Steve Chapman on John F. Kennedy and Overambitious Government

Extravagance can be intoxicating, and those who
grow accustomed to extravagance, only to be deprived of it, can
miss it terribly. That accounts for much of the powerful hold John
F. Kennedy has on a generation of Americans even today. He led
people to imagine that their government had the boundless capacity
to improve the world, and on the day he died, they could still
believe that. His administration and that of his vice president and
successor Lyndon B. Johnson are significant in the same way: They
represent the pinnacle of ambitious, visionary government. But what
each president lacked, writes Steve Chapman, was a sober sense of
the limits of what it could do, at home or abroad.

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