Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders released an ad Monday invoking the legacy of President John F. Kennedy. But in previous remarks, Sanders harshly criticized Kennedy and said the former president nauseated him.
The praise of Kennedy marks a radical departure from Sanders’s previous rhetoric about the president. In a 1987 interview with the University of Vermont student paper, The Gadfly, the socialist candidate remembered Kennedy as the start of his disillusion with mainstream liberalism. “President Kennedy was elected while I was at the University of Chicago, that was 1960. I remember being physically nauseated by his speech and that doesn’t happen very often,” Sanders said.
Sanders told the student paper that he was particularly repulsed by Kennedy’s opposition to Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba. “Kennedy was young and appealing and ostensibly liberal, but I think at that point, seeing through Kennedy, and what liberalism was, was probably a significant step for me to understand that conventional politics or liberalism was not what was relevant,” he said. – READ MORE