John F. Kennedy

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• Born: 29 May 1917
• Birthplace: Brookline, Massachusetts
• Died: 22 November 1963 (assassination by gunshot)
• Best Known As: President of the United States, 1961-63

John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination was one of the most shocking public events of the 20th century. Kennedy served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, commanding the patrol boat PT-109 and leading his crew to rescue after the boat was sunk by the Japanese in the Solomon Islands. A Democrat, "JFK" was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts' 11th district in 1946. In 1952 he moved up to the U.S. Senate, defeating Henry Cabot Lodge. He married Jacqueline Bouvier on 12 September 1953; they had two children, Caroline (b. 1957) and John Jr. (b. 1960). (A third child, Patrick, was born on 7 August 1963 and died two days later.) JFK was elected to replace President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 (narrowly defeating Eisenhower's vice-president, Richard Nixon); he swept into office with a reputation for youthful charm, impatience, wit and vigor. Kennedy's term was sometimes called the New Frontier, a phrase he coined in his acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic convention. Kennedy was shot to death by sniper Lee Harvey Oswald during an open-car motorcade in Dallas, Texas on 22 November 1963; two days later, Harvey was shot and killed by another man, Jack Ruby. Kennedy was succeeded by Lyndon Johnson.

Kennedy was sometimes called by his nickname, Jack... U.S. senators Ted Kennedy and the late Robert F. Kennedy are Kennedy's younger brothers... His son John Kennedy Jr. died in a 1999 private plane crash... His older brother Joe Kennedy Jr. and his sister Kathleen were also killed in plane crashes during the 1940s... His father Joseph Kennedy was a controversial businessman and former ambassador to Great Britain... Kennedy's maternal grandfather, John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, was mayor of Boston...Kennedy suffered from back trouble for most of his adult life; the stiff-backed rocking chair he sometimes used in the Oval Office became a personal symbol... While recovering from two serious back operations he wrote Profiles in Courage, which won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography... He also suffered from the glandular disorder Addison's Disease... Richard Nixon's running mate in 1960 was Henry Cabot Lodge, whom Kennedy defeated for senator in 1952... Kennedy attended the private school Choate and graduated from Harvard College in 1940... Kennedy was America's first Catholic president.

(b. Brookline, Massachusetts, 29 May 1917, d. Dallas, Texas, 22 Nov. 1963) US; member of the US Congress 1947 – 60, President of the United States 1961 – 3 John F. Kennedy was the son of Joseph Kennedy, the first chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission and, later, an ambassador to London. He was educated at the Choate School, the London School of Economics, and Harvard. His undergraduate dissertation at Harvard, a study of British appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s, was published as a book entitled Why England Slept in 1944. In August 1943 the loss of the his ship, PT 109, earned him a decoration for bravery and a reputation as a war hero.

He entered the House of Representatives from the strongly Irish American 11th Congressional District in 1947 and identified himself with traditional Democratic issues such as trade union matters and aid to cities but also spoke on defence and foreign policy matters. In 1952 he defeated Henry Cabot Lodge for a seat in the US Senate and a year later he married Jacqueline Bouvier. Because of a major spinal operation he was absent when the Senate censured Senator Joseph McCarthy in December 1954. In 1956 he failed to secure the nomination for Vice-President but, by trying, ensured his re-election to the Senate in 1958. In July 1960 after a hard fought primary election campaign to nullify prejudice against his Catholicism, he took the Democratic nomination and on 8 November 1960 was elected President.

Kennedy's presidency was marked by a succession of economic and security crises. Black America demanded desegregation in its search for education, prosperity, and equality of status. During the 1960 campaign Kennedy had cultivated black leaders, but after the election seemed reluctant to support black demands. He appointed a black, Robert Weaver, to head the Housing and Home Finance Agency and, using Executive Orders, he created the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity which sought to end discrimination in government and, very importantly, covert discrimination among government contractors. At the Justice Department Kennedy's brother, Attorney-General Robert Kennedy, pressed desegregation at every legal opportunity, sometimes with little help from the FBI. In the autumn of 1962 there was a major crisis involving federal marshals and a southern mob at the University of Mississippi. By early 1963 Robert Kennedy was progressively strengthening a draft bill, a weakened version of which became law after Kennedy's death.

From his inauguration Kennedy pressed Congress to adopt measures to create jobs, alleviate family poverty, assist poor areas, and improve job training opportunities. By late 1962 Congress had appropriated $1.6 billion in a variety of aid programmes and the Housing Act was helping create over 400,000 construction jobs. The President used executive authority to speed federal agency procurements, post office, and highway construction, liberalize federal housing loans, and create a pilot Food Stamp programme. Added to increased defence spending and tax relief for business investment, these steps constituted a moderately successful economic recovery programme which had the effect of sharply increasing the growth rate by 1963. In crucial areas of labour-management relations Kennedy was willing to denounce union "featherbedding" and was unwilling to seek changes in the unpopular *Taft-Hartley Act. In April 1962, however, he showed himself equally ready to use publicity and Anti-Trust legislation against steel companies which increased their prices having had Kennedy's help to moderate union demands. All in all Kennedy proved to be a conservative in words but an active state interventionist in deeds. Blue-collar and black America had much to thank him for.

Abroad the President faced the consequences of a "Communist" Cuba and the threat of similar unwelcome regimes in Latin America. Within days of being in office he had to decide not to cancel an invasion of Cuba by exiles trained and financed in the USA. The subsequent "Bay of Pigs" fiasco in April 1961 scarred the President badly and led him to espouse the Alliance for Progress aimed at economic aid to Latin America. Relations with the USSR were, however, much more important and degenerated after the Vienna Summit with Khrushchev in June 1961. Two months later the building of the Berlin Wall symbolized a distinct hardening of Soviet-American relations. By the spring of 1962 Kennedy had authorized the expansion of US military involvement in South Vietnam, though commenting, "It is their war and they must win it". Most seriously of all, in October 1962, the world seemed on the brink of nuclear war when the USA quarantined Cuba to prevent the arrival of Soviet nuclear missiles. A dangerous impasse was broken only by a secret deal on US missiles in Turkey — a deal which saved Russian face but led eventually to the downfall of Khrushchev. The two powers hastily established a "hot line" between them and in July of 1963 signed a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty which opened the way to a massive sale of wheat to the USSR. Having thus put Soviet-American relations on a safer footing Kennedy was assassinated, ironically, on a visit which was meant to end chronic feuding between factions of Texas Democrats.

President Kennedy and his wife symbolized a new generation in the White House — he was the first President to be born in the twentieth century. As his inaugural showed he was very conscious of speaking for a generation which had done the dying and not the leading in the Second World War. He never lost a veteran's attitude to "civilians" and was suitably sceptical of military leadership and its received wisdom. He was genuinely appreciative of intellectuals certainly when it came to using them to frame policies, improve governance, and civilize public service and public attitudes. If he did not share all his wife's artistic tastes and connections few artists doubted their welcome at the restored, period White House. The myth of Camelot, though useful politically, was rooted in this self-conscious civility and high aspiration. For Kennedy "the business of America was not business".

It is true to say that, domestically, he would not rank as a very successful President though a second term might well have changed that judgement. Abroad he frightened an ageing Soviet leadership but showed real statesmanship during the Cuban crisis. It is very probable that he would have found it difficult to withdraw from Vietnam and thus would have had to endure the same agonies that he bequeathed to his successor.

Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, to a large, wealthy, politically active Irish American family, “Jack” Kennedy graduated from Harvard in 1940 when his financier father, Joseph Kennedy, was U.S. Ambassador to Britain. In the navy (1941–45), John Kennedy commanded a torpedo boat in the Pacific. He was hailed a hero when he helped rescue crew members after a Japanese destroyer sank PT‐109 in 1943.

As a Cold War Democrat from Massachusetts, Kennedy served in the House of Representatives (1947–53) and U.S. Senate (1953–61), calling for increased military spending and the vigorous containment of communism, particularly in the Third World.

In 1960, Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard M. Nixon to become the first Catholic and the youngest man (at forty‐three) to become president. In the campaign, Kennedy had incorrectly charged that the Eisenhower administration allowed a “missile gap” to develop in the Soviet Union's favor. Kennedy's failure during the CIA‐sponsored invasion of the Bay of Pigs by Cuban exiles in April 1961 may have emboldened him to be assertive elsewhere. Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara dramatically expanded the defense budget, increasing nuclear missiles (from 63 to 424 ICMBs, 1961–63) and conventional forces (including the elite counterinsurgency Special Forces) under the concept of “flexible response.” Kennedy also instituted covert operations to depose Cuba's Fidel Castro, and mobilized military reservists in the Berlin Crisis of 1961. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, Kennedy directly challenged Soviet deployment of medium‐range missiles in Cuba, even risking nuclear war before the Soviets backed down. Afterwards, Kennedy obtained a Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963), but continued the arms buildup. NATO allies, meanwhile, began to complain that the United States too seldom consulted them.

To combat suspected communism in the Third World, Kennedy developed the Peace Corps and the Food for Peace program, but he also used military force. Responding to Communist guerrilla warfare in Southeast Asia, Kennedy accepted neutralization of Laos, but he committed American military assistance to South Vietnam, increasing the number of U.S. military “advisers” attached to the South Vietnamese Army from 685 to 16,732. By the end of 1963, 120 Americans had died in combat there. The administration later tacitly authorized the Vietnamese generals' coup against the unpopular Ngo Dinh Diem, although not his murder on 1 November 1963. Kennedy himself was assassinated three weeks later in Dallas, Texas.

The debate over what Kennedy would have done had he lived continues. He offered some statements favorable to hawks, others to doves. His actions, however, dramatically increased the U.S. military role in Vietnam and emphasized it as the test case against Communist wars of “national liberation.” At the end, ambiguity marked his presidency, as mystery shrouded his assassination.

[See also Berlin Crises; Central Intelligence Agency; Vietnam War: Causes.]

Bibliography

• Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, 1965.
• Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Kennedy's Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963, 1989.
• Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963, 1991.
• James N. Giglio, The Presidency of John F. Kennedy, 1991.
• Diane B. Kunz, ed., The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade: American Foreign Relations During the 1960s, 1994

Kennedy, John Fitzgerald (1917-63) 35th president of the United States (1961-63), born in Brookline, Massachusetts. During World War II he served with the navy in the Pacific and was hailed as a hero when he helped rescue crew members after a Japanese destroyer sunk their PT boat (1943). In Kennedy's three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (first elected 1946), his record was undistinguished. But his political career took off with his election to the Senate in 1952, in which the young Irish-Catholic candidate defeated the Yankee incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge, scion of an old New England family. His 1956 book Profiles in Courage (reputedly ghostwritten) won a Pulitzer Prize. In 1958 he was reelected by a lopsided margin and, in preparation for a run for the presidency in 1960, began speaking out on issues related to national defense and an alleged missile gap with the Soviet Union. With Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate, Kennedy won a razor-thin popular plurality of about 100, 000, although he had a comfortable margin in the electoral college (303 to 219), over his opponent Richard M. Nixon, becoming the first Roman Catholic president of the United States. The staff and cabinet he brought to Washington were known for their youth and vigor, particularly in contrast with the departing administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. His main concern was the Soviet Union and its increasing sphere of influence, which led to his involvement in South Vietnam and Cuba. He approved the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion (1961). Tensions with the Soviets came to a head with the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), when Nikita Khrushchev backed down and removed Soviet missiles from the island, marking a key turning point in the Cold War. In 1963 the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed by the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. The situation in Vietnam was heightened when Kennedy sent combat troops, under the guise of “advisers;” their number was doubled by November 1963. One success in his attempts to keep Third World countries out of the Communist bloc was the creation of the Peace Corps, an organization of volunteers who worked at the grass-roots level in remote areas. His Alliance for Progress was less successful in its aim of establishing democratic policies in Latin America. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 while on a routine political trip to Texas to raise money for the upcoming campaign. His murder made him a martyr, and his image and that of his administration were romanticized by his friends and family. Despite later revelations that his personal life was less than impeccable, Kennedy remains a figure of reverence in the eyes of many Americans.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) served in both houses of Congress before becoming the thirty-fifth president of the United States. His assassination shocked the world.

John F. Kennedy once summed up his time as "very dangerous, untidy." He was the child of two world wars, of the Great Depression, and of the nuclear age. "Life is unfair," he remarked. And so it was to Kennedy, heaping him with glory, burdening him with tragedy. Yet, he never lost his grace, his sense of balance, or his indomitable gaiety.

Kennedy was born in Brookline, Mass., on May 29, 1917. He was the second son of business executive and financier Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. His great-grandfather had emigrated in 1850 from Ireland to Boston, where he worked as a cooper. His paternal grandfather had served in the Massachusetts Legislature and in elective offices in Boston. Kennedy's maternal grandfather, John Francis Fitzgerald, had been a state legislator, mayor of Boston, and U.S. congressman. Kennedy's father served as ambassador to Great Britain (1937-1940), having been chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and of the U.S. Maritime Commission. Thus Kennedy was born into a wealthy family oriented toward politics and public service.

Education and Youth

Kennedy attended the Canterbury parochial school (1930-1931), completing his preparatory education at the Choate School (1931-1935). He enrolled at Princeton University in 1935, but illness soon forced him to withdraw. Upon recovery he went to Harvard University. During his junior year he traveled in Europe, observing the political tensions that were leading to World War II. He was gathering materials for his senior thesis, which, reflecting some of the isolationist views of his father, later became the bestselling book Why England Slept (1940).

After graduating from Harvard cum laude with a bachelor of science degree in 1940, Kennedy enrolled at Stanford University for graduate studies. In April 1941 he tried to enlist in the U.S. Army but was rejected for physical reasons (a back injury received while playing football). Months later, his back strengthened through a regimen of exercises, the Navy accepted him. He became an intelligence officer with the rank of lieutenant junior grade in Washington, D.C. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he requested active duty at sea; this assignment was not granted until late in 1942.

War Hero

Following his training with the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron, Kennedy was shipped to the South Pacific into the war against Japan. In March 1943 he received command of a PT boat. That August, when his boat was sliced in two by a Japanese destroyer, two of his crew were killed, while Kennedy and four others clung to the half of the PT boat that remained afloat. Six other men survived in the nearby water, two wounded. In a 3-hour struggle Kennedy got the wounded crewmen to the floating hulk. When it capsized, he ordered his men to swim to a small island about 3 miles away, while he towed one man to shore in a heroic 5-hour struggle. Several days later, having displayed exceptional qualities of courage, leadership, and endurance, Kennedy succeeded in having his men rescued.

Kennedy did not see further action, for he suffered an attack of malaria and aggravation of his back injury. In December he returned to the United States. After a hospital stay he became a PT instructor in Florida, until he was hospitalized again. He was retired from the service in the rank of full lieutenant in March 1945, having undergone a disk operation. Returning to civilian life, Kennedy did newspaper work for several months, covering the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, the Potsdam Conference, and the British elections of 1945.

House of Representatives

However, Kennedy desired a political career. In 1946 he became a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from the Massachusetts eleventh congressional district. Realizing that, despite his family's background in Democratic politics, he was unknown to the district's electorate, Kennedy built a large personal organization for his campaign. On whirlwind tours he met as many voters as possible, addressing them in a direct, informal style on timely topics. In this campaign, as in all the others, his brothers, sisters, and mother supported him. His brothers, Robert and Ted, acted as his managers, while his sisters and mother held social events.

Kennedy was a driven man. "The Kennedys were all puppets in the hands of the old man," Washington newspaperman Arthur Krock once observed. "I got Jack into politics," his father said, although he admitted that neither he nor his wife could picture their son as a politician. "I told him Joe [the oldest brother, who died a hero in World War II] was dead … and I told him he had to." Kennedy fell heir to the political know-how of his grandfather, the legendary "Honey Fitz," who had charmed and utilized the tough Boston Irish electorate. Meanwhile, Kennedy climbed more stairs and shook more hands and worked harder than the 10 other contenders for the candidacy combined.

Kennedy won the primary, the fall election, and reelection to the House in 1948 and in 1950. He kept his campaign pledges to work for broader social welfare programs, particularly in the area of low-cost public housing. Kennedy was a staunch friend of labor. In 1949 he became a member of the Joint Committee on Labor-Management Relations. He battled unsuccessfully against the Taft-Hartley Bill and later supported bills that sought to modify its restrictive provisions. Although Kennedy supported President Harry Truman's social welfare programs, progressive taxation, and regulation of business, he did not follow administration policies in foreign relations. He opposed the fighting in Korea "or any other place in Asia where we cannot hold our defenses."

In 1951 Kennedy spent 6 weeks traveling in Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, and West Germany. On his return he advised the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that he believed defending Western Europe was strategically important to the United States but that he felt Western Europeans should do more on their own behalf and not rely so strongly on the United States. That autumn he traveled around the world. His visits to the Middle East, India, Pakistan, Indochina, Malaya, and Korea caused him to reverse a previous position and support Point Four aid for the Middle East. He also urged that France get out of Algeria.

The Senate

In April 1952 Kennedy announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, running against the strongly entrenched Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a Republican liberal. Kennedy won by over 70,000 votes. Lodge reeled under the impact: "those damned tea-parties," he said. He had not run against a man, but a family - the Kennedy women having acted as hostesses to at least 70,000 Massachusetts housewives. In 1958 Kennedy was reelected.

On Sept. 12, 1953, Kennedy married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, daughter of a New York City financier, at Newport, R. I. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., noted of Mrs. Kennedy that "under a veil of lovely inconsequence" she possessed "an all-seeing eye and ruthless judgment." Four children were born, of whom two survived infancy: Caroline Bouvier and John Fitzgerald.

Taking his seat in the Senate in January 1953, Kennedy served on the Labor and Public Welfare Committee, the Government Operations Committee, the Select Committee on Labor-Management Relations, the Foreign Relations Committee, and the Joint Economic Committee. He secured passage of several bills to aid the Massachusetts fishing and textile industries and fought to ameliorate New England's economic problems. In 1954 he voted to extend the president's powers under the reciprocal trade program.

A recurrence of his old back injuries forced Kennedy to use crutches during 1954. An operation in October was followed by another in February 1955. He spent his months of illness and recuperation writing biographical profiles of Americans who had exercised moral courage at crisis points in their lives. Profiles in Courage (1956), a best seller, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957.

Kennedy's back operations were not completely successful, and he was never again entirely free from pain. He resumed his senatorial duties in May 1955. During the next years he opposed reform in the electoral college, favored American aid to help India stabilize its economy, and became a strong advocate of civil rights legislation. Social welfare legislation was of primary concern. The Kennedy-Douglas-Ives Bill (1957) required full disclosure and accounting of all employee pension and welfare funds. The Kennedy-Byrd-Payne Bill was a budgeting and accounting bill that placed the financial structure of the government on an annual accrued expenditure basis. Kennedy also sponsored bills for providing Federal financial aid to education and for relaxing United States immigration laws.

Campaign for the Presidency

Kennedy's record in Congress, together with his thoughtful books and articles, had attracted national attention. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1956, when presidential nominee Adlai E. Stevenson left the choice of his running mate open, Kennedy was narrowly defeated by Estes Kefauver. From then on, however, Kennedy was running for the presidency. He began building a personal national organization. Formally announcing his candidacy in January 1960, Kennedy made whirlwind tours and won the Democratic primaries in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Oregon, Maryland, and Nebraska, plus an upset victory over Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia. On July 13, 1960, Kennedy was nominated on the first ballot, with Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate.

"Jack In Walk" shouted the Boston Globe after Kennedy gained the nomination. But it would be no walk to the White House against the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon. Kennedy's candidacy was controversial because he was a Roman Catholic; religious prejudice probably cost him a million votes in Illinois alone. But his "Houston speech" on Sept. 11, 1960, met the religious issue head on. He believed in the absolute separation of church and state, he said, in which no priest could tell a president what to do and in which no Protestant clergyman could tell his parishioners how to vote.

A series of televised debates with Nixon was crucial. Kennedy "clobbered" the Republican leader with his "style." Skeptical and laconic, careless and purposeful, Kennedy displayed wit, love of language, and a sense of the past. On November 9 Kennedy became the youngest man in American history to win the presidency and the only Roman Catholic to do so. The election was one of the closest in the nation's history; his popular margin was only 119,450 votes. On December 19 the electoral college cast 303 votes for Kennedy and 219 for Nixon.

The Presidency

The inauguration on Jan. 20, 1960, of the first president born in the 20th century had a quality of pageant, as the old poet Robert Frost, the old priest Cardinal Richard Cushing, and the old president Dwight Eisenhower watched the torch being passed to a new generation. Then the challenge of Kennedy's inaugural address rang out: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country." The new "First Family" quickly captured the public imagination: Jacqueline, with her cameo beauty and her passion for excellence; 3-year-old Caroline; and newborn John.

Although happy that he could do something about "the problems that bedeviled us," Kennedy was aware that his razor-thin victory had narrowed his options. Congress was unyielding - it had seen presidents come and go, and it distrusted Kennedy's youth and wit and gaiety. Kennedy was never able to "escape the congressional arithmetic." Unlike his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy had no past political favors to draw upon. Therefore, most of his program - tax reform, civil rights, a Medicare system, and the establishment of a department of urban affairs - bogged down in Congress. Ironically, his education bill was defeated largely through the efforts of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

The Cuban invasion burst over the Kennedy administration like a bombshell in April 1961. On April 17 it became known that 1,400 exiled Cubans had invaded Cuba's Las Villas Province and had penetrated 10 miles inland. On April 18 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev sent a note to Kennedy stating that his government was prepared to come to the aid of the Cuban government to help it resist armed attack. By April 20 the invasion was clearly a failure. Who was responsible for American involvement in this shabby operation? Kennedy shouldered the responsibility for the fiasco, but his biographers have since noted that "Operation Pluto," committing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to train Cuban guerrillas, was a project of Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration. Kennedy, initially overawed by the CIA and the joint chiefs of staff, in the end refused to commit the necessary American troops. He was aware that if the Cuban people did not rise up and back the invaders, the United States could not impose a regime on them. Furthermore, he was apprehensive that if America moved in Cuba the Soviet Union might move in Berlin. The Bay of Pigs fiasco proved Kennedy's ability to face disaster. When it was over, he was "effectively in control."

Kennedy rapidly learned the great limitations on a president's ability to solve problems. He wanted the United States to reexamine its attitude toward the Soviet Union, and he wanted to act upon both nations' mutual "abhorrence of war." His separate meetings with Gen. Charles De Gaulle, the president of France, and Khrushchev in the spring of 1961 were social triumphs but political defeats. Kennedy failed to dissuade De Gaulle from pulling France out of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, and he could reach no agreement with the Soviet chief on the status of Berlin. He did voice to Khrushchev, however, America's determination to stay in Berlin. Each threatened to meet force with force. In August the Berlin crisis exploded. The East Germans tightened border curbs and erected a wall of concrete blocks along most of the 25-mile border between East Berlin and West Berlin. Kennedy unequivocally stated that the United States would not abandon West Berlin.

Kennedy's civil rights bills bogged down in Congress. Civil rights was the President's foremost domestic concern. When the showdown came, "the Kennedys," as the President and his brother Robert, the attorney general, shamed southern governors. They sent 600 Federal marshals to Alabama in 1961 to protect the "Freedom Riders." In 1962 they forced Mississippi's governor, Ross Barnett, to send his troopers back to the state university, while dispatching hundreds of Federal marshals into an all-night battle to protect the right of one African American student to attend the university.

Kennedy appealed by television to the conscience of the nation. "We are confronted with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and it is as clear as the American Constitution." He called upon the American people to exhibit a sense of fairness. The political costs were high because Kennedy already had the African American vote.

Nuclear Confrontation

On Oct. 22, 1962, Kennedy addressed the nation on a grave matter. The Soviet Union, he said, had deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba, and the United States had declared a quarantine on all shipments of offensive military equipment into Cuba. The United States would not allow Cuba to become a Soviet missile base, and it would regard any missile launched from Cuba "as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response."

This direct confrontation was brinkmanship. For a week the details had been "the best kept secret in government history." Through 7 days of gripping tension and soul-searching, the administration had maintained a facade of normal social and political activities. Meanwhile, American military units throughout the world were alerted.

As messages went back and forth between Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Pope John, who volunteered his aid as peacemaker, Soviet ships were moving toward Kennedy's invisible line in the Atlantic. Would they stop? They slowed, then stopped, and on October 28 the news came that the Soviet Union would remove its missiles from Cuba. For a time Kennedy seemed at least 10 feet tall, but his own wry comment on the crisis was, "Nobody wants to go through what we went through in Cuba very often."

Out of this confrontation came the greatest single triumph of the Kennedy administration: the nuclear testban treaty with the Soviet Union. Kennedy called this treaty "the first step down the path of peace." Before negotiations for the treaty were completed, Khrushchev had defiantly reopened the nuclear race. Kennedy, however, held firm, and the treaty was signed on July 25, 1963. "Yesterday a shaft of light cut into the darkness," Kennedy said. A "hot line" for emergency messages was also established between Washington, D.C., and Moscow.

Vietnam Commitments

According to Kennedy's biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Vietnam "was his great failure." Certainly it consumed more of his time than any other problem. Kennedy had inherited the commitment, but he stepped up the conflict, despite his assertion that "full-scale war in Vietnam … was unthinkable." Kennedy had opposed the French military operations in Algeria and was aware of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's and Eisenhower's warnings against a land war in Asia. Yet he tripled American forces in Vietnam at a time when South Vietnamese troops greatly outnumbered the enemy. Why? Senator William Fulbright has suggested that Kennedy put troops in Vietnam to prove to Khrushchev that "he couldn't be intimidated."

Kennedy was well aware of the dangers of the presidency. One of his favorite poems was "I Have a Rendezvous with Death," and he had always been haunted by the poignancy of those who die young. "Who can tell who will be president a year from now?" he would ask. On the fatal day of his arrival in Dallas, Tex., he remarked that if anyone wanted to kill a president he needed only a high building and a rifle with a telescopic lens.

That day - Nov. 22, 1963 - Kennedy was assassinated by a lone sharpshooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, who fired on Kennedy's motorcade with a rifle equipped with a telescopic lens. Within hours, that "live, electric" figure was dead. Gone was all that brilliance and wit and purpose. In Indonesia, flags were lowered to half-mast; in New Delhi, India, crowds wept in the streets; in Washington, D.C., "grief was an agony."

His Legacy

Kennedy was the first president to face a nuclear confrontation; the first to literally reach for the moon, through the nation's space programs; the first in half a century to call a White House conference on conservation; the first to give the arts a prominent place in American national councils; the first since Theodore Roosevelt with whom youth could identify. He made the nation see itself with new eyes.

Yet his most cherished dreams foundered without the influence of his inspiration and guiding hand. The Alliance for Progress, his program to revitalize life throughout the poor nations of South America, disintegrated - Latin American leaders were simply not committed to democratic change. The youthful idealism of the Peace Corps eroded under the impact of disillusionment and reality. The romantic "Green Berets" degenerated into a cloak-and-dagger outfit.

What Kennedy accomplished was not as important as what he symbolized. He enjoyed unique appeal for the emerging Third World. As the African magazine Transition expressed it, murdered with Kennedy was "the first real chance for an intelligent and new leadership in the world. His death leaves us unprepared and in darkness."

Further Reading

Perhaps the most objective, scholarly biographical account of Kennedy is Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy (1965), combining the insights of the "insider" with the detachment of the historian. Intimate but more romanticized is Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (1965), winner of a Pulitzer Prize. Useful books by intimates of Kennedy include Evelyn Lincoln, My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy (1965), and Pierre Salinger, With Kennedy (1966). The most critical, but well-annotated, study is Victor Lasky, J. F. K.: The Man and the Myth (1963). Valuable insights are in the anthology by Donald S. Harrington, As We Remember Him (1965), and in Tom Wicker, JFK and LBI: The Influence of Personality upon Politics (1968). Kennedy's election to the presidency is detailed in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of American Presidential Elections (4 vols., 1971). Robert Kennedy, Thirteen Days (1969), illumines the tensions of the Cuban missile crisis. William Manchester, The Death of a President (1967), is the definitive work on the assassination. See also Hugh Sidey, John F. Kennedy, President (1963), and Alex Goldman, John Fitzgerald Kennedy: The World Remembers (1968).

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John F. Kennedy, 1961. (credit: AP)

(born May 29, 1917, Brookline, Mass., U.S. — died Nov. 22, 1963, Dallas, Texas) 35th president of the U.S. (1961 – 63). The son of Joseph P. Kennedy, he graduated from Harvard University in 1940 and joined the navy the following year. He commanded a patrol torpedo (PT) boat in World War II and was gravely injured in an attack by a Japanese destroyer; he was later decorated for heroism. Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1946 and the U.S. Senate in 1952, he supported social-welfare legislation and became increasingly committed to civil rights; in foreign affairs, he supported the Cold War policies of the Truman administration. In 1960 he won the Democratic nomination for president, beating out Lyndon B. Johnson, who became his running mate. In his acceptance speech Kennedy declared, "We stand on the edge of a New Frontier"; thereafter the phrase "New Frontier" was associated with his programs. After a vigorous campaign managed by his brother Robert F. Kennedy and aided financially by his father, he narrowly defeated the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon. He was the youngest person and the first Roman Catholic elected president. In his inaugural address he called on Americans to "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." His legislative program, including massive income-tax cuts and a sweeping civil-rights measure, received little support in the Congress, though he did win approval of the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress. In 1961 he committed the U.S. to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. In foreign affairs he approved a plan drawn up during the Eisenhower administration to land an invasion force of Cuban exiles on their homeland, but the Bay of Pigs invasion (1961) was a fiasco. Determined to combat the spread of communism in Asia, he sent military advisers and other assistance to South Vietnam. During the Cuban missile crisis (1962) he imposed a naval blockade on Cuba and demanded that the Soviet Union remove its nuclear missiles from the island. In 1963 he successfully concluded the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty with Britain and the Soviet Union. In November 1963, while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, he was assassinated by a sniper, allegedly Lee Harvey Oswald. The killing is considered the most notorious political murder of the 20th century. Kennedy's youth, energy, and charming family brought him world adulation and sparked the idealism of a generation, for whom the Kennedy White House became known as "Camelot." Revelations about his powerful family and his personal life, especially concerning his extramarital affairs, tainted his image in later years. See also Jackie Kennedy Onassis.

For more information on John Fitzgerald Kennedy, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: May 29, 1917, Brookline, Mass.
• Political party: Democrat
• Education: Harvard College, A.B., 1940; Stanford University Business School, 1940
• Military service: U.S. Navy, 1941–45
• Previous government service: U.S. House of Representatives, 1949–53; U.S. Senate, 1953–60
• Elected President, 1960; served, 1961–63
• Died: Nov. 22, 1963, Dallas, Tex.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the youngest person ever elected President and the first Catholic to serve as the nation's chief executive. His Presidency continued the New Deal and Fair Deal domestic programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman and attempted to maintain a position of world leadership for the United States. He died in office before the promise of his Presidency could be fulfilled.

Kennedy was the second son of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and Joseph P. Kennedy. His father was a financier and former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission who was active in the Democratic party. John Kennedy was voted “most likely to succeed” at the Choate School. After serving for a time as secretary to his father, who in 1937 had been appointed ambassador to Great Britain by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennedy graduated from Harvard in 1940. His senior thesis, “Appeasement at Munich,” a study of the British appeasement of Adolf Hitler, was awarded high honors. It was published that same year under the title Why England Slept, becoming a bestseller.

Kennedy enlisted in the navy in October 1941, and on August 2, 1943, his PT Boat 109 was sunk by a Japanese destroyer. Two of the crew died, but Kennedy helped to rescue his 10 surviving crew members and was awarded the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps medal and a Purple Heart for injury. He returned home a hero, though a naval inquiry into the sinking indicated poor seamanship and command on Kennedy's part.

In 1945 Kennedy was discharged from the navy, worked briefly as a reporter for the Hearst newspapers, and the following year won election to the House of Representatives from a district in Boston. He was reelected twice and in 1952 defeated incumbent Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., for a Senate seat. Kennedy's accomplishments in Congress were minimal. He had one of the worst attendance records, which may have been due to his having Addison's disease, which required daily implantation of a steroid compound in his thighs.

Kennedy had a spinal operation in 1954, and while recuperating he wrote Profiles in Courage, a series of biographies of American politicians who had gone against public opinion to do what they believed was right. It was published in 1955 and won a Pulitzer Prize for biography the following year. In 1956 Kennedy campaigned for the Vice Presidential slot on the Democratic ticket, but the convention nominated Estes Kefauver instead. Later, Kennedy would say that losing that contest was the best thing that could have happened to him, because the Democratic ticket went down to a crushing defeat. Kennedy was reelected to the Senate by a large margin and began organizing a campaign for the next Presidential nomination.

In 1960 Kennedy defeated Hubert Humphrey and several others in the Democratic field in seven primary contests: in West Virginia his victory demonstrated that an overwhelmingly Protestant state would vote for a Catholic candidate. He was nominated by the Democratic convention on the first ballot, defeating Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson handily. He then offered Johnson the second spot on the ticket, and to the surprise of many of Kennedy's advisers, Johnson accepted. Kennedy's July 15 acceptance speech offered Americans a “New Frontier” and promised “to get America moving again.”

In the November election Kennedy and Johnson won a majority of electoral college votes against Republican nominee Richard M. Nixon and his running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, but they received less than half the popular vote. At age 43, Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected President (though Theodore Roosevelt had been a year younger when he succeeded to the office).

“Ask not what your country can do for you,” Kennedy said in his inaugural address, “ask what you can do for your country.” He challenged youthful idealists to join the Peace Corps, which he created by executive order a few weeks later, to help with the development of other nations. He got Congress to create an Alliance of Progress in Latin America to provide foreign aid in the Western Hemisphere. He created an arms control agency to pursue arms limitations talks with the Soviet Union. He challenged the nation to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, a feat accomplished in 1969, right on schedule.

Kennedy's New Frontier legislative program was designed to get the U.S. economy moving again after the recession and slow growth of the years under Dwight Eisenhower. It emphasized an investment tax credit and other tax breaks for business. His proposed social programs were extensions of the New Deal: federal aid to education, medical care for the elderly, urban mass transit, a new Department of Urban Affairs, and regional development for Appalachia. Much of this legislation was stalled in Congress by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats, though Congress did pass an increase in the minimum wage, higher Social Security benefits, and a public housing bill. It also passed a trade expansion act that significantly increased U.S. exports and opened up foreign markets.

Kennedy's refusal to provide for aid to parochial (church-run) schools in his federal aid to education bill doomed its chances. In 1962 Kennedy sent federal troops to Mississippi to ensure that James Meredith, an African-American student, could enroll at the University of Mississippi and attend classes without harassment. In 1963 he used federal troops in Alabama to enforce federal court desegregation orders. But Kennedy delayed introducing civil rights legislation until late spring 1963. On August 28, 1963, a March on Washington for Peace and Justice, which attracted more than 200,000 people, convinced Kennedy to push Congress harder for comprehensive civil rights laws. In a televised speech Kennedy identified with the marchers, saying that the grandchildren of the slaves freed by Lincoln “are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice … and this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free”.

Kennedy's foreign policy emphasized militant anticommunism. In his inaugural address he laid down a gauntlet to communists: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

On April 17, 1961, an operation sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) against Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro began: 1,500 Cuban exiles landed in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, hoping to spark an uprising. They were surrounded and defeated by the Cuban army. At the last minute Kennedy refused to provide them with air cover for their operation in order to avoid overt U.S. involvement. Kennedy accepted full responsibility for the fiasco, however, noting that “victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” The 1,100 prisoners held by Castro were ransomed by the United States for $53 million in food and medical supplies.

After East Germany constructed the Berlin Wall to seal off the communist side of the city from the West in August 1961, Kennedy traveled to Berlin to show solidarity with its citizens. He proclaimed in German, “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I am a Berliner). In October 1962 Kennedy found out that the Soviet Union had shipped offensive missiles and bombers to Cuba; after quarantining the island with U.S. naval forces, he insisted that the Soviets remove their offensive forces, and after a tense standoff they did so. In August 1963 Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, outer space, and the oceans. Only underground testing, which presented no risk of radioactive fallout, would be permitted.

Kennedy ordered U.S. military advisers and trainers to South Vietnam, 18,000 in all, to prop up a pro-American government against attempts by communist guerrillas to undermine it. But he also decided to allow South Vietnamese military units to overthrow President Ngo Dinh Diem and install a new military leader. Although Kennedy hoped the new regime would improve the situation, the November 1, 1963, coup began a prolonged period of instability in South Vietnam that all but ensured that U.S. troops would be needed for the war.

On November 22, 1963, while visiting Dallas, Texas, to help unify the feuding state Democrats, John Kennedy was shot and killed by two bullets fired from the Book Depository building while riding in a motorcade through the center of town. Texas governor John Connally was wounded. Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspected assassin, was taken into custody by Dallas police, but two days later he was killed by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby while being transferred from his cell to an office for questioning. A national commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that Oswald, acting alone, had shot the President in the rear of the head with a rifle and that Oswald had been mentally ill.

The conclusions of the Warren Commission remain controversial. The House Select Committee on Assassinations argued in 1979 that there were at least three shots fired rather than two. Others believe that Kennedy was killed by a bullet, fired from a nearby grassy knoll, that entered the front of his head; that theory would point to a conspiracy rather than a lone assassin. But the House panel's final conclusion was that Oswald had fired all three shots, two of which hit Kennedy and one missed. Nevertheless, conspiracy theories continue to capture the public imagination, and the answer to the question “Who killed Kennedy?” remains unclear to many Americans.

The Kennedy era was brief. It began the transition from an era of confrontation to an era of negotiation in the cold war. Kennedy was the first President born in the 20th century: his youth, vigor, and style under pressure created a “Camelot on the Potomac” for a generation of Americans who came of age during World War II and the first years of the cold war.

See also Assassinations, Presidential; Cuban Missile Crisis; Debates, Presidential; Health, Presidential; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Kennedy, Jacqueline; Monroe Doctrine; New Frontier; Nixon, Richard M.; Primaries, Presidential

Sources

• Benjamin Bradley, Conversations with Kennedy (New York: Norton, 1975).
• Herbert Parmet, J.F.K.: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial, 1983).
• Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965)

(1917-1963), thirty-fifth president of the United States. Kennedy was born into an Irish-American family with aspirations resembling those of the British gentry. Overcoming limitations of health and doubts about his personal ambitions, he achieved the presidency by battling simultaneously on several fronts. Kennedy coasted to the inevitable first-ballot nomination at the Democratic party's Los Angeles convention in July 1960 and then pulled off what proved to be an essential political coup by selecting Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas as his running mate. Kennedy's electoral college margin of 303-219 was won with little more than a 100,000-vote plurality out of nearly 69 million cast. At the age of forty-three, he became the youngest man to reach the White House via the electoral college. Most significant was his ability to demonstrate that a Roman Catholic could win.

John F. Kennedy left two different legacies. The first was best communicated through his lofty, inspiring rhetoric, his youth and personal elegance, and his glamorous wife. He also appealed to the aspirations of ordinary people through such programs as the Peace Corps. His Alliance for Progress, despite its inability to bring democratic reforms to Latin America, helped further his association with human rights. Much more electrifying was his promise to send an American to the moon by the end of the decade. Kennedy's delicate carrot-and-stick maneuvering with the Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev overcame a crisis over the future of the divided city of Berlin and the potential of a nuclear holocaust during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, enabling him to conclude an agreement with the Soviet Union to ban nuclear tests in the atmosphere. His sudden martyrdom on November 22, 1963, by suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald quickly became the inspiration for President Johnson's Great Society program of social reforms, especially major civil rights legislation.

The second Kennedy legacy, more arguable and tentative, involved the contention that his objectives were myopic to begin with, and that he encouraged inflated expectations, both at home and abroad. His misguided effort to topple Fidel Castro's Cuban regime during the Bay of Pigs fiasco triggered a chain of events that helped lead to the later showdown over Russian missiles in Cuba. His continuation of the American commitment to the South Vietnamese government of President Ngo Dinh Diem intensified the escalation in Southeast Asia. That policy became virtually irreversible when Kennedy became an accomplice in Diem's subsequent overthrow. Those who had expected a more activist presidency found him too timid about pressuring the still-powerful congressional conservatives. Fear of political retribution inhibited requests for additional civil rights legislation until violent resistance to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, desegregation efforts removed his options.

By then, Kennedy's reputation, together with the opening of a more hopeful dialogue with the Soviets, had made him an international hero. A transitional presidency became better remembered as a model for future White House leadership and for its reaffirmation of American humanitarian values. There had been other assassinations, but only Kennedy's resembled Lincoln's in helping create a new legend. To millions all over the world, John F. Kennedy continued to embody an almost mythical view of the ideal American president.

Bibliography:

Herbert S. Parmet, J. F. K.: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (1983); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (1965).

Author:

Herbert S. Parmet

See also Elections: 1960; Roman Catholic Church. For events during Kennedy's administration, see Bay of Pigs Invasion; Civil Rights Movement; Middle East-U.S. Relations; Peace Corps; Space Program; Vietnam War.

Early Life

While an undergraduate at Harvard (1936–40) he served briefly in London as secretary to his father, who was ambassador there. His Harvard honors thesis on the British failure to judge the threat of Nazi Germany was published as Why England Slept (1940). Enlisting in the navy in Sept., 1941, he became commander of a PT boat in the Pacific in World War II. In action off the Solomon Islands (Aug., 1943), his boat, PT 109, was sunk, and Kennedy was credited with saving the life of at least one of his crew.

Congressional Career

As a Congressman from Massachusetts (1947–53), Jack Kennedy consistently supported the domestic programs of the Truman administration but criticized its China policy. In 1952, despite the Eisenhower landslide, he defeated Henry Cabot Lodge for a seat in the U.S. Senate, where he served on the Labor and Public Welfare and Foreign Relations committees. In 1953, Kennedy married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier (see Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy). While recuperating in 1955 from an operation to repair a spinal problem, one of the many serious and often extremely painful illnesses that plagued him from childhood until his death, he wrote Profiles in Courage (1956). The book dealt with American political leaders who defied public opinion to vote according to their consciences; for this work (later revealed to have been written in part by Theodore Sorensen and others) he received the Pulitzer Prize. Although Kennedy narrowly lost the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1956, his overwhelming reelection as Senator in 1958 helped him toward the goal of presidential candidacy.

Presidency

In 1960 he entered and won seven presidential primaries and captured the Democratic nomination on the first ballot. To balance the ticket, he selected Lyndon B. Johnson as his vice-presidential candidate. In the campaign that followed, Kennedy engaged in a series of televised debates with his Republican opponent, Richard M. Nixon. Defeating Nixon by a narrow popular margin, Kennedy became at 43 the youngest person ever, and the first Catholic, elected President.

Soon after his inaugural, Kennedy set out his domestic program, known as the New Frontier: tax reform, federal aid to education, medical care for the aged under Social Security, enlargement of civil rights through executive action, aid to depressed areas, and an accelerated space program. He was almost immediately, however, caught up in foreign affairs crises. The first (Apr., 1961) was the abortive Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles trained and aided by the Central Intelligence Agency. Although the invasion had been planned under Eisenhower, Kennedy had approved it, and was widely criticized.

In June, 1961, the President met in Vienna with Soviet Premier Khrushchev. Hopes of a thaw in the cold war were dashed by Khrushchev's threat that the USSR would conclude a peace treaty with East Germany and thus cut off Western access to West Berlin. In the period of tension that followed, the United States increased its military strength while the East Germans erected the Berlin Wall.

In Oct., 1962, U.S. reconnaissance planes discovered Soviet missile bases in Cuba. Kennedy immediately ordered a blockade to prevent more weapons from reaching Cuba and demanded the installations' removal. After an interval of extreme tension when the world appeared to be on the brink of nuclear war, the USSR complied with U.S. demands. Kennedy won much praise for his stance in the crisis, but some have criticized him for what they held to be unnecessary “brinkmanship.” In Aug., 1963, tension with the USSR was eased by conclusion of a treaty that prohibited the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.

In Southeast Asia the Kennedy administration perceived a growing Communist threat to the South Vietnamese government; it steadily increased the number of U.S. military advisers in South Vietnam and for the first time placed U.S. troops in combat situations. As disaffection in South Vietnam grew, moreover, the United States involved itself in political maneuvering and finally connived at the overthrow (Oct., 1963) of the corrupt South Vietnamese dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem (see Vietnam War). Within the Western Hemisphere, Kennedy established (1961) the Alliance for Progress, which provided economic assistance to Latin American countries. He also initiated the Peace Corps program, which sent U.S. volunteers to work in developing countries.

Many of Kennedy's domestic reform proposals were either killed or not acted on by Congress. In the area of civil rights and integration the administration assigned federal marshals to protect Freedom Ride demonstrations and used federal troops in Mississippi (1962) and a federalized National Guard in Alabama (1963) to quell disturbances resulting from enforced school desegregation. In June, 1963, Kennedy proposed civil-rights legislation, but this, like his tax reform program, languished until after his death.

Assassination

On Nov. 22, 1963, President Kennedy was shot and killed while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Tex. The Warren Commission, appointed by his successor Lyndon Johnson to investigate the murder, eventually concluded that it was the work of a single assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Kennedy's death shocked the nation. Many felt that he would have gone on to achieve greatness as a President. Subsequent revelations, especially concerning his sexual activity, have somewhat dimmed his luster, but the sense that his administration was a youthful, idealistic “Camelot” remains powerful. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Bibliography

See biographies by V. Lasky (1963), R. Caro (1982), T. Sorenson (1988), G. Perret (2001), and R. Dallek (2003); T. H. White, The Making of the President, 1960 (1961); A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days (1965); H. S. Parmet, JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (1983); R. Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (1993); S. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (1997); E. R. May, The Kennedy Tapes (1997); B. Leaming, Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman (2007).

1917 - 1963

U.S. President, 1961 - 1963.

Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the son of Joseph P. Kennedy, first chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and ambassador to Britain from 1937 to 1940. After a Harvard University education, Kennedy served in the navy during World War II, then served as U.S. congressman (1947 - 1953) and senator (1953 - 1960) from Massachusetts.

As a senator, Kennedy supported Algeria's independence from France. After taking office as president in 1961, Kennedy's policy toward the Middle East shifted from that of previous administrations. He initially supported Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he saw as a progressive leader, favoring nationalism, who might keep the Arab world out of the Soviet Union's orbit. Nasser's conflict with Saudi Arabia over the Yemen Civil War undermined Kennedy's policy, however. At the same time that he was attempting to woo Nasser, Kennedy also strengthened U.S. ties with Israel, and he approved the sale of Hawk antiaircraft missiles to Israel in 1962 - the first advanced U.S. weapons system sold to Israel. Yet he was plagued by Israel's attempts to develop nuclear weapons at its Dimona nuclear facility, and his attempts to press the Israelis on the matter damaged his relationship with Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion.

Kennedy also made some timid diplomatic efforts aimed at resolving the Palestinian refugee problem. He dispatched Joseph E. Johnson to the region in 1961 and 1962 to develop a plan aimed at making progress on the issue, under the aegis of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine. In the end, however, he failed to support Johnson's recommendations after Israel objected. The "informal talks" launched in the spring and summer of 1963 similarly made no progress.

Bibliography

Cohen, Avner. Israel and the Bomb. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Gazit, Mordechai. President Kennedy's Policy toward the ArabStates and Israel: Analysis and Documents. Tel Aviv: Shiloah Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, 1983.

— ZACHARY KARABELL
UPDATED BY MICHAEL R. FISCHBACH

A Democratic party political leader of the twentieth century; he was president from 1961 to 1963. His election began a period of great optimism in the United States. In his inaugural address, he challenged the nation, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Kennedy brought the United States out of the Cuban missile crisis and negotiated the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 with Britain and the Soviet Union. But he was also responsible for the disastrous attempt to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy's domestic policies were called the New Frontier; he strongly supported space exploration and the civil rights movement. His presidency ended with his assassination on November 22, 1963, apparently by Lee Harvey Oswald, who allegedly shot Kennedy as the president rode in an open car through Dallas. Kennedy's death was mourned throughout the world.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the thirty-fifth president of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. Though his administration had few legislative accomplishments, Kennedy energized the United States by projecting idealism, youth, and vigor.

Kennedy was born May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was a self-made millionaire and the son of a Boston politician. His mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, was the daughter of John F. ("Honey Fitz") Fitzgerald, who served as a Representative and a mayor of Boston. Kennedy, one of nine children, graduated from Harvard University in 1940. His senior thesis, "Why England Slept," which dealt with the reasons Great Britain had been unprepared for World War II, was published in 1940 to great acclaim. His father thought that Kennedy would be a writer or teacher, and that Kennedy's older brother, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., would go into politics. World War II changed those plans.

Kennedy joined the Navy in 1941 and commanded a PT boat in the Pacific. In 1943 the boat was attacked and destroyed, and Kennedy emerged a hero owing to his valiant efforts to save his crew. Joseph was killed in action in 1944. Kennedy's father then transferred his political goals to Kennedy.

In 1946 Kennedy was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the solidly Democratic Eleventh District of Massachusetts. He was reelected in 1948 and 1950.

In 1952 he was elected to the Senate, defeating the incumbent, Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Kennedy kept a low profile at first, working on legislation that benefited Massachusetts. Back problems and other physical maladies bedeviled Kennedy during this period. He underwent two operations on his back to alleviate chronic pain. During his convalescence he wrote Profiles in Courage (1956), a series of essays on courageous stands taken by U.S. senators throughout U.S. history. It won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography.

In 1956 Kennedy sought the Democratic vice presidential nomination. He made the presidential nominating speech for Adlai Stevenson, of Illinois, who was nominated for a second time to run against Dwight D. Eisenhower. Despite a vigorous effort, Kennedy lost the vice presidential nomination to Senator Estes Kefauver, of Tennessee.

In 1957 Kennedy was appointed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he became a critic of the Eisenhower administration's foreign policy and a champion for increased aid to underdeveloped countries. He also served on the committee that investigated corruption and racketeering in labor unions and the head of the Teamsters Union, James R. Hoffa.

In 1960 Kennedy won the Democratic presidential nomination. He selected Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, of Texas, as his running mate. After a vigorous campaign that included television debates with Republican Richard M. Nixon, Kennedy won the election by fewer than 120,000 popular votes. He was the youngest person ever elected president, and the first Roman Catholic. His impressive inaugural speech contained the popular phrase "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country."

Once in office Kennedy drafted a series of ambitious measures that were collectively entitled the New Frontier. These policies included expanding the space program, instituting civil rights legislation, aiding education, improving the tax system, and providing medical care for older citizens through the Social Security program. Most of the New Frontier programs failed to make it through a Congress dominated by southern Democratic leadership, but many were enacted by President Johnson following Kennedy's assassination.

The Kennedy administration was enmeshed in a series of foreign crises almost immediately. In April 1961 Kennedy was severely criticized for approving an ill-fated invasion of the Bay of Pigs, in Cuba. This clandestine operation, conceived during the Eisenhower administration, was conducted by anti-Communist Cuban exiles trained in the United States and was directed by the Central Intelligence Agency. The invasion achieved public notoriety when it failed and created international tension.

In June 1961 Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, of the Soviet Union, met in Vienna to discuss ways of improving Soviet-U.S. relations. Instead of proceeding with those discussions, Khrushchev announced an increased alliance with East Germany. Later the Berlin Wall was constructed to prohibit Western influence and to prevent persons from fleeing East Germany. In response, the United States added to its military forces in Germany.

The most serious crisis occurred in October 1962, when it was learned that Soviet missiles were about to be placed in Cuba. Kennedy issued a forceful statement demanding the dismantling of the missile sites and ordered a blockade to prevent the delivery of the missiles to Cuba. The world was poised for nuclear war until Khrushchev backed down and agreed to Kennedy's demands. Kennedy's handling of the crisis led to national acclaim.

U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia began to increase during the Kennedy administration. Kennedy agreed to send U.S. advisers to help the South Vietnamese government fight Communist rebels. In 1963 the United States became involved in overthrowing the corrupt and unscrupulous South Vietnamese government of President Ngo Dinh Diem.

On the domestic front, Kennedy dealt with a newly invigorated civil rights movement that was seeking to integrate the South. In 1961 federal marshals were sent to Montgomery, Alabama, to help restore order after race riots erupted. In 1962 Kennedy sent three thousand federal troops into Oxford, Mississippi, to restore order after whites rioted against the University of Mississippi's admission of James Meredith, its first African American student. In 1963 Kennedy was forced to federalize the Alabama National Guard in order to integrate the University of Alabama. Later that year he federalized the guard again in order to integrate the public schools in three Alabama cities.

Faced with these problems, Kennedy proposed legislation requiring that hotels, motels, and restaurants admit customers regardless of race. He also asked that the U.S. attorney general be given authority to file court suits demanding the desegregation of public schools. Most of these proposals were passed in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C.A. §2000a et seq.).

Kennedy's achievements during his brief term as chief executive included an agreement with the Soviet Union to restrict nuclear testing to underground facilities; the creation of the Alliance for Progress to establish economic programs to aid Latin America; and the creation of the Peace Corps program, which provides U.S. volunteers to work in underdeveloped countries.

On November 22, 1963, Kennedy's term was ended by an assassin's bullets in Dallas, and Johnson was sworn in as president. Lee Harvey Oswald was charged with the murder. Oswald was killed two days later by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, while being moved from the city jail to the county jail. Johnson appointed a commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren to investigate the Kennedy assassination. In its report, issued in September 1964, the commission concluded that Oswald acted alone in murdering Kennedy.

Quotes:

"Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."

"People have not been horrified by war to a sufficient extent... War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today."

"A young man who does not have what it takes to perform military service is not likely to have what it takes to make a living."

"It is our task in our time and in our generation to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours."

"Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance."

"Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation."

See more famous quotes by John F. Kennedy