "JFK, Conservative.") The best-selling biographies of the president after his death were by two of his more left-wing advisers, Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

It's often forgotten how troubled left-liberals were by JFK. New York Times columnist Tom Wicker disdained as "bellicose" his Inaugural Address pledge to "pay any price, bear any burden" to defend freedom. Former Democratic aide Chris Matthews understood "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country" as "a hard Republican-sounding slap at the welfare state."

After making tariff reduction his top legislative goal for 1962, Kennedy announced that "the most urgent task confronting the Congress in 1963" was cutting marginal income-tax rates—not an antipoverty program or a civil rights law. "The soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now," he said. Liberal adviser John Kenneth Galbraith reported that Kennedy told him to "shut up about my opposition to tax cuts."

Kennedy's tax cuts were even to the right of the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, which worried that "the economic impact of lower taxes is a guess at best." But he was right. The tax cuts, enacted after his death, created years of strong economic growth. The editorial page later championed supply-side economics, and Ronald Reagan cited JFK's precedent in embracing the idea.

In 1981, Sorensen admitted that "most of us and the press and historians have, for one reason or another, treated Kennedy as being much more liberal than he so regarded himself at the time." This admission was made only in private, at a meeting of administration veterans at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Likewise, Kennedy's Treasury secretary, Douglas Dillon, called JFK "fiscally conservative," but only in a speech to the Century Association, a private club in New York City, in 1993.

"It was too late," Mr. Stoll said in an interview. "The myth had already been created." Asked whether the increased transparency of our digital era would make it hard to repeat the spin job that portrayed Kennedy as a liberal, Mr. Stoll said: "The Internet does make fact-checking easier and deception harder."

Mr. Stoll discovered via the Internet that Sorensen's and Schlesinger's biographies reversed the chronology of two key foreign-policy speeches to make it look as if the president drifted more dovish. But JFK's later speech, at the Berlin Wall, was hard-line. He referred to communism as an "evil system" and gloated that free countries "have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in." Reagan used "evil empire" and began his "Tear Down This Wall" speech by saying, "Twenty-four years ago, President John F. Kennedy visited Berlin."

The Internet led Mr. Stoll to a startling quote about Harold Christoffel, a United Auto Workers official who was sentenced to prison for lying to Congress about communist influence on a strike at an Allis-Chalmers plant in Wisconsin that made turbines for Navy destroyers. "The 1941 Allis-Chalmers strike was a commie strike," said Massachusetts Rep. John F. Kennedy. The source was a 1947 issue of the Dispatcher, the newspaper of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Mr. Stoll said it wasn't in the catalog of the Wisconsin Historical Society, but "a Google search did turn up the LinkedIn profile of the intern who listed on her profile the experience of having processed and cataloged the papers for the Society." That led Mr. Stoll to the old news story.

Getting history right is important: The political tradition of economic growth, limited government and peace through strength worked for JFK and Reagan, two of the most popular postwar presidents.
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