January 20, 1961

Even if he'd had access to Twitter, the man who said that would not demean the office with bullying tweets.

It isn't that John Kennedy couldn't be vulgar. He spent four years in the Navy. During WWII. A popular joke among servicemen in those days had a soldier explaining the condition of his jeep by saying, "The fucking fucker's fucked." More tellingly, when he was quoted in the press as saying, "My father told me all businessmen were sons of bitches," he complained bitterly about being misquoted. Not because of the vulgarity -- he said he may have said "bastards" or "pricks" -- but he refused to believe he tarred "all businessmen."

Kennedy was too elegant, too respectful of language, to tweet the way President Trump does. He read extensively and constantly. (His wife recalled he often propped a book or magazine on the sink so he could keep reading as he shaved.) His second book won the Pulitzer Prize.

He was also hardwired to be gracious. Nellie Connelly, wife of Gov. John Connelly, was in the car with him when he was assassinated. She reports that he spent the parade route saying, "thank you" to the crowd as he waved. Even though, she noted, they couldn't possibly hear him.

And, unlike Donald Trump, John Kennedy was confident in his alpha dog status. Our current President graduated from Wharton. According to PennLive, he didn't receive honors. JFK graduated cum laude from Harvard and his senior thesis was published and made the NY Times best seller list as Why England Slept.

Donald Trump didn't go to Vietnam because of "heel spurs." Another rich man's son, John Kennedy, had his father pull strings to get him into the Navy, despite being underweight and having a bad back. He lived to see his heroics in the Pacific immortalized first by The Reader's Digest and then on the big screen.

Original 1963 movie poster

 
Women? JFK's wife wasn't The Next Jackie because she was, well, you know, Jackie. Where Donald Trump is denying he paid porn star Stormy Daniels for sex, Kennedy was linked with actresses Gene Tierney, Angie Dickinson and most famously, Marilyn Monroe.

There's no reason to compare hair or teeth.

When a man knows he is the real deal, he doesn't need to try elevating himself by bestowing childish nicknames on his adversaries.