JFK: the third most intelligent president of USA, JFK Jr: Dependably and consistently good

1. (Highest IQ ranking) President John Quincy Adams - IQ score: 168. While studying law at Harvard University, America's future sixth president (1825-1829) became romantically involved with a local woman, but his parents advised him to establish his career before marrying her. Brokenhearted or not, Adams listened to the advice — and went on to his duty to become one of the most respected and productive presidents ever. He's remembered for his diplomatic skills: he settled the Treaty of Ghent and ended the War of 1812; negotiated with Britain over the location of the U.S. border with Canada; and purchased Florida from Spain. 

2. President Thomas Jefferson. IQ score: 153. Officially, Thomas Jefferson was a planter, lawyer and politician — but he also had in-depth knowledge of mechanics, several languages and architecture, and he was a talented surveyor and mathematician. He was an extremely busy man with a huge range of interests that he kept under control with a very strict schedule: He rose with the sun, ate breakfast strictly at 8, had a big lunch at 3, and kept track of everything in a trusty notebook. Jefferson's achievements include writing the Declaration of Independence when he was in his early 30s. As the third president (1801-1809), he: doubled the country’s territory; negotiated peace with France; and developed American trade. He remained an overachiever after retiring from office, when he founded the University of Virginia.

3. President John F. Kennedy - IQ score: 150. JFK was not just very smart—he was a real trooper who fought chronic illnesses his whole life and refused to give in. He pursued an interest in political philosophy at Harvard, then served with distinction in the Naval Reserve in World War II. During his abbreviated presidency (1961-1963), he faced some intense political situations. Kennedy steered the U.S. through the Cold War, struggles with Cuba and the Middle East, and the rising civil rights and women's equality movements. As the country was becoming more woke, the 35th president managed to push it toward a more equitable future by signing the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and proposing what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

David Talbot: In recent years, the Kennedy legacy has been clouded by a spate of books, documentaries, and articles that have attempted to demythologize Camelot by presenting JFK as a drug-addled, sex-addict, with capricious character. This pathological interpretation misses the essential story of his presidency. There was a heroic grandeur to John F. Kennedy's administration that had nothing to do with the mists of Camelot. It was a presidency that clashed with its own times, and in the end found some measure of greatness. Coming to office at the height of the Cold War and held hostage by their party's powerful Southern racist wing, the Kennedy brothers steadily grew in vision and courage - prodded by the social movements of the sixties - until they were in such sharp conflict with the national security bureaucracy and Southern Democrats that they risked splitting their own administration and party. This is the fundamental historical truth about the presidency of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And yet, caught up in the fashionable anti-Kennedy backlash of the times, prominent journalists like Christopher Hitchens dismissed JFK as a vulgar playboy. One result of this relentless Kennedy bashing has been to diminish the public outrage over JFK's unsolved murder. After all, if President Kennedy really was such a sleazy character, where is the tragedy in his violent demise? It has also become fashionable in all the media babble about Dallas that fills the air each year around November 22 for commentators to opine that 'we will probably never know the truth about John F. Kennedy's assassination'—a self-fulfilling prophecy that relieves them of any responsibility to search for the truth. From Dallas to Vietnam to Iraq, the truth has consistently been avoided, the perpetrators have never been found. When the nation has mustered the courage to impanel commissions, these investigations soon come up against locked doors that remain firmly shut to this day. The stage for this reign of secrecy was set on November 22, 1963. The lesson of Dallas was clear. If a president can be shot down with impunity at high noon in the sunny streets of an American city, then any kind of deceit is possible. The CIA should be required to disclose the phone and travel records of agents suspected of involvement in the JFK - and RFK - assassinations, such as David Morales. Lingering technical disputes about the events in Dealey Plaza - such as the hotly debated 'acoustic fingerprints' on the Dallas police motorcycle Dictabelt that apparently indicated that as many as five shots were fired that day - should be resolved by utilizing the most sophisticated forensic resources, including those of the federal Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which oddly refused to take on the case. The assassination researchers are, of course, indefatigable by nature. That's what has allowed them to carry on, through years of government obstruction, media ridicule, and the bewilderment of family and friends. But outside this shrinking community of hardy souls, a malaise hangs over the JFK crusade. Do Americans still want the truth - starting with Dallas and going all the way to Guantanamo? Do they want to take back their country? I don't know for certain. But I have to be optimistic. Just because there really is no other way, is there? —David Talbott,  author of Brothers - The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.

"In real life, the big gesture isn't enough. You need to be consistent, you need to be dependably good." —JFK Jr (Estimated IQ according to his SAT tests in Brown University: 129). John Kennedy Jr was passionate about history and one of his favorite readings was Roman Imperialism in the Late Republic by Ernst Badian (an Austrian-born classical scholar who served as a professor at Harvard University from 1971 to 1998). "John's legacy was really about who he would've become," friend Brian Steel, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan with John Kennedy Jr, said to Today News. "But I just think America and also the world would have been a better place. Now you look back, and you think of what might have been."  A run for high-profile political office in New York was most likely in his future with an eye on one day returning the Kennedy family to the White House. "There's no doubt he was thinking about running for governor," Steel said. "We had that discussion a couple times in the months before he passed away. He also had given sort of fleeting thought for running for that Senate seat in 2000. The White House could have been his destiny." "I think anytime you go into politics, you have to make sure the rest of your life will accommodate that decision," John Kennedy Jr. told NBC's Tom Brokaw in 1995. "There is a whole generation that has now grown up without knowing Kennedy Jr. as a public figure, but his memory lives on. I mean, there was no one that compared in the world to John," Steel added. "Everything that he did with his power, his fame, it was all about some greater good," Rose Marie Terenzio (his former executive assistant at George magazine) said. "He's truly missed for the way that he gracefully took that mantle of responsibility and lived an honorable life full of integrity—and he's missed for what we all want, which is somebody to look up to and to be proud of." 

Brian Steel: Calling out a random woman in public angered John, and you can see clearly John going off on the paparazzo who'd shouted Carolyn's name while they were vacationing in Hyannisport. I can’t believe a minute later, John apologized to that annoying photographer, which shows you what a classy man he was. Not only he apologized for losing his temper, John also offered to pay for his broken camera. Not too many high status people would do that. And you can tell he really felt bad, he first had yelled "I don't give a fuck about your camera!" and then he asks him politely: "Can I pay for it? How much it costs?" Very rare sympathy that is not found in celebrated public figures these days. 

Douglas Caddy: Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, recalling a discussion he and Kennedy had about the Bay of Pigs said, "This episode seared him. He had experienced the extreme power these groups had, these various insidious influences of the CIA and the Pentagon on civilian policy, and I think it raised in his own mind the specter: Can Jack Kennedy, President of the United States, ever be strong enough to really rule these two powerful agencies? I think it had a profound effect... it shook him up." John Stockwell (former CIA officer) discussed his role in Oliver Stone's movie, JFK, and their eventual parting of ways over differences in belief about the mechanics of the assassination plot. Though both agreed that Kennedy was killed by a group of conspirators, Stockwell argued that it was a group of "renegades" whereas Stone, using the Jim Garrison investigation and Fletcher L. Prouty's recollections as starting points, argued that the conspiracy went to the highest levels of the US government. Stockwell faults Stone and Garrison for leaving out the mafia connection to the assassination plot and the Miami nexus of Cuban-exiles. Stockwell focused on how the CIA targeted six countries for destabilization in order to put its favorites in command of their governments. What he described fits to a T of what America under Trump has gone through. The only difference being that it was a former KGB Colonel named Putin and not the CIA that targeted America for destabilization.

Jim DiEugenio: A few days ago, I wrote a brief article for Kennedys and King.com about the upcoming parole hearing for Sirhan Sirhan. I posted it on the RFK section. Since it is dealing with a current topic--the hearing is in March--and since people have queried me about it and emailed me their letters, I decided to check on its popularity. At Google, it is nowhere to be seen.  I thought that was odd. It makes me wonder, are we living in The Truman Show? Is Google really that rigged against people like us?  I mean I know all about Wikipedia. But now this? If so, break Google up. The Corbett Report had the most popular video on youtube in regard to the federal reserve, explaining the origins of fractional reserve banking and money creation so a layman could understand. It was top search and then it just vanished from searches but, it’s still there on the authors page, you just can’t find it even if you type the exact title. There was nothing factually incorrect about the video, it just didn’t make the FED look good. Some book sites have removed peoples audiobooks and refunded them, with no explanation. Clearly the books were fine for publication, or they never would have been available in the first place. Youtube, FB and Twitter have all just removed people's accounts with no warnings, the only general explanation you get is that policy was broken, no laws were broken though. Essentially, where this is going is that big tech is shaping our thoughts and ideas, manipulating public discourse. Society is so reliant on google for results, it has lost the ability to critically think or research. This is the future, you’ll only find what google wants you to find and people will wish they had hard copy of books again. 

Larry Hancock: The Carlos Lechuga / Silvia Duran / Harvey Oswald story deserves far more attention than it has received and is based in deep research by Bill Simpich and Stu Wexler, now continued by David Boylan (who is working the Moore lead as well). I would say it is one of the deepest and perhaps the most seminal leads to explain events in Mexico City (including Emilio Rodriguez, Tony Sforza, the AMOTS and the impersonation of Oswald) than anything else I've seen. More importantly, it provides a very specific path by which Oswald would have been selected as the ideal patsy for Dallas....a path leading back directly to Miami and SAS/WAVE personnel. So in terms of tensions and a deep seated mistrust of JFK you only need to look at how Esterline communicated that to those in the chain of command and follow him down to Miami, to Moore, to Morales, and to the exiles in the maritime operations there. Whatever anyone suspected or knew about JFK's plot was overridden by personal concerns and by fears of survival of the CIA as a whole - whom everyone still saw as a front line unit in the fight against global communism. I imagine that was used as the justification for just moving on. Even after his exit from CIA in November 1961, Allen Dulles was still able to input his agenda in 1963? We know Eisenhower gave green lights to get rid of Lumumba and Trujillo. But the killing of Dag Hammarskjold in September '61 was given no presidential authority, yet Dulles and ZR/RIFLE were involved. The day after the crash, former U.S. President Harry Truman commented that Hammarskjöld "was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said 'when they killed him'." Having read the recent brilliant publication by Greg Poulgrain 'JFK vs Allen Dulles' that documents the 30 years of Dulles overtaking of Indonesia, that required the removal of both Sukarno & JFK, which resulted in the regime change in '65. So there were odds that the ex CIA Director could also set the Dallas plot in motion! Presidential authority got lost in the world of subtle conversations and indirect dialogue in the Director's office at CIA. J.C. King was the first CIA officer to propose killing Castro - and was the senior officer that approved the TILT mission, a political action which could have eviscerated the Kennedy administration had it succeeded. Frankly I think King doesn't get nearly enough attention, a man with extreme views who was operationally in charge of Western Hemisphere for way to long. All I can postulate in Tipping Point is there were conversations which would have involved Dulles, Angleton, Harvey and Helms about their concerns over JFK's drift towards negotiation and neutrality in international relations, which they considered both extremely naive and actually dangerous. Those conversations were repeated within Operations, likely to King and down stream to officers in SAS/WAVE. Source: https://educationforum.ipbhost.com