A captain does not let his boat get rammed. He watches the water. He keeps the crew alive. He does not let the enemy cut him in two like a ripe fruit. But Kennedy let them. PT-109 burned because he was not good enough. And yet they called him a hero.

Then Krushchev came. The Short one. The bald one. He sized up the American and knew what he saw. He saw weakness wrapped in a suit, in a tan, in a mess of perfect hair. He saw a boy in his father’s clothes. He pressed. The American folded. Berlin slipped from his hands like sand.

Then came Cuba. The perfect disaster. The exile army floundered on the beach while Kennedy wrung his hands in Washington. He did not send the planes. He did not finish the fight. He had made a promise, and he broke it. The world saw.

The Russian came again. This time with missiles. Kennedy spoke, and they called it strong. But strength does not need to be spoken. Strength acts. The missiles left, but the world remembered. A bluff is still a bluff even if it works.

And so we had to go to Viet Nam. To prove we were not weak. To prove we were not afraid. But we were. Kennedy made sure of that. By the time his brains painted the Texas asphalt, the damage was done. We had to fight because he had lost too many fights before.

The man with the hair. The man with the words. The man with nothing underneath.

That was Kennedy. The fragile prince. His father bought the throne, and he sat on it like a child playing at war. He wore his pain like a medal, his sickness like a crown. The bad back, the rotten guts, the shots, the pills. The hollow man, kept upright by medicine and myth.

But the hair. The hair remained perfect. The hair mocked us. Through the failures, through the retreats, through the half-measures and humiliations, it stayed in place. Even in death, sprawled in the Dallas sun, part of his skull missing, the hair held. A sick joke.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5704211&forum_id=2:#48809207)