He certainly was a much better President than Woodrow Wilson and ridiculous to rate him lower than Polk in my view.
As for Kennedy and the Space program, I believe that his "challenge" was a part of his cold warrior mentality, stick it to the Ruskies, coupled with a certain "frat boy" entitlement, a kind of off the cuff poorly considered promise made without input from the people who would actually have to execute the program. He was very much Joe Kennedy's son - Kennedy Sr. informed anyone who asked that his son was no liberal - and Joe Kennedy Sr. was at the end of the day, not a good guy. Beschloss wrote a wonderful book on the subject of the relationship between the Roosevelts and the Kennedys, and it's not flattering to the Kennedys.
John F. Kennedy didn't really consult with engineers when he made this cold warriors challenge to put men on the moon, and I've read and heard that most engineers were at a loss to think of how it might be done.
That they actually did it is a credit to them, the engineers and scientists, and not to Kennedy, but the reality is that the it is true that the US Space program did allow for the development of many critical technologies, small portable computers among many others, and many advances in the area of Material Science. In that sense, I'm glad he issued the challenge, but I think it more luck than insight.
Now we did have a very, very, strong scientific infrastructure at the time, including, in the missile/rocket area, along with captured senior scientists from the Nazi "National Lab" at Peenemunde - all of whom were "liberated" to "help" in the "struggle" with the Soviets - teams of very talented native aerospace engineers. (I have read, that the US intelligence community was thrilled during the Eisenhower administration that Soviets launched Sputnik, since it set an international legal basis for spacecraft to overfly foreign countries.)
So Kennedy's promise was fulfilled because of the infrastructure was there and not as a result of any real input, or understanding of the nature of the task, from him.
For me, any positives from Kennedy, (who by the way watched the March on Washington down the block on the TV set, wondering if it would effect his chances for reelection), including, if he really was responsible for it, the moon shot, are outweighed by the fact that he very nearly stumbled into a nuclear war. I was a child at the time, and I remember thinking I was going to die in the afternoon. The psychological impact of that event led my generation to make some poor decisions that to me, with my particular focus, had serious implications for the future. I consider that we might not have had people dropping dead from heat stroke in Vancouver yesterday if there had been enough sobriety at the top to have prevented the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I believe if he'd lived, Kennedy would rank much lower than he does in these surveys. He was not, really, a serious man, and to the extent that Bill Clinton was inspired by him, it may have been in one Kennedy's worst personality traits, not his best.
Overall Clinton was a much better, much more intelligent, and much more serious man than Kennedy could have ever hoped to have been. He should rate higher than Kennedy, and certainly higher than Reagan. I recently attended (virtually) a brief talk by Clinton on the viability of Democracy at Cornell and I was struck with a deeper respect for him than ever, his inability to manage his zipper for the benefit of the country notwithstanding. I think Obama was a better President than Clinton, but that Clinton was far superior to the likes of Reagan, McKinley, Madison, J.Q. Adams, and Monroe. The claim to the contrary is somewhat absurd.
In any case, they didn't ask for my input for preparing this ranking list. If they had, Buchanan would have been spared the bottom. I'm sure that Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz disagree with it far more than I do overall.
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