I always thought that Kennedy was heavily over rated as far as his foreign policy went.
the Bay of Pigs disaster was on him, He went to Vienna for a summit with Khrushchev and got his clock cleaned. I think he was fortunate in the Cuban Missile Crisis however it was the one rare time that the American Intelligence Community actually got it right, but to give credit to Kennedy he did stay calm throughout the crisis and show leadership.
There have been arguments made though that if Kennedy had given Khrushchev a bit of wiggle room when he had him cornered we might have seen a significant cooling of the cold war instead it lead to the fall of Khruschev and the rise of a string of hardliners like Brezhnev and Andropov who dialed the cold war to higher levels.
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