I received the "6th Annual Making of America Issue" of TIME this week, which features a strikingly handsome portrait of John F. Kennedy.

An aside: please note the absence of any computer generated tears a la the Ronald Reagan cover from a while back.

The Cover Text reads:

What We Can Learn from JFK:

How to lead in a dangerous world;

What candidates should say about faith;

Why civil rights can't be compromised.

Quick Thoughts:

1. Before reading one word of the coverage, I was disturbed that TIME has now published six special issues celebrating essential Americans in this series, and they have not yet featured George Washington. All five of the previous choices have been respectable (Ben Franklin, 2nd year, and Abe Lincoln, 4th year, were stellar), but Jefferson before GW--and now JFK? Come on. Does anybody over there have any respect for American history?

An aside: The team at Newsweek seems to have a much better handle on the essence of our national story.

While I agree with TIME managing editor Richard Stengel's assertion that the study of history is a two-way conversation between the past and the present, I am always suspicious of persons who manipulate history as a cudgel to achieve current political goals. Without having read all of this issue, the exercise seems more concerned with exposing the faults of figures, policies and philosophies currently out of favor with TIME rather than offering a critical retelling of the Kennedy years.

2. I like JFK. I always rank him as an extremely talented president. However, he was only in office for 1,000 days. Yes. I understand his afterlife is more important than his life span. However, the list of untapped monumental figures who cast a shadow over the American political landscape is long and much more distinguished than JFK. FDR? Andrew Jackson? Ronald Reagan?

3. Even more disturbing, looking at the table of contents, the editors seem to be checking their healthy historical skepticism at the door.

First TIME Article: A Warrior for Peace:
"His Presidency included some of the tensest moments of the cold war, but he was convinced that our true power came from democratic ideals, not military might" (story here).

According to TIME, the 1960 Campaign forced Kennedy to play the role of a hawk on the Cold War, although he and his family had long since come to understand that war was unnecessary and "stupid." But facing Richard Nixon in 1960, who TIME calls "one of the dirtiest fighters in the American political arena," JFK decided to fight fire with fire. "Kennedy had no interest in becoming another Adlai Stevenson," TIME reports, "the high-minded liberal who was easily defeated in back-to-back elections by [a] war hero. JFK was determined not to be turned into...a punching bag for two-fisted GOP rhetoric."

So, according to TIME, Kennedy lied. Inventing a "missile gap" and disingenuously "championing the cause of the Cuban 'freedom fighters,'" Kennedy secured election, which TIME implicitly condones (a justifiable means to a necessary end). Once in office, the "Warrior for Peace" assiduously battled his hardliner generals to bring sanity to relations with our noble but misunderstood Soviet adversaries.

Embattled, the President leaned on his only two friends in the administration: his brother Robert and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, who, like him, sought "non-military solutions" to the "most dangerous moment in human history," the Cuban Missile Crisis. While the Washington hardliners pushed for a nuclear showdown, Kennedy courageously resisted the intense pressure from his military advisors. TIME blithely accepts the speculation that only Kennedy's steady hand averted a catastrophe which would have reduced "a vast swath of the urban U.S. within missile range...to radioactive rubble."

Of course, all of this is very much in dispute, and it also begs the question: would the humane Soviets leaders, who only wanted to do the right thing, really have brought down nuclear cataclysm on American cities and innocent civilians?

What of Vietnam? Again, JFK was caught in a vise between his insane military leaders and politics. With every intention of withdrawing from South East Asia after his reelection in 1964, the President let us get a little bit pregnant in Vietnam--but always fully understanding, according to TIME, that the war was unwinnable, and unalterably determined to get us out.

Later, according to TIME, "Lyndon Johnson was able to [disingenuously] portray his own deeper Vietnam intervention as a logical progression of JFK's policies." But TIME and Robert "McNamara know the truth: Kennedy would have withdrawn."

As proof of Kennedy's overall sincerity, TIME reports that his Soviet adversary, Nikita Khrushchev "broke down and sobbed [upon hearing] the news from Dallas in November 1963." TIME relays that Khrushchev saw JFK as "a real statesman" and together, Khrushchev believed, "the two men could have brought peace to the world."

Again, TIME feeds all their reportage through the assumption that Khrushchev was our friend and only Kennedy et al were wise enough to understand this now apparent fact of history. It is the same logic that credits Mikhail Gorbachev with ending the Cold War while Ronald Reagan looked on red-faced in his befuddlement and early-onset Alzheimer’s.

In a single declaratory sentence: This is bad history. SHAME on TIME.

The other pieces:

"A Slow Road to Civil Rights: As President, Kennedy initially moved cautiously on segregation. But by the spring of 1963, he knew that more was needed."

This also looks like a ridiculously facile and convenient reading of history--but it will have to wait until I have another moment to engage. As will the story on Kennedy's Catholicism, which also strikes me as overblown and too finely engineered to speak authoritatively to present politics. Until next time.