The reason we have the great society was because JFK died Johnson got enough social capital to pull it through.
The problem is the great society had a whole bunch of bullshit that seemed like a good idea at the time that actually turned out to have serious negative conquences.
One of these things was that it rewarded poor women finically for kicking out the fathers of their children. Social workers went into the black community and basically kicked out the men in the name of helping these poor women. This caused so many problems in the black community that haunt it to this day.
The second thing was Veitnam, Ken for all of his faults knew learned from bay of pigs and knew not to throw good money after bad. Upon realization that this was a quagmire he probally would have descretely left. LBJ felt that he had to make a stand on the issue and we had nam as a result.
That said JFK wasn't that great of a president, he was a womanizer of the first order, could be brash and was really into nepotism.
What do I think? I think we would have gotten the civil rights act later under a republican president, we would have gotten some thing less ambitious then the great society and the black community would be better off and the money we blew on Vietnam would likely be spent on insurgencies and counter insurgency elsewhere.
