JFK's Greatness–The Peace Corps

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books (February 20, 2014) Frank Rich takes a look at and sums up the numerous books (140 +) and TV programs about JFK on the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of his assassination. (By the way, Rich says, there have been approximately 40,000 books written on Kennedy.)

In his long essays (this is the NYreview of Books, after all) Rich writes about another new  book that tries to cast JFK as a ‘conservative’ is JFK, Conservative by Ira Stoll.

Rich does battle with the book, but at once point he sums us Kennedy’s liberal bent and that brings the Peace Corps into focus. Here is the paragraph from Rich’s essay:

“What most endures about Kennedy is his inspirational sanctification of public service–as conveyed by his rhetoric, by specific programs (the Peace Corps), and by the example of much of his family’s subsequent careers in public and private life. Whether or not his presidency can be characterized as ‘great,’ that was a great things.”

This is just another example of how when the world remembers Kennedy for his “greatest” it is the Peace Corps that spring first to mind.