John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the US, and Ronald Wilson Reagan, who served as the 40th of the US, had unique ruling styles.
Comparing these two leaders might be difficult since Reagan served as president for eight years and Kennedy did not even have three years in office. Also, JFK was welcomed by many troubles after he took office as he faced the Vienna Summit and Berlin Wall, but he sailed through and shined in the Cuban Missile Crises. Reagan was gifted a viable economy from Carter, and he is applauded for ending the Cold War.
CNBC senior contributor and former Reagan administration economist Larry Kudlow and historian Brian Domitrovic collaborated in penning down a book titled ‘JFK and the Reagan Revolution,’ in which they explicitly noted that “Former President John F. Kennedy was a big believer in supply-side economics. That’s a concept more often associated with former president Ronald Reagan and Republicans than Democrats” [Source].
Jake Novak of CNBC interviewed Kudlow on their book and “the mostly unknown story of how President Ronald Reagan admired JKF’s economic policies and was determined to emulate them.”
For JFK, cutting down taxes was necessitated by a republican Douglas Dillon, a Treasury Secretary, a Groton and Harvard graduate. Kennedy was worried about the stagnant nature of his economy and was willing to try a novel way of doing things. He accepted ideas from his Democrats-Republicans cabinet that he had chosen in the spirit of bi-partisan.
Kudlow emphasized how JFK’s tax policies influenced Reagan by saying, “Reagan knew that connecting JFK to his tax policies would be a key to getting the American people and Democrats in Congress to accept them. As a result, Reagan insisted his staffers and speechwriters play up the connection as much as possible”. Larry Sabato cemented this view in his book, which states that Reagan and Bill Clinton are ranked high for American presidents who quoted Kennedy; no one else is even close to these two.
To win the heart of Congress and parliamentarians into agreeing with his big tax cuts, Kudlow said that Reagan “did a lot of one-on-one lobbying. He invited dozens of Democrats from the House to Camp David, played up the JFK connection to them, and eventually won over about 70 of them to vote for the plan …”. This shows how Reagan was feeding off his predecessor JFK’s achievements. Connecting himself to JFK was sufficient to gunner support from other politicians in the cabinet. It also proves how effective Kennedy’s policies were to have survived for that long. Even former US President Trump took a piece from Kennedy’s tax policies.
Village News gives a run-down of comparative issues between JFK and Kennedy, it reported that these two knew the importance of the constitution, believed in free trade, argued that only US citizens must vote in US elections, were sympathetic towards homosexuals, promised full wrath on crime, despised negotiating with terrorists, “felt that abortion was not an ethical form of birth control” and were conservatives [Source].
But some analysts do argue that Reagan should rank higher than Kennedy because he served in the presidential office for a long time. His accomplishments were numerous compared to JFK, who might have achieved more only if he had served for a longer period.
