>>140125641967 was known as the "summer of love", and the culture was moving toward normalization of promiscuity and casual sex. Between the pill and AIDS, the late 60s/70s were a fuckfest because simultaneous second wave feminism and gay rights. Even in the UK, homosexuality was decriminalized in the late 60s. This is not to say that AIDS was ever something that straight people ever needed to be TOO worried about in the United States, but it was quickly understood to be a death sentence so you really better not catch that shit. Just the idea of it was enough to dampen the fuck parade.
JFK (as opposed to RFK) is generally credited with averting thermonuclear armageddon in the Cuban missile crisis, and most pertinent for our purposes, for giving the big vision for human spaceflight. Apart from those two items, opinion on him tends to diverge along party lines. His term (well under one full term) is almost too short to meaningfully compare him to other presidents. I had to check to see whether he even managed to get a SCOTUS justice installed (he got two, one of whom resigned in under three years. So Kennedy's only meaningful addition to the court was Byron White (about 30 years, long haul), who interestingly dissented on Roe v. Wade, continuing a long SCOTUS tradition of justices doing the opposite of what you might think their nominator would have liked (I must be careful here because I don't know what JFK's political position on abortion was, if it was even a thing).
