PRESIDENT KENNEDY: A TRUE CONSERVATIVE !

The Democrat party has gone so far to the socialist-Marxist left during the past 40 years that President John F. Kennedy today would be labeled a conservative Republican.

The first thing JFK did when he narrowly won election in 1960 was to cut federal taxes 10 times more than President George W. Bush did when he was narrowly elected in 2,000.

Yes, Kennedy, a genuine conservative!

Bush? A “moderate” Republican. Why? Because the liberals viciously attack any Republican who dares to cut taxes. After 40 years of rampant liberal tax-and-spend Democrats have all but destroyed the American Dream for many working taxpayers. They see taxpayers as discardable slaves to Big Government.

I covered the 1960 Presidential election of Kennedy Vs. Nixon. I was then a reporter/columnist for the North Jersey Herald-News, the second largest evening newspaper in New Jersey. The Herald-News was then a Republican paper, endorsing Nixon in that election.

I was assigned to cover one of the last campaign appearances of Massachusetts Senator Jack Kennedy on the weekend before the election at the Teaneck Armory in Bergen County. I brought my girlfriend with me, Jeanne Reed of Teaneck, who became my wife of 41 years when we married in 1962.

Because of my credentials as a newsman, we took our positions at the press table right in front of the stage of the Teaneck Armory. Some 12,000 people packed the Teaneck armory only three days before the Presidential election.

Kennedy appeared with his famous “Rat Pack” – Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford (Kennedy’s brother-in-law), comedian Joey Bishop, and Anthony Quinn.

Seeing Kennedy, the massive crowd lunged forward, collapsing the press table. I  looked up at Kennedy, standing at the lectern in front of me. He looked down at us and gave his winning, bright-white teeth smile. He was certainly the inspiration for “Camelot.”

I filed my story for The Herald-News, which was on Page one Monday, the day before the election, the first Tuesday in November. The headline read: ARMORY CROWD STAMPEDES, with my by-line, Gordon B. Bishop, Herald-News Staff Writer. The picture on Page One showed a movie-star like happy face of Jack Kennedy, standing next to New Jersey Governor Robert B. Meyner.

The next morning I voted for the first time. You had to be 21 years old then. I cast my first vote in the curtained booth for Senator Kennedy. I identified with Kennedy because we were both devout Catholics. I doubt whether Kennedy would go along with today’s radical baby-killing abortion liberals.

Today, Presidents Kennedy and Ronald Reagan are two of the most popular Presidents of the 20^th Century. They truly represented the taxpayers of America, not the Big Government interests of the socialist liberals.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took America down the dead-end road to socialism with his New Deal radicalism of the 1930s, trashing the U.S. Constitution in the process.

The real political leaders and role models of the 20^th Century were Reagan and Kennedy, not FDR or Bill Clinton, who really had no respect for the Constitution – the “rule of law.”

Instead, liberalism-socialism has undermined the Constitution and our Bill of Rights since the New Deal era.

Constitutional law, which created this great nation after a bloody Tax Revolution in 1776, has become secondary to the liberal-socialist agenda of more taxes, bigger government and total disregard for the principles in the founders’ Republic of the United States of America.

America was founded as a Republic governed by the people’s representatives – not a democracy that became a government out of control after the imposition of an illegal income tax in 1913.

Our founders would not recognize today’s lawless government and justice system that’s rewriting the Constitution, one destructive decision at a time.

Long live the Republic. God bless America.

(I want to thank Eric, who services my car, for inspiring this column on American history during the past half-century. Young Eric was not around during the Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton eras.)