Richard Nixon was a better president than John F. Kennedy

Counter-Rebuttals and ConclusionI vigorously restate that Kennedy was a failure in foreign policy. He got the U.S. involved in Vietnam, which was a mess that Nixon got the country out of. The Bay of Pigs invasion was indeed, as my opponent said, a plan set forth by the previous administration. However I dispute the claim that "... [Kennedy's] hands were tied by the previous administration." He refused to offer air support for the Cuban rebels and yet he went through with the plan. Being a foolishly dangerous plan to begin with, it would have been prudent to stop it. Even if my opponent is correct in saying that the president had no choice, it is ridiculous to halfheartedly support the rebels without air support, which would might changed the outcome and avoided the crisis later on. My point here is that Kennedy should have gone all-in, or not at all. Instead, his weakness here and at the Vienna Summit displayed to Kruschev that he was a weak leader and encouraged him to place missiles in Cuba. I made the point about Kennedy's reckless threats nearly causing nuclear war based on this evidence, which my opponent has since requested to see. It is an well-known fact that his public ultimatum on October 22, 1962 for the missiles to be removed was the point that the situation was escalated to the level of a crisis. The missiles could have been removed through private diplomatic channels and the escalation was unnecessary.My opponent found issue with my statement in round 3 about the margin of victory in Nixon's re-election. By making this statement, I was not attempting to support the idea that Nixon was a good president; it was solely intended to be evidence of the idea that Watergate was not as dastardly of a scandal as it is played up to be, as it failed to do anything to turn the election in Nixon's favor and wouldn't have made a difference if it had gone unnoticed. I recognize that election margins do not reflect the merit of a president.Throughout the debate, there has been some disagreement on how presidential greatness can be measured. If my opponent has sought to show that accomplishments are not the greatest measure of this, I believe that he has done a poor job of proving it. If integrity is a notable exclusion from my list of criteria, then I argue that I have clearly shown that Kennedy was by no means a moral role model, even if he appeared to be at the time. My opponent has based his argument on the idea that since, according to him, the two presidents were relatively equal in terms of accomplishments, the distrust in government caused by the Watergate scandal makes Nixon the worse president. I believe that my arguments have clearly shown that the first part of this thesis is incorrect. I concede some noteworthy accomplishments to Kennedy: he did indeed bring about the space race and Project Apollo; he established the fairly successful Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps; he signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; he also made diplomatic ties with Israel official. However, I do not feel that my opponent offered sufficient explanation for why these are significant or equal to the accomplishments of Nixon. He has also neglected to offer rebuttals for my original argument for what Nixon did accomplish; the only rebuttals posted thus far have been counter rebuttals to my own rebuttals. This seems to concede their merit.The second part of my opponent's argument, which is that present day distrust in government was a negative result of Nixon's administration, is questionable. By this, I do not mean that Nixon caused it; I argue that it isn't necessarily that bad. When citizens distrust their government, there is a much higher standard for accountability. Having absolute trust in government is not a good thing; it only allows for more corruption, like that which took place unchecked under Kennedy.I feel that I have shown through my arguments that Nixon was a better president than Kennedy, and I hope that voters feel the same way. I realize that I've neglected to give an in-depth rebuttal to my opponent's questioning of my sources as I'm writing this literally to the buzzer.