William Henry Harrison and John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy Foreign Policy:
JFK was president during one of the most important and dangerous situations during the history of our country. He definitely understood the impact that a foreign policy decision can make on a country as is evident in a quote of his when he says, "Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us." JFK was forced to deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis where the Soviet Union moved nuclear weapons into Cuba. He had no choice but to react with some sort of foreign policy decision. He also understood what a fine line he was walking between peace and a full fledged nuclear war. In an address to the U.N. in 1961 he said, "It is therefore our intention to challenge the Soviet Union, not to an arms race, but to a peace race--to advance together step by step, stage by stage, until general and complete disarmament has been achieved. We invite them now to go beyond agreement in principle to reach agreement on actual plans." The leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, lied to the American leader by saying that he would not put any offensive weapons in Cuba. The U.S. received pictures showing that this was a lie and reacted in a way that may have saved a nuclear war. He received all kinds of opinions on what action to take, especially from the group he set up called ex comm, but in the end he decided on a quarantine. Kennedy went on television and said that all ships going to Cuba were to return from where they are coming from and that the soviets must remove their weapons from Cuba or else further action would occur. This method worked and Kennedy avoided a serious disaster.


Economic Policies:
John F. Kennedy once said, "Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance." Kennedy was given an economy from Eisenhower that was not in the best of shape. It needed a lot of help and Kennedy was there to give that to it. In Kennedy's state of the union address he said, "The present state of our economy is disturbing. We take office in the wake of seven months of recession, three and one-half years of slack, seven years of diminished economic growth, and nine years of falling farm income." JFK inherited a mess of an economy and he proposed a bunch of proposals and bills to get the country out of the recession. He proposed an investment tax credit program, tax cuts to encourage investment and savings, better education, improvement of medical care, improving water and energy infrastructure, and he wanted to get minorities into the mainstream economy of the country. All of these ideas were not cuts of the budget but rather additions to it to help to stimulate and improve the economy. On top of that, he believed that the space program would also help to improve the economy and it was almost the basis of his entire economic plan. The space program, in just five years, created 400,000 new jobs for Americans and did what Kennedy hoped it would do by improving the economy of the country. If you were to compare William Henry Harrison and Kennedy in economic policy you can say that they faced many of the same challenges. Both were given poor economies and had to do something to improve it. Kennedy got the chance to do that while Harrison died before he could make a real difference.


William Henry Harrison Foreign Policy:
Harrison died of pneumonia just 30 days into office which caused him to basically do nothing as the president of the United States. I don't really know what foreign policy he would have instigated but if he were to follow in line with other members of the Whig party then he would most likely have a protectionist type of foreign policy. Protectionism is when the government restricts trade between other nations in the world. They would place taxes and tariffs on goods that were being imported as to help the local businesses. This would cause less people to buy foreign goods and instead buy the local products instead. Overall, it is a system that protects the businesses in the country that uses that type of policy and it extremely discourages the purchase and use of foreign goods. Since Harrison was so limited in his time spent in office, all I can do is speculate that he would have followed this type of policy and enacted laws to help local businesses instead of foreign ones.


Economic Policies:
Harrison spent such a sort time in office so he never had a chance to institute any economic policy for the U.S. But, one he was elected because of an economic problem. He was running in the election against Martin Van Buren. Van Buren was in bad shape in the eye of the public mainly because of the Panic of 1837. He was blamed almost entirely for the economic problems that the country faced during this time. Andrew Jackson was the one that was mainly responsible for the problems that Van Buren was given but he took the blame anyways. People said that he failed to involve the government in the economy, which caused the economic drought to last longer and to be worse. This situation is much like the one we are in now. The one major difference is that the government is getting involved to try and make a difference. Harrison and Barack Obama can be compared somewhat because both of them were elected to bring change. Harrison was expected to lead the country out of the panic while Obama is looked at as a new face in the white house to hopefully bring us out of our situation. Harrison died just 30 days in office, so we do not know what policies he was going to propose to get our country out of the mess that we were in or what effect those policies would have had.




http://theantipress.blogspot.com/2007/09/jfk-quotes-you-probably-havent-heard.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/coldwar/kennedy_cuban_missile_01.shtml
http://americanhistory.suite101.com/article.cfm/president_william_henry_harrison
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Politics/Clinton_Kennedy.html
http://home.att.net/~jrhsc/jfk.html
http://www.schillerinstitute.org/economy/phys_econ/2006/JFK_recovery.html