The JFK Paradox and the Challenge of Rating “Canada’s Presidents”

This article addresses the analytical challenges posed by the administration of John F. Kennedy for scholars who would seek to “rate” American presidents from the perspective of Canadian interests. No one in Canada seems to have much of a desire to try to rank-order the presidents systematically. But if they did, the Kennedy administration would present an enigma for them, because while America’s 35th president was very popular with Canadians, his time in office is nevertheless typically recalled as having been an extremely turbulent period in Canadian–American relations. The turbulence was almost exclusively attributable to differences between the two countries over whether Canada had committed itself to equipping a suite of recently acquired weapons-delivery systems with nuclear warheads, and as a result the events of the early 1960s have routinely (if not completely accurately) been subsumed under the rubric of the “Bomarc crisis.” This article tells the story of that crisis, set against the larger backdrop of the challenges facing scholars wrestling with the question of how American leaders might be systematically assessed and ranked according to their impact upon Canadian national interests.