Promises Kept: John F. Kennedy's New Frontier Irving Bernstein (Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles)
A counter-revisionist examination of John F Kennedy and his administration. Promises Kept presents a policy history of major domestic legislature efforts bnetween 1961 and 1963. Irving Berstein focuses on administrative and congressional progress under Kennedy in civil rights, education, taxes, unemployment, Medicare and the Peace Corps. He persuasively argues that Kennedy was indeed `a very successful President, that the revisionists are dead wrong'. He contends that many of Kennedy's campaign promises were well on their way to being enacted by the third year of his first term, even after his first two years dealing with the transition of a society from conservative to liberal. Berstein also declares that many of Kennedy's objectives that were later achieved by Lyndon Johnson would have been brought to fruition by Kennedy himself had he not been assassinated. He supports this argument by tracing Kennedy's selection of advisers and directors on each issue, piecing together his overall decision-making process through original written sources and previously published works, and calculating the probability that the policy would have been successfully implemented.