[Black civil rights leader John Lewis, addressing the…]

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Black civil rights leader John Lewis, addressing the Washington March in August 1963: "Listen Mr Kennedy, Listen Mr Congressmen, Listen fellow citizens, the Black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom period". "I want to know, which side is the fee ran obera "centing off" must say to the politicians that there won't be a appraisal of his politics shows no reason, why socialists should cherish his memory.

Good-looking, filthy rich, and rabidly anti-communist, Kennedy was able to wrap up much of the politics of the preceding Eisenhower and Truman administrations in a new veneer of 'liberal" razzamatazz and demagogy about a "New Frontier" and the 'torch" being taken by a new generation.

He scraped home to victory over Richard Nixon in 1960 by the narrowest margin that ever elected a President, having spent liberally from his father's estimated $200-$400 million fortune to back his campaign.

Get moving

Kennedy's campaign had focussed on a pledge to "get the country moving again" after the 1958 recession and eight years of cautious book-balancing Republican government under Eisenhower.

But he had also banged the Cold War drum, with incessant allegations that Eisenhower's restrained military spending had allowed the Soviet Union to take the lead in nuclear weaponry, opening up a "missile gap"

The "gap" proved to be a costly and disastrous fiction, for which working people in • the USA and on a world scale are still paying - in the form of the arms race.

Kennedy also wrapped himself in 'liberal' colours with a vote-catching phone call to Martin Luther King's wife while the civil rights leader was in jail: but once in office, Kennedy himself and his administration did little to oppose legal 'Jim Crow' discrimination against blacks in the South. Only when blacks themselves took to the streets in ever greater numbers during 1963-4 were first Kennedy and then Johnson forced into concessions designed to prevent any political break by black voters from the established two-party line-up.

The administration's initial civil rights bill aimed at taking the black struggle off the streets Stop the and into the courts was described by black militants as "too little, too late" , while Kennedy himself continued to appoint racist judges, and presided over federal government persecution and even FBI murder of black activists across the country.

Kennedy's domestic economic policies were a quaint mixture of traditional Democratic liberalism, with increases in federal spending, together with tax cuts across the board, huge incentives for businesses, and a massive increase in the arms budget, which after two years in office had reached $56 billion and was soon to soar way above this with the Vietnam war.

Arms race

This vast expenditure was allocated both to nuclear weapons (in the rush to close the fictitious "missile gap") and a big expansion of the "conventional" arms and manpower available.

Former Ford executive Robert MacNamara was brought in as Secretary of Defence, and between them these two men swiftly launched the biggest eges.

And his stance in opposition to revolution in the Third World took tangible form on the one hand providing tied "aid" through a new "Alliance for Progress" and in support for "reformist" anti-communist regimes; and on the other in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in which CIAfinanced exiles failed in an attempted invasion of Castro's Cuba.

In the aftermath of this humiliating setback Kennedy ordered the CIA to arrange to assassinate Castro - a task which they repeatedly plotted, to little effect.

In the Dominican Republic, Kennedy arranged with rather more success for the CIA to do away with the embarrassingly savage pro-US President Trujillo: but the question of a stable anti-communist successor remained unresolved.

As Kennedy saw things, there were three possibilities, in descending order of preference: "a decent democratic regime, a continuation of the Trujillo regime or a Castro regime. We ought to aim at the first, but we really can't renounce the second until we