O 50 aniversário da morte de Kennedy

Joseph S. Nye is a professor at Harvard University and the author of "Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era;  

About the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the President John F. Kennedy and his legagy: 

 (...) A 2009 poll of 65 American presidential scholars rated JFK as the sixth most important president, while a recent survey of British experts on American politics put Kennedy in 15th place. Those are impressive rankings for a president who was in office for less than three years, but what did Kennedy really accomplish and how might history have been different if he had survived?

In my book Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era, I divide presidents into two categories: those who are transformational in their objectives, pursuing large visions related to major changes; and transactional leaders, who focus more on “operational” issues – ensuring that the metaphorical trains run on time (and stay on the tracks). Because he was an activist and a great communicator with an inspirational style, Kennedy appeared to be a transformational president. He campaigned in 1960 on a promise to “get the country moving again.”

Kennedy’s inaugural address appealed to sacrifice (“Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country”). He established programs like the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress with Latin America, and he set the United States on a path to landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960’s.

But, despite his activism and rhetoric, Kennedy was a cautious rather than an ideological personality. As the presidential historian Fred Greenstein put it, “Kennedy had little in the way of an overarching perspective.”

Rather than being critical of Kennedy for not living up to his rhetoric, we should be grateful that in critical situations, he was prudent and transactional rather than ideological and transformational. The most important achievement of Kennedy’s brief presidency was to manage the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and defuse what was probably the riskiest episode since the dawn of the nuclear age.

(...)

In my view, Kennedy was a good but not a great president. What made him good was not merely his ability to inspire others, but his prudence when it came to complex foreign-policy decisions. We are fortunate that he was more often transactional than transformational in foreign policy. We are unfortunate that we lost him after only a thousand days. 

Read more: here