MTG--
That, and I point out JFK was an ardent anti-communist, not the James Douglass-defined appeaser singing kumbaya.
Oh well, the world will have to survive without my 2 cents in EF-JFKA.
For a change, you got something right. Of the candidates running for the Democrat nomination in 1960, JFK was by far the most conservative. The liberal wing would have preferred anybody else. First Humphrey flamed out during the primaries. Their next choice was Stuart Symington. Some of them were hoping to draft Adlai Stephenson for a third bite of the apple. LBJ was the favorite of the Southern Democrats. Together, they couldn't muster the delegates to deny JFK a first ballot nomination. Neither Harry Truman nor Eleanor Roosevelt wanted JFK. Roosevelt even refused to support him until very late in the general election when she gave him a lukewarm endorsement.
Some things a lot of people forget about JFK:
He was elected to Congress at a time northeast Republicans were the liberals and the Democrats the more conservative option. Think Rockefeller.
JFK and Nixon were both friends and anti-communist allies.
In 1950 JFK donated $1000 to Nixon's Senate campaign against the far-left Helen Douglas.
In 1952, conservative JFK ran for the Senate and won against the liberal Henry Cabot Lodge.
After being elected, Joseph Kennedy called his friend Joe McCarthy and asked him to mentor JFK, even though McCarthy was a Republican.
McCarthy was very close with the Kennedys. RFK was a staff lawyer on McCarthy's committee. RFK ask McCarthy to be the godfather to his first child. Edward R. Murrow was the guest speaker at a Washington JayCees dinner that was citing RFK as one of the top ten young men for the year. RFK walked out in protest when Murrow got up to speak. Joe McCarthy even dated one of the Kennedy sisters for a while.
When McCarthy had his fall from grace, JFK had to distance himself from McCarthy because he had presidential ambitions, but he held firm on his hardline anti-Communist positions.
Some people who aren't old enough to know better assume JFK was a staunch liberal like his youngest brother Teddy but the record paints a much different picture.