I firmly believe Kennedy belongs with the company mentioned here, if not for the same reasons as many people. As far as the mystique of JFK, I believe that it has something to do with his combination of personal attractiveness, youth, and the exact right point in time when he entered the national political scene. At the time the Baby Boomers were moving into adolescence or early adulthood, he was the accessible father figure. He was the first TV president (supposedly when he debated Nixon, those who listened to the debates on the radio were more likely to believe Nixon won the debate, while the TV audience had a more favorable impression of Kennedy - Nixon was supposedly visibly uncomfortable in front of the cameras and under the lights, and had refused makeup, all of which combined to give Kennedy a significant advantage in aesthetics). These things combined with the infamous self-absorption of the Boomers which has magnified the attention and significance of anything relating to them, increased the apparent visibility of his administration.

The era in which he was president was the tail end of the material prosperity and relative social harmony of the post-war era. The various civil and social conflicts, the economic issues of the seventies, and the widening schism on foreign policy, national security and social issues since then have blessed Kennedy's era with the benefit of nostalgic hindsight. Kennedy and his VP/successor were the last presidents to enjoy the courtesy of the press in avoiding the issues discussed in this very article. Subsequent to that, they leapt at the opportunity to take down Nixon, whom the by-that-time predominantly liberal, media despised, and the headline-driven (or ratings/pageviews-driven) culture of the media has kept their appetite for similar stories whetted.

Kennedy was right in that sweet spot and had the personal qualities to make the most of it. In some ways, he is a figurehead of the tail end of an era remembered in rose-tinted hindsight (helped not least by, again, that now-obsolete "understanding" referred to above regarding a public figure's private life), and in other ways, he serves as the political equivalent of a first crush/lover or favorite freshman teacher, the one who really turned you on to sociology or Shakespeare or political science. However deficient the reality of either figure, they are generally remembered favorably in comparison to subsequent experiences.

Me, even leaving aside his sexual behavior, the details and depth of which more seem like a disease or mental affliction than mere debauchery, or his drug habits, or his family background, his administrative and political record is truly appalling for barely 2.5 years in office. He managed to commit the US to a significant degree in Vietnam (despite his predecessor calling such a policy the worst tragedy he could think of) and set the stage for the necessity of expanding the involvement with his bungling of the situation, including the assassination of Diem, who, whatever shortcomings are accurately or falsely attributed to him, was probably the only man in the country capable of standing up to Ho Chi Minh. He botched the Bay of Pigs with poor planning and logistics and doomed it with his personal decision to withhold air cover, without which no amphibious assault has ever succeeded. He performed so poorly in his first encounters with Khrushchev that the USSR were emboldened to try putting missiles in Cuba and even after calling it off, still won concessions from the US that made the whole affair a net win for them. Domestically, he presided over the beginning of the Civil Rights movement by doing little or nothing to advance civil rights (belonging as he did to the party of the segregationists), while spouting off on the subject, in a way that did nothing beyond galvanizing the troublemakers on both sides of the issue.

As for those other people you mention, Winston Churchill was a foolhardy troublemaker, political opportunist, misguided romantic, arrogant Anglo-chauvinist, unreliable ally, and military blunderer, who presided over economic disasters, and the dissolution of the Empire, despite his attachment to the same. He advocated genocide on three different continents, and sold out Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union (he not only named the Iron Curtain, he helped to forge it).

Gandhi was largely a fraud whose fame was won by the timidity of his opposition. He advocated a lifestyle that would have wreaked havoc on India had large numbers of people taken him seriously, while living a lifestyle that one contemporary described as requiring the fortunes of princes to keep him in poverty. And in his own creepy fetishistic way, was as bad as some of the French guys referenced above.

FDR was the proto-Kennedy, a self-indulgent, philandering dilettante and intellectual lightweight, who rose to fame through a novel medium whose audience was insufficiently sophisticated to critically assess the content of his speeches or objectively weigh his performance against his promises. FDR presided over the longest period of economic depression and unemployment in modern history, despite unprecedented powers and resources with which to combat the same. He made economic policy on frivolous criteria and in a reactive manner that often had various executive offices or agencies in conflict with one another, all while doing and getting away with just about every dirty trick every president from Nixon onward has been accused of pulling, and on a far larger scale. His enemies list, and abuse of the justice department and revenue services for political retribution makes Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Eric Holder & Obama's IRS and Chris Christie's bridge study all look like models of probity and fair play. In an era when the rest of the world was hostile to indifferent regarding the USSR, and at the height of Stalin's atrocities, FDR extended unprecedented recognition and approval to him. He ignored credible warnings of security leaks that meant Stalin knew more about the atomic bomb, and earlier, than the man who actually deployed it. He exacerbated and prolonged World War Two with his unilateral announcement that nothing less than unconditional surrender would be accepted, cutting the legs out from under Canaris, vonStauffenberg and all others who might have been willing to end the war, the regime and the Holocaust, and giving credence to Goebbles' claims that Germany's only courses of action were victory or extinction. He used his experience as a naval official to political effect, while starving the navy and cutting it to the bone, and serving as commander in chief of a navy that was caught completely off guard in 1941, allowing both coasts to be terrorized by submarines. When American businessmen were volunteering their experience, skills and work for a dollar a year to serve the war effort, he was creating offices and agencies to keep his wife busy and allow her to hire her entertainer friends as consultants at five figure salaries. His foreign officers confidentially reported that they were being ordered to push belligerent and hostile stances against Germany on the various European nations, at a time when the American public was bitterly opposed to any war, and there was not yet any knowledge of the moral shortcomings of Hitler's regime that might have vindicated such a course of action. The most obstreperous, constitutionally-contemptuous presidents to follow Roosevelt collectively fail to match his efforts to intimidate the Supreme Court. I could literally go on for days about FDR's shortcomings and personal inadequacies.

As for Nelson Mandela, there are his ties to Soviet-backed groups, and terrorist/mafia-esque tactics against his own people, not to mention letting other people do the heavy lifting while he sat out the struggle in jail in a truly Gandhi/Kennedy/FDR/Churchill-like triumph of image over accomplishment.

So yeah. Kennedy really is a statesmen of comparable stature to those frauds.