John F. Kennedy
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John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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John F. Kennedy, 1961. (credit: AP)
John F. Kennedy, 1961. (credit: AP)
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Oxford Dictionary of Political Biography:
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John Fitzgerald Kennedy
(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.
Oxford Companion to US Military History:
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John F. Kennedy
(1917–1963), thirty‐fifth U.S. president
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
Oxford Dictionary of the US Military:
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John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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.
Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:
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John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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).
Oxford Guide to the US Government:
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John F. Kennedy, 35th President
• 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)
Houghton Mifflin Companion to US History:
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Kennedy, John F.
(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.
Columbia Encyclopedia:
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Kennedy, John F.
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 1917-63, 35th President of the United States (1961-63), b. Brookline, Mass.; son of Joseph P. Kennedy.
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); C. Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero (2011).
Gale Encyclopedia of the Mideast & N. Africa:
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John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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
Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature:
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Works by John F. Kennedy
(1917-1963)
| 1940 | Why England Slept. The twenty-four-year-old son of the U.S. ambassador to England assesses the reasons why Britain failed to rearm during the 1930s and its implications for the United States. |
| 1956 | Profiles in Courage. Kennedy's testimonial on behalf of eight political leaders' tests of conscience earns the Pulitzer Prize as well as attention for the budding politician and future president. Later reports indicates that Kennedy's friend and adviser Theodore Sorensen is the book's actual author. |
Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: History:
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Kennedy, John F.
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.
West's Encyclopedia of American Law:
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Kennedy, John Fitzgerald
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.
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Kennedy
IN BRIEF: n. - A large airport on Long Island east of New York City; 35th President of the United States.
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John F. 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."
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John F. Kennedy
"JFK", "John Kennedy", and "Jack Kennedy" redirect here. For other uses, see JFK (disambiguation), John Kennedy (disambiguation), and Jack Kennedy (disambiguation).
| John F. Kennedy | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| 35th President of the United States | |
| In office January 20, 1961 – November 22, 1963 |
|
| Vice President | Lyndon B. Johnson |
| Preceded by | Dwight D. Eisenhower |
| Succeeded by | Lyndon B. Johnson |
| United States Senator from Massachusetts |
|
| In office January 3, 1953 – December 22, 1960 |
|
| Preceded by | Henry Cabot Lodge |
| Succeeded by | Benjamin Smith |
| Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts's 11th district |
|
| In office January 3, 1947 – January 3, 1953 |
|
| Preceded by | James Curler |
| Succeeded by | Tip O'Neill |
| Personal details | |
| Born | John Fitzgerald Kennedy May 29, 1917 Brookline, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | November 22, 1963 (aged 46) Dallas, Texas, U.S. |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse(s) | Jacqueline Bouvier |
| Children |
|
| Alma mater | Harvard College |
| Profession | Politician |
| Religion | Roman Catholicism |
| Signature |  |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance | United States |
| Service/branch | United States Navy |
| Years of service | 1941–1945 |
| Rank |  Lieutenant |
| Unit | Motor Torpedo Boat PT-109 |
| Battles/wars |
|
| Awards | |
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy 
pronunciation (help·info) (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963.
After military service as commander of the Motor Torpedo Boats PT-109 and PT-59 during World War II in the South Pacific, Kennedy represented Massachusetts's 11th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 as a Democrat. Thereafter, he served in the U.S. Senate from 1953 until 1960. Kennedy defeated then Vice President and Republican candidate Richard Nixon in the 1960 U.S. presidential election. He was the youngest elected to the office, at the age of 43,[2][a] the second-youngest President (after Theodore Roosevelt), and the first person born in the 20th century to serve as president.[3] Kennedy is the only Catholic president, and is the only president to have won a Pulitzer Prize.[4] Events during his presidency included the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall, the Space Race, the African American Civil Rights Movement, and early stages of the Vietnam War.
Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. Lee Harvey Oswald was charged with the crime, but was shot and killed two days later by Jack Ruby before a trial could take place. The FBI, the Warren Commission, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) officially concluded that Oswald was the lone assassin, with the HSCA allowing for the possibility of conspiracy based on disputed acoustic evidence.[5] Today, Kennedy continues to rank highly in public opinion ratings of U.S. presidents.[6]
Early life and education
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts on May 29, 1917,[7] the second son of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., and Rose Fitzgerald; Rose was the eldest child of John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, a prominent Boston political figure who was the city's mayor and a three-term member of Congress. Kennedy lived in Brookline for ten years and attended Edward Devotion School, Noble and Greenough Lower School, and the Dexter School, through 4th grade. In 1927, the family moved to 5040 Independence Avenue in Riverdale, Bronx, New York City; two years later, they moved to 294 Pondfield Road in Bronxville, New York, where Kennedy was a member of Scout Troop 2.[1] Kennedy spent summers with his family at their home in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, and Christmas and Easter holidays with his family at their winter home in Palm Beach, Florida. For the 5th through 7th grade, Kennedy attended Riverdale Country School, a private school for boys. For 8th grade in September 1930, the 13-year old Kennedy attended Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut. In late April 1931, he required an appendectomy, after which he withdrew from Canterbury and recuperated at home.[8]
In September 1931, Kennedy was sent to The Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, for his 9th through 12th grade years. His older brother, Joe Jr., had already been at Choate for two years, a football star and leading student. Jack spent his first years at Choate in his brother's shadow, and compensated for this with rebellious behavior that attracted a coterie. Their most notorious stunt was to explode a toilet seat with a powerful firecracker. In the ensuing chapel assembly, the strict headmaster, George St. John, brandished the toilet seat and spoke of certain "muckers" who would "spit in our sea". The defiant Jack Kennedy took the cue and named his group "The Muckers Club", which included roommate and friend Kirk LeMoyne "Lem" Billings. While at Choate, Kennedy was beset by health problems that culminated in 1934 with his emergency hospitalization at Yale – New Haven Hospital. In June 1934 he was admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and diagnosed with colitis. Kennedy graduated from Choate in June 1935. For the school yearbook, of which he had been business manager, Kennedy was voted the "most likely to succeed".[9]
In September 1935, he made his first trip abroad, with his parents and sister Kathleen, to London, with the intent of studying under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics (LSE), as his older brother Joe had done. Ill health forced his return to America in October 1935, when he enrolled late and spent six weeks at Princeton University. He was then hospitalized for observation at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. He convalesced further at the Kennedy winter home in Palm Beach, then spent the spring of 1936 working as a ranch hand on a 40,000 acres (160 km2) cattle ranch outside Benson, Arizona.[10]
In September 1936, Kennedy enrolled at Harvard College, where he produced that year's annual "Freshman Smoker", called by a reviewer "an elaborate entertainment, which included in its cast outstanding personalities of the radio, screen and sports world".[11] He tried out for the football, golf, and swim teams and earned a spot on the varsity swim team.[12] In July 1937 Kennedy sailed to France—bringing his own his convertible—and spent ten weeks driving through Europe with Billings.[13] In June 1938 Kennedy sailed overseas with his father and brother Joe to work with his father, who was then Franklin D. Roosevelt's U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, at the American embassy in London.[14] In 1939 Kennedy toured Europe, the Soviet Union, the Balkans, and the Middle East in preparation for his Harvard senior honors thesis. He then went to Czechoslovakia and Germany before returning to London on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. On September 3, 1939, the family was in the House of Commons for speeches endorsing the United Kingdom's declaration of war on Germany. Kennedy was sent as his father's representative to help with arrangements for American survivors of the SS Athenia, before flying back to the U.S. from Foynes, Ireland, to Port Washington, New York on his first transatlantic flight.
As an upperclassman at Harvard, Kennedy became a more serious student and developed an interest in political philosophy. In his junior year he made the Dean's List.[15] In 1940 Kennedy completed his thesis, "Appeasement in Munich", about British participation in the Munich Agreement. The thesis became a bestseller under the title Why England Slept.[16] He graduated from Harvard College with a Bachelors of Science cum laude in international affairs in 1940. Kennedy enrolled and audited classes at the Stanford Graduate School of Business that fall.[17] In early 1941, he helped his father write a memoir of his three years as an American ambassador and then traveled throughout South America.[18]
Military service
Main article: Motor Torpedo Boat PT-109
In September 1941, after medical disqualification by the Army for his chronic lower back problems, Kennedy joined the U.S. Navy, with the influence of the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, former naval attaché to Joseph Kennedy.[19] Kennedy was an ensign serving in the office of the Secretary of the Navy when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. He attended the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps and Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Center, was assigned duty in Panama and later in the Pacific theater, where he earned the rank of lieutenant, commanding a patrol torpedo (PT) boat.[20]
On August 2, 1943, Kennedy's boat, PT-109, along with PT-162 and PT-169, were performing nighttime patrols near New Georgia in the Solomon Islands,[21] when PT-109 was rammed by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri.[22] Kennedy gathered his surviving crew members together in the water around the wreckage, to vote on whether to "fight or surrender". Kennedy stated, "There's nothing in the book about a situation like this. A lot of you men have families and some of you have children. What do you want to do? I have nothing to lose." Shunning surrender, the men swam towards a small island.[23] Kennedy, despite re-injury to his back in the collision, towed a badly burned crewman through the water with a life jacket strap clenched between his teeth.[24] He towed the wounded man to the island, and later to a second island, from where his crew was subsequently rescued.[25] For these actions, Kennedy received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal with the following citation:
For extremely heroic conduct as Commanding Officer of Motor Torpedo Boat 109 following the collision and sinking of that vessel in the Pacific War Theater on August 1–2, 1943. Unmindful of personal danger, Lieutenant (then Lieutenant, Junior Grade) Kennedy unhesitatingly braved the difficulties and hazards of darkness to direct rescue operations, swimming many hours to secure aid and food after he had succeeded in getting his crew ashore. His outstanding courage, endurance and leadership contributed to the saving of several lives and were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.
In October 1943, Kennedy took command of a PT boat converted into a gun boat, PT-59, which took part in a Marine rescue on Choiseul Island that November.[26] Kennedy was honorably discharged in early 1945, just prior to Japan's surrender. Kennedy's other decorations in World War II included the Purple Heart, American Defense Service Medal, American Campaign Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with three bronze service stars, and the World War II Victory Medal.[1] When later asked how he became a war hero, Kennedy joked: "It was easy. They cut my PT boat in half."[27]
In April 1945, Kennedy's father, a friend of William Randolph Hearst, arranged a position for his son as a special correspondent for Hearst Newspapers; the assignment kept Kennedy's name in the public eye and "expose[d] him to journalism as a possible career."[28] He worked as a correspondent that May, covering the Potsdam Conference and other events.[29]
Congressional career
House of Representatives
While Kennedy was still serving, his older brother, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., was killed in action on August 12, 1944, while part of Operation Aphrodite. Since Joe Jr. had been the family's political standard-bearer, the task now fell to John.[30]
In 1946, U.S. Representative James Michael Curley vacated his seat in the strong Democratic 11th Congressional district in Massachusetts—at Joe's urging—to become mayor of Boston. Kennedy ran for the seat, beating his Republican opponent by a large margin.[31] He served as a congressman for six years.
Senate
In the 1952 election, he defeated incumbent Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. for the U.S. Senate seat. The following year he was married to Jacqueline.[32]
Kennedy underwent several spinal operations over the following two years. Often absent from the Senate, he was at times critically ill and received Catholic last rites. During his convalescence in 1956, he published Profiles in Courage, a book about U.S. Senators who risked their careers for their personal beliefs, and which received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1957.[33] Rumors that this work was co-authored by his close adviser and speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, were confirmed in Sorensen's 2008 autobiography.[34]
At the 1956 Democratic National Convention, Kennedy was nominated for Vice President on a ticket with presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, but finished second in the balloting to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Kennedy received national exposure from that episode; his father thought it just as well that his son lost, due to the political debility of his Catholicism and the strength of the Eisenhower ticket.
One of the matters demanding Kennedy's attention in the Senate was President Eisenhower's bill for the Civil Rights Act of 1957.[35] Kennedy cast a procedural vote on this, which was considered by some as an appeasement of Southern Democratic opponents of the bill.[35] Kennedy did vote for Title III of the act, which would have given the Attorney General powers to enjoin, but Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson agreed to let the provision die as a compromise measure.[36] Kennedy also voted for Title IV, termed the "Jury Trial Amendment". Many civil rights advocates at the time criticized that vote as one which would weaken the act.[37] A final compromise bill, which Kennedy supported, was passed in September 1957.[38] In 1958, Kennedy was re-elected to a second term in the Senate, defeating his Republican opponent, Boston lawyer Vincent J. Celeste, by a wide margin.
Senator Joseph McCarthy was a friend of the Kennedy family; Joseph Kennedy, Sr. was a leading McCarthy supporter, Robert F. Kennedy worked for McCarthy's subcommittee, and McCarthy dated Patricia Kennedy. In 1954, when the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, Kennedy drafted a speech supporting the censure. The speech was not delivered, because he was in the hospital. Though absent, he could have participated procedurally by "pairing" his vote against that of another senator, but did not do so. He never indicated how he would have voted, but the episode damaged Kennedy's support among members of the liberal community, including Eleanor Roosevelt, in the 1956 and 1960 elections.[39]
1960 presidential election
Main article: United States presidential election, 1960
On January 2, 1960, Kennedy initiated his campaign for President in the Democratic primary election, where he faced challenges from Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. Kennedy defeated Humphrey in Wisconsin and West Virginia, Morse in Maryland and Oregon, as well as from token opposition (often write-in candidates) in New Hampshire, Indiana, and Nebraska. Kennedy visited a coal mine in West Virginia; most miners and others in that predominantly conservative, Protestant state were quite wary of Kennedy's Roman Catholicism. His victory in West Virginia confirmed his broad popular appeal. At the Democratic Convention, he gave his well-known "New Frontier" speech, saying: "For the problems are not all solved and the battles are not all won—and we stand today on the edge of a New Frontier ... But the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises—it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them."[40]
With Humphrey and Morse eliminated, Kennedy's main opponent at the Los Angeles convention was Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. Kennedy overcame this formal challenge as well as informal ones from Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee in 1952 and 1956, Stuart Symington, and several favorite sons, and on July 13 the Democratic convention nominated Kennedy as its candidate. Kennedy asked Johnson to be his Vice Presidential candidate, despite opposition from many liberal delegates and Kennedy's own staff, including his brother, Robert. He needed Johnson's strength in the South to win what was considered likely to be the closest election since 1916. Major issues included how to get the economy moving again, Kennedy's Roman Catholicism, Cuba, and whether the Soviet space and missile programs had surpassed those of the U.S. To address fears that his being Catholic would impact his decision-making, he famously told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, "I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party candidate for President who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters – and the Church does not speak for me."[41] Kennedy questioned rhetorically whether one-quarter of Americans were relegated to second-class citizenship just because they were Catholic, and once stated that, "No one asked me my religion [serving the Navy] in the South Pacific."[42]
In September and October, Kennedy appeared with Republican candidate Richard Nixon, then Vice President, in the first televised U.S. presidential debates in U.S. history. During these programs, Nixon, with a sore injured leg and his "five o'clock shadow", looked tense, uncomfortable, and perspiring, while Kennedy, choosing to avail himself of makeup services, appeared relaxed, leading the huge television audience to favor Kennedy as the winner. Radio listeners either thought Nixon had won or that the debates were a draw.[43] The debates are now considered a milestone in American political history—the point at which the medium of television began to play a dominant role in politics.[33] Kennedy's campaign gained momentum after the first debate, and he pulled slightly ahead of Nixon in most polls. On November 8, Kennedy defeated Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections of the 20th century. In the national popular vote Kennedy led Nixon by just two-tenths of one percent (49.7% to 49.5%), while in the Electoral College he won 303 votes to Nixon's 219 (269 were needed to win). Another 14 electors from Mississippi and Alabama refused to support Kennedy because of his support for the civil rights movement; they voted for Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, as did the elector from Oklahoma.[44] Kennedy was the youngest man elected president, succeeding Eisenhower, who was then the oldest (Ronald Reagan surpassed Eisenhower as the oldest president in 1981).[45]
Presidency
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John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th President at noon on January 20, 1961. In his inaugural address he spoke of the need for all Americans to be active citizens, famously saying, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." He asked the nations of the world to join together to fight what he called the "common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself". He added: "All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin." In closing, he expanded on his desire for greater internationalism: "Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you."[46]
The address reflected Kennedy's confidence that his administration would chart a historically significant course in both domestic policy and foreign affairs. The contrast between this optimistic vision and the pressures of managing daily political realities at home and abroad would be one of the main tensions running through the early years of his administration.[47]
Kennedy brought to the White House a stark contrast in organization compared to the decision making structure of the former general, Eisenhower; and he wasted no time in dismantling Eisenhower's methods.[48] Kennedy preferred the organizational structure of a wheel, with all the spokes leading to the president. He was ready and willing to make the increased number of quick decisions required in such an environment. He selected a mixture of experienced and inexperienced people to serve in his cabinet. "We can learn our jobs together", he stated.[49] There were a couple instances where the president got ahead of himself, as when he announced in a cabinet meeting, without prior notice, that Edward Lansdale would be Ambassador to South Vietnam, a decision which Secretary of State Rusk later had Kennedy alter.[50] There was also the case of Harris Wofford, who was summoned to the White House for swearing in without knowing which position he was to assume.[51]
Much to the chagrin of his economic advisors, who wanted him to reduce taxes, he quickly agreed to a balanced budget pledge. This was needed in exchange for votes to expand the membership of the House Rules Committee in order to give the Democrats a majority in setting the legislative agenda.[52] The president focused on immediate and specific issues facing the administration, and quickly voiced his impatience with ponderings of deeper meanings. Deputy national security advisor Walt Whitman Rostow once began a diatribe about the growth of communism, and Kennedy abruptly cut him off, asking, "What do you want me to do about that today?"[53]
Foreign policy
Main article: Foreign policy of the John F. Kennedy administration
President Kennedy's foreign policy was dominated by American confrontations with the Soviet Union, manifested by proxy contests in the early stage of the Cold War. In 1961, Kennedy anxiously anticipated a summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The President started off on the wrong foot by reacting aggressively to a routine Khrushchev speech on Cold War confrontation in early 1961. The speech was intended for domestic audiences in the Soviet Union, but Kennedy interpreted it as a personal challenge. His mistake helped raise tensions going into the Vienna Summit of June 1961.[54] On the way to the summit, Kennedy stopped in Paris to meet Charles de Gaulle, who advised Kennedy to ignore Khrushchev's abrasive style. The French president was nationalistic and disdainful of the United States' presumed influence in Europe. Nevertheless de Gaulle was quite impressed with the young president and his family. Kennedy picked up on this in his speech in Paris, saying he would be remembered as "the man who accompanied Jackie Kennedy to Paris."[55]
On June 4, 1961, the president met with Khrushchev in Vienna and left the meetings angry and disappointed that he had allowed the Premier to bully him, despite the warnings he had received. Khrushchev, for his part, was impressed with the president's intelligence, but thought him weak. Kennedy did succeed in conveying the bottom line to Khrushchev on the most sensitive issue before them, a proposed treaty between Moscow and East Berlin. He made it clear that any such treaty which interfered with U.S access rights in West Berlin would be regarded as an act of war.[56]
Shortly after the president returned home, the U.S.S.R. announced its intention to sign a treaty with East Berlin, abrogating any third-party occupation rights in either sector of the city. Kennedy, depressed and angry, assumed his only option was to prepare the country for nuclear war, which he personally thought had a one in five chance of occurring.[57]
In the weeks immediately after the Vienna summit, more than 20,000 people fled from East Berlin to the western sector in reaction to statements from the USSR. Kennedy began intensive meetings on the Berlin issue, where Dean Acheson took the lead in recommending a military buildup alongside NATO allies.[58] In a July 1961 speech, Kennedy announced his decision to add $3.25 billion to the defense budget, along with over 200,000 additional troops, saying an attack on West Berlin would be taken as an attack on the U.S. The speech received an 85% approval rating.[59] The following month, the Soviet Union and East Berlin began blocking any further passage of East Berliners into West Berlin and erected barbed wire fences across the city, which were quickly upgraded to the Berlin Wall. Kennedy's initial reaction was to ignore this, as long as free access from West to East Berlin continued. This course was altered when it was learned that the West Berliners had lost confidence in the defense of their position by the United States. Kennedy sent Vice President Johnson, along with a host of military personnel, in convoy through West Germany, including Soviet armed checkpoints, to demonstrate the continued commitment of the U.S. to West Berlin.[60]
Kennedy gave a speech at Saint Anselm College on May 5, 1960, regarding America's conduct in the emerging Cold War. The address detailed how American foreign policy should be conducted towards African nations, noting a hint of support for modern African nationalism by saying that "For we, too, founded a new nation on revolt from colonial rule".[61]
Cuba and the Bay of Pigs Invasion
Main article: Bay of Pigs Invasion
The prior Eisenhower administration had created a plan to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba. The plan, led by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with help from the U.S. military,[62] was for an invasion of Cuba by a counter-revolutionary insurgency composed of U.S.-trained anti-Castro Cuban exiles[63] led by CIA paramilitary officers. The intention was to invade Cuba and instigate an uprising among the Cuban people in hopes of removing Castro from power.[64] On April 17, 1961, Kennedy ordered what became known as the "Bay of Pigs Invasion": 1,500 U.S.-trained Cubans, called "Brigade 2506", landed on the island. No U.S. air support was provided. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA, later stated that they thought the president would authorize any action required for success once the troops were on the ground.[65] By April 19, 1961, the Cuban government had captured or killed the invading exiles, and Kennedy was forced to negotiate for the release of the 1,189 survivors. After twenty months, Cuba released the captured exiles in exchange for $53 million worth of food and medicine.[66] The incident made Castro wary of the U.S. and led him to believe another invasion would occur.[67] According to biographer Richard Reeves, Kennedy primarily focused on the political repercussions of the plan rather than the military considerations; when it failed, he was convinced the plan was a setup to make him look bad.[68] But he took responsibility for the failure, saying, "... We got a big kick in the leg and we deserved it. But maybe we'll learn something from it."[69]
In late 1961, the White House formed the "Special Group (Augmented)", headed by Robert Kennedy and including Edward Lansdale, Secretary Robert McNamara, and others. The group's objective—to overthrow Castro via espionage, sabotage, and other covert tactics—was never pursued.[70]
Cuban Missile Crisis
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Kennedy addressing the nation on October 22, 1962 about the buildup of arms on Cuba
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Main article: Cuban Missile Crisis
On October 14, 1962, CIA U-2 spy planes took photographs of intermediate-range ballistic missile sites being built in Cuba by the Soviets. The photos were shown to Kennedy on October 16; a consensus was reached that the missiles were offensive in nature and thus posed an immediate nuclear threat.[71] Kennedy faced a dilemma: if the U.S. attacked the sites, it might lead to nuclear war with the U.S.S.R., but if the U.S. did nothing, it would be faced with the increased threat from close range nuclear weapons. The U.S. would as well appear to the world as less committed to the defense of the hemisphere. On a personal level, Kennedy needed to show resolve in reaction to Khrushchev, especially after the Vienna summit.[72]
More than a third of the members of the National Security Council (NSC) favored an unannounced air assault on the missile sites, but for some of them this conjured up an image of "Pearl Harbor in reverse".[73] There was as well some reaction from the international community (asked in confidence) that the assault plan was an overreaction in light of U.S. missiles that had been placed in Turkey by Eisenhower. And there could be no assurance that the assault would be 100% effective.[74] In concurrence with a majority vote of the NSC, Kennedy decided on a naval quarantine. On October 22 he dispatched a message to Khrushchev and announced the decision on TV.[75]
The U.S. Navy would stop and inspect all Soviet ships arriving off Cuba, beginning October 24. The Organization of American States gave unanimous support to the removal of the missiles. The president exchanged two sets of letters with Khrushchev, to no avail.[76] United Nations (UN) Secretary General U Thant requested both parties reverse their decisions and enter a cooling off period. Khrushchev said yes, but Kennedy said no.[77] One Soviet-flagged ship was stopped and boarded. On October 28 Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missile sites subject to UN inspections.[78] The U.S. publicly promised never to invade Cuba and privately agreed to remove its missiles in Turkey, which were by then obsolete and had been supplanted by submarines equipped with UGM-27 Polaris missiles.[79] This crisis brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any point before or since. In the end, "the humanity" of the two men prevailed.[80] The crisis improved the image of American willpower and the president's credibility. His approval rating increased from 66% to 77% immediately thereafter.[81]
Latin America and communism
Main article: Kennedy and Latin America
Arguing that "those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable,"[82] Kennedy sought to contain communism in Latin America by establishing the Alliance for Progress, which sent aid to troubled countries and sought greater human rights standards in the region. He worked closely with Governor of Puerto Rico Luis Muñoz Marín for the development of the Alliance of Progress, and began working towards the autonomy of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
When the president took office the Eisenhower administration, through the CIA, had begun formulating plans for the assassination of Castro in Cuba and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Kennedy privately instructed the CIA that any such planning must include plausible deniability by the U.S. His public position was in opposition.[83] In June 1961 the Dominican Republic's leader was assassinated; in the days following the event, Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles led a cautious reaction by the nation. Robert Kennedy, who saw an opportunity for the U.S., called Bowles "a gutless bastard" to his face.[84]
Peace Corps
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John F. Kennedy's announcement of the establishment of the Peace Corps
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As one of his first presidential acts, Kennedy asked Congress to create the Peace Corps. His brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, was the first director.[85] Through this program, Americans volunteer to help underdeveloped nations in areas such as education, farming, health care, and construction. The organization grew to 5,000 members by March 1963 and 10,000 the following year.[86] Since 1961, over 200,000 Americans have joined the Peace Corps, serving in 139 countries.
Southeast Asia
Main articles: 1963 South Vietnamese coup, Arrest and assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, Reaction to the 1963 South Vietnamese coup, Cable 243, Buddhist crisis, Thích Quảng Đức, Xá Lợi Pagoda raids, Krulak Mendenhall mission, and McNamara Taylor mission
When briefing Kennedy, Eisenhower emphasized that the communist threat in Southeast Asia required priority; Eisenhower considered Laos to be "the cork in the bottle" in regards to the regional threat. In March 1961, Kennedy voiced a change in policy from supporting a "free" Laos to a "neutral" Laos, indicating privately that Vietnam, and not Laos, should be deemed America's tripwire for communism's spread in the area.[87] In May 1961 he dispatched Lyndon Johnson to meet with South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem. Johnson assured Diem more aid in molding a fighting force that could resist the communists.[88] Kennedy announced a change of policy from support to partnership with Diem in defeat of communism in South Vietnam.[89]
Kennedy initially followed Eisenhower's lead, using limited military action to fight the communist forces led by Ho Chi Minh.[90] Kennedy continued policies that provided political, economic, and military support to the South Vietnamese government.[90] Late in 1961 the Viet Cong began assuming a predominant presence, initially seizing the provincial capital of Phuoc Vinh.[91] Kennedy increased the number of helicopters, military advisors, and undeclared U.S. Special Forces in the area, but he was reluctant to order a full scale deployment of troops.[92][93] Kennedy formally authorized escalated involvement when he signed the "National Security Action Memorandum – Subversive Insurgency (War of Liberation)" in early 1962.[94] Secretary of State Dean Rusk voiced strong support for U.S. involvement.[95] "Operation Ranch Hand", a large-scale aerial defoliation effort, began on the roadsides of South Vietnam.[96][b]
In April 1963, Kennedy assessed the situation in Vietnam: "We don't have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point. But I can't give up that territory to the communists and get the American people to re-elect me".[97] Kennedy faced a crisis in Vietnam by July; despite increased U.S. support, the South Vietnamese military was only marginally effective against pro-communist Viet Cong forces.
On August 21, just as the new U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge arrived, Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu ordered South Vietnam forces, funded and trained by the CIA, to quell Buddhist demonstrations. The crackdowns heightened expectations of a coup d'état to remove Diem with (or perhaps by) his brother, Nhu.[98] Lodge was instructed to try to get Diem and Nhu to step down and leave the country. Diem would not listen to Lodge.[99]Cable 243 (DEPTEL 243), dated August 24, followed, declaring Washington would no longer tolerate Nhu's actions, and Lodge was ordered to pressure Diem to remove Nhu. If Diem refused, the Americans would explore alternative leadership.[100] Lodge stated that the only workable option was to get the South Vietnamese generals to overthrow Diem and Nhu, as originally planned.[101] At week's end, Kennedy learned from Lodge that the Diem government might, due to France's assistance to Nhu, be dealing secretly with the communists—and might ask the Americans to leave; orders were sent to Saigon and throughout Washington to "destroy all coup cables".[102] At the same time, the first formal anti-Vietnam war sentiment was expressed by U.S. clergy from the Ministers' Vietnam Committee.[103]
A White House meeting in September was indicative of the very different ongoing appraisals; the President was given updated assessments after personal inspections on the ground by the Department of Defense (General Victor Krulak) and the State Department (Joseph Mendenhall). Krulak said the military fight against the communists was progressing and being won, while Mendenhall stated that the country was civilly being lost to any U.S. influence. Kennedy reacted, saying, "Did you two gentlemen visit the same country?" The president was unaware the two men were at such odds that they had not spoken to each other on the return flight.[104]
In October 1963, the president appointed Defense Secretary McNamara and General Maxwell D. Taylor to a Vietnam mission in another effort to synchronize the information and formulation of policy. The objective of the McNamara Taylor mission "emphasized the importance of getting to the bottom of the differences in reporting from U.S. representatives in Vietnam".[105] In meetings with McNamara, Taylor, and Lodge, Diem again refused to agree to governing measures insisted upon by the U.S., helping to dispel McNamara's previous optimism about Diem.[106] Taylor and McNamara were also enlightened by Vietnam's Vice President, Nguyen Ngoc Tho (choice of many to succeed Diem should a coup occur), who in detailed terms obliterated Taylor's information that the military was succeeding in the countryside.[107] At Kennedy's insistence, the mission report contained a recommended schedule for troop withdrawals: 1,000 by year's end and complete withdrawal in 1965, something the NSC considered a strategic fantasy.[108] The final report declared that the military was making progress, that the increasingly unpopular Diem-led government was not vulnerable to a coup, and that an assassination of Diem or Nhu was a possibility.[109]
In late October, intelligence wires again reported that a coup against the Diem government was afoot. The source, Vietnamese General Duong Van Minh (also known as "Big Minh"), wanted to know the U.S. position. Kennedy instructed Lodge to offer covert assistance to the coup, excluding assassination, and to ensure deniability by the U.S.[110] Later that month, as the coup became imminent, Kennedy ordered all cables routed through him. A policy of "control and cut out" was initiated to insure presidential control of U.S. responses, while cutting him out of the paper trail.[111] On November 1, 1963, South Vietnamese generals, led by "Big Minh", overthrew the Diem government, arresting and then killing Diem and Nhu. Kennedy was shocked by the deaths. He found out afterwards that Minh had asked the CIA field office to secure safe passage out of the country for Diem and Nhu, but was told 24 hours was needed to get a plane. Minh responded that he could not hold them that long.[112] News of the coup initially led to renewed confidence—both in America and in South Vietnam—that the war might be won.[113] McGeorge Bundy drafted a National Security Action Memo to present to Kennedy upon his return from Dallas. It reiterated the resolve to fight communism in Vietnam, with increasing military and economic aid and expansion of operations into Laos and Cambodia. Before leaving for Dallas, Kennedy told Michael Forrestal that "after the first of the year ... [he wanted] an in depth study of every possible option, including how to get out of there ... to review this whole thing from the bottom to the top". When asked what he thought the president meant, Forrestal said, "it was devil's advocate stuff."[114]
Historians disagree on whether Vietnam would have escalated had Kennedy survived and been re-elected in 1964.[115] Fueling the debate are statements made by Secretary of Defense McNamara in the film "The Fog of War" that Kennedy was strongly considering pulling out of Vietnam after the 1964 election.[116] The film also contains a tape recording of Lyndon Johnson stating that Kennedy was planning to withdraw, a position that Johnson disagreed with.[117] Kennedy had signed National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263, dated October 11, which ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 military personnel by the end of the year.[118][119] Such an action would have been a policy reversal, but Kennedy was moving in a less hawkish direction since his acclaimed speech about world peace at American University on June 10, 1963.[120]
When Robert Kennedy was asked in 1964 what his brother would have done if the South Vietnamese had been on the brink of defeat, he replied, "We'd face that when we came to it."[121] At the time of Kennedy's death, no final policy decision had been made as to Vietnam.[122] U.S. involvement in the region escalated until Lyndon Johnson, his successor, directly deployed regular U.S. military forces for fighting the Vietnam War.[123][124] After Kennedy's assassination, President Johnson passed NSAM 273 on November 26, 1963. It reversed Kennedy's decision to withdraw 1,000 troops, and reaffirmed the policy of assistance to the South Vietnamese.[125][126]
American University speech
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Speech from American University by John F. Kennedy, June 10, 1963 (duration 26:47)
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On June 10, 1963, Kennedy delivered the commencement address at American University in Washington, D.C., "to discuss a topic on which too often ignorance abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived – yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace ... I speak of peace because of the new face of war...in an age when a singular nuclear weapon contains ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied forces in the Second World War ... an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and air and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn ... I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men ... world peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor – it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance ... our problems are man-made – therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants."[127] The president also made two announcements – that the Soviets had expressed a desire to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty and that the U.S had postponed planned atmospheric tests.[128]
West Berlin speech
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 Ich bin ein Berliner speech from the Rathaus Schöneberg by John F. Kennedy, June 26, 1963 (duration 9:01)
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In 1963, Germany was enduring a time of particular vulnerability due to Soviet aggression to the east, de Gaulle's French nationalism to the west, and the impending retirement of German Chancellor Adenauer.[129] On June 26 Kennedy gave a public speech in West Berlin reiterating the American commitment to Germany and criticizing communism; he was met with an ecstatic response from a massive audience. Kennedy used the construction of the Berlin Wall as an example of the failures of communism: "Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in." The speech is known for its famous phrase "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a citizen of Berlin"). A million people were on the street for the speech.[130] He remarked to Ted Sorensen afterwards: "We'll never have another day like this one, as long as we live."[131]
Israel
Kennedy encountered problems with the Israeli government regarding the production of nuclear materials in Dimona. After the existence of a nuclear plant was initially denied by the Israeli government, David Ben-Gurion stated in a speech to the Israeli Knesset on December 21, 1960, that the purpose of the nuclear plant at Beersheba was for "research in problems of arid zones and desert flora and fauna".[132] When Ben-Gurion met with Kennedy in New York, he claimed that Dimona was being developed to provide nuclear power for desalinization and other peaceful purposes "for the time being".[132] Kennedy was skeptical, and stated in a May 1963 letter to Ben-Gurion that American support to Israel could be in jeopardy if reliable information on the Israeli nuclear program was not forthcoming. Ben-Gurion repeated previous reassurances that Dimona was being developed for peaceful purposes. The Israeli government resisted American pressure to open its nuclear facilities to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections. A science attache at the embassy in Tel Aviv concluded that parts of the Dimona facility had been shut down temporarily to mislead American scientists when they visited. According to Seymour Hersh, the Israelis set up false control rooms to show the Americans. Israeli lobbyist Abe Feinberg stated, "It was part of my job to tip them off that Kennedy was insisting on [an inspection]."[133] Rodger Davies, the director of the State Department's Office of Near Eastern Affairs, concluded in March 1965 that Israel was developing nuclear weapons. He reported that Israel's target date for achieving nuclear capability was 1968–69.[134] On May 1, 1968, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach told President Johnson that Dimona was producing enough plutonium to produce two bombs a year. The State Department argued that if Israel wanted arms, it should accept international supervision of its nuclear program.[133] Dimona was never placed under IAEA safeguards. Attempts to write Israeli adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) into contracts for the supply of U.S. weapons continued throughout 1968.[135]
Iraq
In 1963, the Kennedy administration backed the Ramadan Revolution coup against the government of Iraq headed by Abd al-Karim Qasim, who five years earlier had deposed the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy. On 8 February 1963, Kennedy received a memo stating: "We will make informal friendly noises as soon as we can find out whom to talk with, and ought to recognize as soon as we’re sure these guys are firmly in the saddle. CIA had excellent reports on the plotting, but I doubt either they or UK should claim much credit for it."[136] The CIA had planned to remove Qasim in the past, but those efforts did not come to fruition.[137] The new government, led by Abdul Salam Arif and dominated by the Ba'ath Party (along with a coalition of Nasserists and Iraqi nationalists), allegedly used lists—provided by the CIA—of suspected communists and other leftists to systematically murder unknown numbers of Iraq's educated elite.[138][139] The US continued to back Arif after he purged the Ba'ath Party from the government in the November 1963 Iraqi coup d'état.[140] Former CIA officer James Chritchfield disputes the notion that the CIA offered "active support" to the coup plotters and instead argues that the CIA, while "well-informed" on the first coup, was "surprised" by the power struggles that followed.[141] Author Richard Dreyfuss also maintains that the US played no role in the coup.[142]
Ireland
During his visit to Ireland in 1963, Kennedy accepted a grant of armorial bearings from the Chief Herald of Ireland and received honorary degrees from the National University of Ireland and Trinity College, Dublin.[143] He visited the cottage at Dunganstown, near New Ross, where his ancestors had lived before emigrating to America.[144] On December 22, 2006, the Irish Department of Justice released declassified police documents indicating that security was heightened as Kennedy was the subject of three death threats during this visit.[145]
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
Main article: Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
Troubled by the long-term dangers of radioactive contamination and nuclear weapons proliferation, Kennedy and Khrushchev agreed to negotiate a nuclear test ban treaty, originally conceived in Adlai Stevenson's 1956 presidential campaign.[146] In their Vienna summit meeting in June 1961, Khrushchev and Kennedy reached an informal understanding against nuclear testing, but the Soviet Union began testing nuclear weapons that September. The United States responded by conducting tests five days later.[147] Shortly thereafter, new U.S. satellites began delivering images which made it clear that the Soviets were substantially behind the U.S. in the arms race.[148] Nevertheless, the greater nuclear strength of the U.S. was of little value as long as the U.S.S.R. perceived themselves to be at parity.[149]
In July 1963, Kennedy sent Averell Harriman to Moscow to negotiate a treaty with the Soviets.[150] The introductory sessions included Khrushchev, who later delegated Soviet representation to Andrei Gromyko. It quickly became clear that a comprehensive test ban would not be implemented, due largely to the reluctance of the Soviets to allow inspections that would verify compliance.[151] Ultimately, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union were the initial signatories to a limited treaty, which prohibited atomic testing on the ground, in the atmosphere, or underwater, but not underground; the U.S. Senate ratified this and Kennedy signed it into law in October 1963. France was quick to declare that it was free to continue developing and testing its nuclear defenses.[152]
Domestic policy
Kennedy called his domestic program the "New Frontier". It ambitiously promised federal funding for education, medical care for the elderly, economic aid to rural regions, and government intervention to halt the recession. Kennedy also promised an end to racial discrimination. In his 1963 State of the Union address, he proposed substantial tax reform and a reduction in income tax rates from the current range of 20–90% to a range of 14–65%; he proposed a reduction in the corporate tax rates from 52 to 47%. Kennedy added that the top rate should be set at 70 percent if certain deductions were not eliminated for high income earners.[153] Congress did not act until 1964, after his death, when the top rate was raised to 70%. To the Economic Club of New York, he spoke in 1963 of "... the paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high and revenues too low; and the soundest way to raise revenue in the long term is to lower rates now."[154] Congress passed few of Kennedy's major programs during his lifetime, but did vote them through in 1964–65 under his successor Johnson.[155]
Economy
Kennedy ended a period of tight fiscal policies, loosening monetary policy to keep interest rates down and encourage growth of the economy.[156] He presided over the first government budget to top the $100 billion mark, in 1962, and his first budget in 1961 led to the country's first non-war, non-recession deficit.[157] The economy, which had been through two recessions in three years and was in one when Kennedy took office, accelerated notably during his presidency. Despite low inflation and interest rates, GDP had grown by an average of only 2.2% during the Eisenhower presidency (scarcely more than population growth at the time), and had declined by 1% during Eisenhower's last twelve months in office.[158]
The economy turned around and prospered during the Kennedy administration. GDP expanded by an average of 5.5% from early 1961 to late 1963,[158] while inflation remained steady at around 1% and unemployment eased;[159] industrial production rose by 15% and motor vehicle sales rose by 40%.[160] This rate of growth in GDP and industry continued until around 1966, and has yet to be repeated for such a sustained period of time.[158]
The major steel companies announced in April 1962 a 3.5% price increase (the first in 3 years) within a day of each other. This came just days after the companies had reached a settlement with the steelworkers' union, providing in chief a wage increase of 2.5%. The administration was furious, with Kennedy saying, "Why did they do this? Do they think they can get away with this? God, I hate the bastards."[citation needed] Amid concern about the inflationary effects of the price increase, the president took personal charge of a campaign against the industry, assigning to each cabinet member a statement regarding the effects of the price increase on their area. Robert Kennedy, echoing his brother's sentiments, said "We're going for broke ... their expense accounts, where they've been and what they've been doing ... the FBI is to interview them all ... we can't lose this."[161] Robert took the position that the steel executives had illegally colluded to fix prices. The administration's actions influenced US Steel to rescind the price increase.[162] The Wall Street Journal wrote that the administration had acted "by naked power, by threats, by agents of the state security police."[163] Yale law professor Charles Reich wrote in The New Republic his opinion that the administration had violated civil liberties by calling a grand jury to indict US Steel for collusion so quickly.[163] A New York Times editorial praised Kennedy's actions and said that the steel industry's price increase "imperils the economic welfare of the country by inviting a tidal wave of inflation."[164] Nevertheless, the administration's Bureau of Budget reported the price increase would have resulted in a net gain for GDP as well as a net budget surplus.[165] The stock market, which had steadily declined since Kennedy's election, dropped 10% shortly after the administration's action on the steel industry.[166]
Kennedy had little knowledge of the agricultural sector of the economy, and farmers were not on his list of priorities, at least in his 1960 campaign. After giving a speech to a farming community, he rhetorically asked an aide, "Did you understand any of what I just said in there? I sure didn't."[167]
Federal and military death penalty
As President, Kennedy oversaw the last federal execution prior to Furman v. Georgia, a 1972 case that led to a moratorium on federal executions.[168] Victor Feguer was sentenced to death by a federal court in Iowa and was executed on March 15, 1963.[169] Kennedy commuted a death sentence imposed by a military court on seaman Jimmie Henderson on February 12, 1962, changing the penalty to life in prison.[170]
On March 22, 1962, Kennedy signed into law HR5143 (PL87-423), abolishing the mandatory death penalty for first degree murder in the District of Columbia, the only remaining jurisdiction in the United States with such a penalty.[171] The death penalty has not been applied in the District of Columbia since 1957, and has now been abolished.[172]
Civil rights
The turbulent end of state-sanctioned racial discrimination was one of the most pressing domestic issues of the 1960s. The Supreme Court of the United States had ruled in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Many schools, especially in southern states, did not obey the Supreme Court's decision. The Court also prohibited segregation at other public facilities (such as buses, restaurants, theaters, courtrooms, bathrooms, and beaches) but it continued nonetheless. Kennedy verbally supported racial integration and civil rights; during the 1960 campaign he telephoned Coretta Scott King, wife of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been jailed while trying to integrate a department store lunch counter. Robert Kennedy called Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver and obtained King's release from prison, which drew additional black support to his brother's candidacy.[173]
Kennedy believed the grassroots movement for civil rights would anger many Southern whites and make it more difficult to pass civil rights laws in Congress, which was dominated by conservative Southern Democrats, and he distanced himself from it.[174] He also was more concerned with other issues early in his presidency, such as the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the situation in Southeast Asia. As articulated by brother Robert, the administration's early priority was to "keep the president out of this civil rights mess". Many civil rights leaders viewed Kennedy as lukewarm, especially concerning the Freedom Riders, who organized an integrated public transportation effort in the south, and who were repeatedly met with violence by whites, including law enforcement officers, both federal and state. Kennedy assigned federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders as an alternative to using federal troops or uncooperative FBI agents. Robert Kennedy, speaking for the president, urged the Freedom Riders to "get off the buses and leave the matter to peaceful settlement in the courts."[175]
In September 1962, James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi, but was prevented from entering. Attorney General Robert Kennedy responded by sending 400 federal marshals, while President Kennedy reluctantly sent 3,000 troops after the situation on campus turned violent.[176] The Ole Miss riot of 1962 left two dead and dozens injured, but Meredith did finally enroll in his first class. On November 20, 1962, Kennedy signed Executive Order 11063, prohibiting racial discrimination in federally supported housing or "related facilities".[177]
In early 1963, Kennedy related to Martin Luther King, Jr., about the prospects for civil rights legislation: "If we get into a long fight over this in Congress, it will bottleneck everything else, and we will still get no bill."[178] However, civil rights clashes were on the rise that year.[179] Brother Robert and Ted Sorenson pressed Kennedy to take more initiative on the legislative front.[180] On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy intervened when Alabama Governor George Wallace blocked the doorway to the University of Alabama to stop two African American students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from attending. Wallace moved aside only after being confronted by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and the Alabama National Guard, which had just been federalized by order of the President, and which had hours earlier been under Wallace's command. That evening Kennedy gave his famous civil rights address on national television and radio, launching his initiative for civil rights legislation – to provide equal access to public schools and other facilities, and greater protection of voting rights.[181][182] His proposals became part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The day ended with the murder of a NAACP leader, Medgar Evers, in front of his home in Mississippi.[183] As the president had predicted, the day after his TV speech, and in reaction to it, House Majority leader Carl Albert called to advise him that his two year signature effort in Congress to combat poverty in Appalachia (Area Redevelopment Administration) had been defeated, primarily by the votes of Southern Democrats and Republicans.[184]
Kennedy signed the executive order creating the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women on December 14, 1961.[185] Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt led the commission. The Commission statistics revealed that women were also experiencing discrimination; their final report documenting legal and cultural barriers was issued in October 1963.[186] Earlier, on June 10, 1963, Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, a federal law amending the Fair Labor Standards Act, aimed at abolishing wage disparity based on sex.[187]
Over a hundred thousand, predominantly African Americans, gathered in Washington for the civil rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. Kennedy feared the March would have a negative effect on the prospects for the civil rights bills in Congress, and declined an invitation to speak. He turned over some of the details of the government's involvement to the Dept. of Justice, which channelled hundreds of thousands of dollars to the six sponsors of the March, including the N.A.A.C.P. and Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). To ensure a peaceful demonstration, the organizers and the president personally edited speeches which were inflammatory and agreed the March would be held on a Wednesday and would be over at 4:00 pm. Thousands of troops were placed on standby. Kennedy watched King's speech on TV and was very impressed. The March was considered a "triumph of managed protest", and not one arrest relating to the demonstration occurred. Afterwards, the March leaders accepted an invitation to the White House to meet with Kennedy and photos were taken. Kennedy felt the March was a victory for him as well and bolstered the chances for his civil rights bill.[188]
Nevertheless, the struggle was far from over. Three weeks later, a bomb exploded on a Sunday at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; at the end of the day six children had died in the explosion and aftermath.[189] As a result of this resurgent violence, the civil rights legislation underwent some drastic amendments that critically endangered any prospects for passage of the bill, to the outrage of the president. Kennedy called the congressional leaders to the White House and by the following day the original bill, without the additions, had enough votes to get it out of the House committee.[190]
Civil liberties
In 1963, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who hated civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and viewed him as an upstart troublemaker,[191] presented the Kennedy Administration with allegations that some of King's close confidants and advisers were communists. Concerned that the allegations, if made public, would derail the Administration's civil rights initiatives, Robert Kennedy and the president both warned King to discontinue the suspect associations. After the associations continued, Robert Kennedy felt compelled to issue a written directive authorizing the FBI to wiretap King and other leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King's civil rights organization.[192] Although Kennedy only gave written approval for limited wiretapping of King's phones "on a trial basis, for a month or so",[193] Hoover extended the clearance so his men were "unshackled" to look for evidence in any areas of King's life they deemed worthy.[194] The wire tapping continued through June 1966 and was revealed in 1968.[195]
Immigration
John F. Kennedy initially proposed an overhaul of American immigration policy that later was to become the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, sponsored by Kennedy's brother Senator Edward Kennedy. It dramatically shifted the source of immigration from Northern and Western European countries towards immigration from Latin America and Asia and shifted the emphasis of selection of immigrants towards facilitating family reunification.[196] Kennedy wanted to dismantle the selection of immigrants based on country of origin and saw this as an extension of his civil rights policies.[197]
Space program
Further information: Space Race and Space policy of the United States
The Apollo program was conceived early in 1960, during the Eisenhower administration, as a follow-up to Project Mercury. While NASA went ahead with planning for Apollo, funding for the program was far from certain given Eisenhower's opposition to manned spaceflight. Kennedy's advisors speculated that a moon flight would be prohibitively expensive,[198] but he postponed the decision out of deference to his vice president. Johnson had been appointed chairman of the U.S. Space Council[199] and strongly supported NASA because its new Manned Spacecraft Center was located in Texas.[200] In his January 1961 State of the Union address, Kennedy had suggested international cooperation in space. Khrushchev declined, as the Soviets did not wish to reveal the status of their rocketry and space capabilities.[201]
On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space, reinforcing American fears about being left behind in a technological competition with the Soviet Union.[202] Kennedy was eager for the U.S. to take the lead in the Space Race for reasons of strategy and prestige. He first announced the goal of landing a man on the Moon in the speech to a Joint Session of Congress on May 25, 1961, stating:
"First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish."[203] Full text
Kennedy made a speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962, in which he said:
"No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space." ... "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."[204] Full text
On November 21, 1962, in a cabinet meeting with NASA administrator James E. Webb and other officials, Kennedy explained that the moon shot was important for reasons of international prestige, and that the expense was justified.[205] Johnson assured him that lessons learned from the space program had military value as well. Costs for the Apollo program were expected to reach $40 billion.[206]
In a September 1963 speech before the United Nations, Kennedy urged cooperation between the Soviets and Americans in space. Khrushchev again declined, and the Soviets did not commit to a manned moon mission until 1964.[207] On July 20, 1969, almost six years after Kennedy's death, Apollo 11 landed the first manned spacecraft on the Moon.
Native American relations
Further information: Kinzua Dam#Native Americans and Seneca nation#Kinzua Dam
Construction of the Kinzua Dam flooded 10,000 acres (4,047 ha) of Seneca nation land that they had occupied under the Treaty of 1794, and forced 600 Seneca to relocate to Salamanca, New York. Kennedy was asked by the American Civil Liberties Union to intervene and halt the project, but he declined, citing a critical need for flood control. He expressed concern about the plight of the Seneca, and directed government agencies to assist in obtaining more land, damages, and assistance to help mitigate their displacement.[208][209]
Assassination
Main article: Assassination of John F. Kennedy
President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, at 12:30 pm Central Standard Time on November 22, 1963, while on a political trip to Texas to smooth over frictions in the Democratic Party between liberals Ralph Yarborough and Don Yarborough (no relation) and conservative John Connally.[210] He was shot once in the upper back and killed with a final shot to the head. He was taken to Parkland Hospital for emergency medical treatment, but pronounced dead at 1:00 pm. Only 46, President Kennedy died younger than any U.S. president to date. Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the Texas School Book Depository from which the shots were suspected to have been fired, was arrested on charges for the murder of a local police officer and was subsequently charged with the assassination of Kennedy. He denied shooting anyone, claiming he was a patsy,[211][212] but was killed by Jack Ruby on November 24, before he could be indicted or tried. Ruby was then arrested and convicted for the murder of Oswald. Ruby successfully appealed his conviction and death sentence but became ill and died of cancer on January 3, 1967, while the date for his new trial was being set.[213]
President Johnson created the Warren Commission—chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren—to investigate the assassination, which concluded that Oswald was the lone assassin. The results of this investigation are disputed by many.[214] The assassination proved to be an important moment in U.S. history because of its impact on the nation and the ensuing political repercussions.
Funeral
Main article: State funeral of John F. Kennedy
A Requiem Mass was held for Kennedy at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle on November 25, 1963. Afterwards, John F. Kennedy's body was buried in a small plot, (20 by 30 ft.), in Arlington National Cemetery. Over a period of 3 years, (1964–1966), an estimated 16 million people had visited his grave. On March 14, 1967, Kennedy's body was moved to a permanent burial plot and memorial at the Cemetery. The funeral was officiated by Father John J. Cavanaugh.[215] It was from this memorial that the graves of both Robert and Ted were modeled.
The honor guard at JFK's graveside was the 37th Cadet Class of the Irish Army. JFK was greatly impressed by the Irish Cadets on his last official visit to Ireland, so much so that Jackie Kennedy requested the Irish Army to be the honor guard at the funeral.[216]
Kennedy's wife, Jacqueline and their two deceased minor children were buried with him later. His brother, Senator Robert Kennedy, was buried nearby in June 1968. In August 2009, his brother, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, was also buried near his two brothers. JFK's grave is lit with an "Eternal Flame." Kennedy and William Howard Taft are the only two U.S. Presidents buried at Arlington.[217][218] According to the JFK Library, I Have a Rendezvous with Death, by Alan Seeger "was one of John F. Kennedy's favorite poems and he often asked his wife to recite it."[219]
Administration, Cabinet, and judicial appointments 1961–1963
| Office | Name | Term |
|---|---|---|
| President | John F. Kennedy | 1961–1963 |
| Vice President | Lyndon B. Johnson | 1961–1963 |
| State | Dean Rusk | 1961–1963 |
| Treasury | C. Douglas Dillon | 1961–1963 |
| Defense | Robert McNamara | 1961–1963 |
| Justice | Robert F. Kennedy | 1961–1963 |
| Postmaster General | J. Edward Day | 1961–1963 |
| Postmaster General | John A. Gronouski | 1963 |
| Interior | Stewart Udall | 1961–1963 |
| Agriculture | Orville Freeman | 1961–1963 |
| Commerce | Luther H. Hodges | 1961–1963 |
| Labor | Arthur Goldberg | 1961–1962 |
| Labor | W. Willard Wirtz | 1962–1963 |
| Health, Education, and Welfare | Abraham A. Ribicoff | 1961–1962 |
| Health, Education, and Welfare | Anthony J. Celebrezze | 1962–1963 |
Judicial appointments
Supreme Court
Main article: John F. Kennedy Supreme Court candidates
Kennedy appointed the following Justices to the Supreme Court of the United States:
- Byron White – 1962
- Arthur Goldberg – 1962
Further information: List of nominations to the Supreme Court of the United States
Other courts
Main article: List of federal judges appointed by John F. Kennedy
In addition to his two Supreme Court appointments, Kennedy appointed 21 judges to the United States Courts of Appeals, and 102 judges to the United States district courts.
Image, social life and family
Further information: Kennedy family
John Kennedy met his future wife, Jacqueline Bouvier, when he was a congressman. Charles L. Bartlett, a journalist, introduced the pair at a dinner party.[220] They were married a year after he was elected senator, on September 12, 1953.[221] Kennedy and his wife were younger in comparison to the presidents and first ladies that preceded them, and both were popular in ways more common to pop singers and movie stars than politicians, influencing fashion trends and becoming the subjects of numerous photo spreads in popular magazines. Although Eisenhower had allowed presidential press conferences to be filmed for television, Kennedy was the first president to ask for them to be broadcast live and made good use of the medium.[222] Jacqueline brought new art and furniture to the White House, and directed its restoration. They invited a range of artists, writers and intellectuals to rounds of White House dinners, raising the profile of the arts in America. The Kennedy family is one of the most established political families in the United States, having produced a President, three senators, and multiple other Representatives, both on the federal and state level. John Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was a prominent American businessman and political figure, serving in multiple roles, including Ambassador to the United Kingdom, from 1938 to 1940.
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Outside on the White House lawn, the Kennedys established a swimming pool and tree house, while Caroline attended a preschool along with 10 other children inside the home.
The president was closely tied to popular culture, emphasized by songs such as "Twisting at the White House." Vaughn Meader's First Family comedy album—an album parodying the President, First Lady, their family and administration—sold about four million copies. On May 19, 1962, Marilyn Monroe sang "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" at a large party in Madison Square Garden, celebrating Kennedy's upcoming forty-fifth birthday. The charisma of Kennedy and his family led to the figurative designation of "Camelot" for his administration, credited by his wife to his affection for the then contemporary Broadway musical of the same name.[223]
Behind the glamorous facade, the Kennedys also experienced many personal tragedies. Jacqueline had a miscarriage in 1955 and a stillbirth in 1956. Their newborn son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, died in August 1963. Kennedy had two children who survived infancy. One of the fundamental aspects of the Kennedy family is a tragic strain which has run through the family, as a result of the violent and untimely deaths of many of its members. John's eldest brother, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., died in World War II, at the age of 29. It was Joe Jr. who was originally to carry the family's hopes for the Presidency. Then both John himself, and his brother Robert died as a result of assassinations. Edward had brushes with death, the first in a plane crash and the second as a result of a car accident, known as the Chappaquiddick incident. Edward died at age 77, on August 25, 2009, from the effects of a malignant brain tumor.
Years after Kennedy's death, it was revealed that in September 1947, at age 30, and while in his first term in Congress, he was diagnosed by Sir Daniel Davis at The London Clinic with Addison's disease, a rare endocrine disorder. In 1966, his White House doctor, Janet Travell, revealed that Kennedy also had hypothyroidism. The presence of two endocrine diseases raises the possibility that Kennedy had autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 2 (APS 2).[224] He also suffered from chronic and severe back pain, for which he had surgery and was written up in the AMA's Archives of Surgery. Kennedy's condition may even have had diplomatic repercussions, as he appears to have been taking a combination of drugs to treat severe pain during the 1961 Vienna Summit with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The combination included hormones, animal organ cells, steroids, vitamins, enzymes, and amphetamines, and potential side effects included hyperactivity, hypertension, impaired judgment, nervousness, and significant mood swings.[225] Kennedy at one time was regularly seen by no fewer than three doctors, one of whom, Max Jacobson was unknown to the other two, as his mode of treatment was controversial[226] and used for the most severe bouts of pain.[227] There was often disagreement among his doctors, as in late 1961, over the proper balance of medication and exercise, with the president preferring the former as he was short on time and desired immediate relief.[149] Details of these and other medical problems were not publicly disclosed during Kennedy's lifetime.[228]
Caroline Bouvier Kennedy was born in 1957 and is the only surviving member of JFK's immediate family. John F. Kennedy, Jr. was born in 1960, just a few weeks after his father was elected. John died in 1999, when the small plane he was piloting crashed en route to Martha's Vineyard, killing him, his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and his sister-in-law.[229]
In October 1951, during his third term as Massachusetts's 11th district congressman, the then 34-year-old Kennedy embarked on a seven-week Asian trip to India, Japan, Vietnam, and Israel with his then 25-year-old brother Robert (who had just graduated from law school four months earlier) and his then 27-year-old sister Patricia. Because of their eight-year separation in age, the two brothers had previously seen little of each other. This 25,000-mile (40,000 km) trip was the first extended time they had spent together and resulted in their becoming best friends, in addition to being brothers. Robert was campaign manager for Kennedy's successful 1952 Senate campaign and later, his successful 1960 presidential campaign. The two brothers worked closely together from 1957 to 1959 on the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor and Management Field, when Robert was its chief counsel. During Kennedy's presidency, Robert served in his cabinet as Attorney General and was his closest advisor.[230]
Kennedy was a Life Member of the National Rifle Association.[231][232] Kennedy came in third (behind Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mother Teresa) in Gallup's List of Widely Admired People of the 20th century.[233][234]
Extra-marital relationships
Kennedy reportedly had affairs with a number of women, including Marilyn Monroe,[235] Gunilla von Post,[236] Judith Campbell,[237] Mary Pinchot Meyer,[238] Marlene Dietrich,[239] and Mimi Alford.[240] Doctors speculated that the drugs the president required for Addison's disease had the side effect of increasing his virility.[149] The president remarked to UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, "I wonder how it is for you, Harold? If I don't have a woman for three days, I get terrible headaches."[241] Kennedy inspired affection and loyalty from the members of his team and his supporters.[242] According to Reeves, this included "the logistics of Kennedy's liaisons ... [which] required secrecy and devotion rare in the annals of the energetic service demanded by successful politicians."[243] Kennedy believed that his friendly relationship with members of the press would help protect him from revelations about his sex life.[244]
Ancestors
The Kennedy family originally came from Dunganstown, County Wexford.[245] In 1848, Patrick Kennedy left his farm and boarded a ship in New Ross bound for Liverpool on his way to Boston.[246] It was here he met the woman he was to marry, Bridget Murphy.[247] Patrick Kennedy came to Boston, took a job as a migrant worker, and died within eight or nine years, of cholera.[248] He left behind a widow and children to carry on.
Ancestors of John F. Kennedy
Legacy
Television became the primary source by which people were kept informed of events surrounding John F. Kennedy's assassination. In fact, television started to come of age before the assassination. On September 2, 1963, Kennedy helped inaugurate network television's first half hour evening newscast in an interview CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite for the newscast.[249]
Newspapers were kept as souvenirs rather than sources of updated information. In this sense it was the first major "TV news event" of its kind, the TV coverage uniting the nation, interpreting what went on and creating memories of this space in time. All three major U.S. television networks suspended their regular schedules and switched to all-news coverage from November 22 through November 25, 1963, being on the air for 70 hours, making it the longest uninterrupted news event on American TV until 9/11.[250] Kennedy's state funeral procession and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald were all broadcast live in America and in other places around the world. The state funeral was the first of three in a span of 12 months. The other two were for General Douglas MacArthur and Herbert Hoover. All three have two things in common: the commanding general of the Military District of Washington during those funerals was Army Major General Philip C. Wehle and the riderless horse was Black Jack, who also served in that role during Lyndon B. Johnson's funeral.
The assassination had an effect on many people, not only in the U.S. but around the world. Many vividly remember where they were when first learning of the news that Kennedy was assassinated, as with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 before it and the September 11 attacks after it. UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson said of the assassination: "all of us... will bear the grief of his death until the day of ours." Many people have also spoken of the shocking news, compounded by the pall of uncertainty about the identity of the assassin(s), the possible instigators and the causes of the killing as an end to innocence, and in retrospect it has been coalesced with other changes of the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, especially the Vietnam War.
Special Forces have a special bond with Kennedy. "It was President Kennedy who was responsible for the rebuilding of the Special Forces and giving us back our Green Beret," said Forrest Lindley, a writer for the newspaper Stars and Stripes who served with Special Forces in Vietnam.[c] This bond was shown at JFK's funeral. At the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of JFK's death, Gen. Michael D. Healy, the last commander of Special Forces in Vietnam, spoke at Arlington Cemetery. Later, a wreath in the form of the Green Beret would be placed on the grave, continuing a tradition that began the day of his funeral when a sergeant in charge of a detail of Special Forces men guarding the grave placed his beret on the coffin.
Kennedy was the first of six Presidents to have served in the U.S. Navy,[251] and one of the enduring legacies of his administration was the creation in 1961 of another special forces command, the Navy SEALs,[252] which Kennedy enthusiastically supported.[253]
Ultimately, the death of President Kennedy and the ensuing confusion surrounding the facts of his assassination are of political and historical importance insofar as they marked a turning point and decline in the faith of the American people in the political establishment—a point made by commentators from Gore Vidal to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and implied by Oliver Stone in several of his films, such as his landmark 1991 JFK.
Kennedy moved further on civil rights than his predecessors. In a radio and TV address to the nation in June 1963 – a century after Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation— Kennedy became the first president to call on all Americans to embrace civil rights as a moral imperative. The year after JFK's assassination, President Johnson pushed the landmark Civil Rights Act through a bitterly divided Congress by invoking the slain president's memory.
Kennedy's continuation of Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower's policies of giving economic and military aid to South Vietnam left the door open for President Johnson's escalation of the conflict.[254] At the time of Kennedy's death, no final policy decision had been made as to Vietnam, leading historians, cabinet members and writers to continue to disagree on whether the Vietnam conflict would have escalated to the point it did had he survived.[255][122] The Vietnam War contributed greatly to a decade of national difficulties and disappointment on the political landscape.
Many of Kennedy's speeches (especially his inaugural address) are considered iconic; and despite his relatively short term in office and lack of major legislative changes coming to fruition during his term, Americans regularly vote him as one of the best presidents, in the same league as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Some excerpts of Kennedy's inaugural address are engraved on a plaque at his grave at Arlington.
He was posthumously awarded the Pacem in Terris Award. It was named after a 1963 encyclical letter by Pope John XXIII that calls upon all people of goodwill to secure peace among all nations. Pacem in Terris is Latin for 'Peace on Earth.'
President Kennedy is the only president to have predeceased both his mother and father. He is also the only president to have predeceased a grandparent. His grandmother, Mary Josephine Hannon Fitzgerald, died in 1964, just over eight months after his assassination.
Throughout the English-speaking world, the given name Kennedy has sometimes been used in honour of President Kennedy, as well his brother Robert.[256]
Eponyms
- John F. Kennedy International Airport, American facility (renamed from Idlewild in December 1963) in New York City's Queens County; nation's busiest international gateway
- John F. Kennedy Memorial Airport American facility in Ashland County, Wisconsin, near city of Ashland
- John F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge American seven-lane transportation hub across Ohio River; completed in late 1963, the bridge links Kentucky and Indiana
- John F. Kennedy School of Government, American institution (renamed from Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration in 1966)
- John F. Kennedy Space Center, U.S. government installation that manages and operates America's astronaut launch facilities in Titusville near Coco Beach, Fl.
- John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School – trains United States Army personnel for the United States Army Special Operations Command and Army Special Operation Forces at Fort Bragg outside Fayetteville, N.C.
- John F. Kennedy University, American private educational institution founded in California in 1964; locations in Pleasant Hill, Campbell, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz
- USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67), U.S. Navy aircraft carrier ordered in April 1964, launched May 1967, decommissioned August 2007; nicknamed "Big John"
- John F. Kennedy High School is the name of many secondary schools.
- USS John F. Kennedy (CVN-79), U.S. Navy aircraft carrier to begin construction in 2012, and to be placed in commission in 2018.
Memorials
Main article: Memorials to John F. Kennedy
Coat of arms
In 1961, Kennedy was presented with a grant of arms for all the descendants of Patrick Kennedy from the Chief Herald of Ireland. The design of the arms strongly alludes to symbols in the coats of arms of the O'Kennedys of Ormonde and the Fitzgeralds of Desmond, from whom the family is believed to be descended. The crest is an armored hand holding four arrows between two olive branches, elements taken from the coat of arms of the United States of America and also symbolic of Kennedy and his brothers.
Kennedy received a signet ring engraved with his arms for his 44th birthday as a gift from his wife, and the arms were incorporated into the seal of the USS John F. Kennedy. Following his assassination, Kennedy was honored by the Canadian government by having a mountain, Mount Kennedy, named for him, which his brother, Robert Kennedy, climbed in 1965 to plant a banner of the arms at the summit.[257]
Media
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President Kennedy comments on the possible prevention of the Cold War
Kennedy's message to Turkish President Cemal Gursel and The Turkish People on the Anniversary of the Death of Kemal Ataturk, November 10, 1963 (accompanying text)
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See also
- Abraham Zapruder, photographer of the primary film of assassination, the Zapruder film.
- Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
- History of the United States (1945–1964)
- Jesuit Ivy
- The John F. Kennedy Memorial Park (in Ireland)
- Kennedy tragedies
- Kennedy Doctrine
- Kennedy family
- Lincoln–Kennedy coincidences urban legend
- List of assassinated American politicians
- List of Presidents of the United States
- List of Presidents of the United States who died in office
- Operation Northwoods
- Orville Nix, photographer of another film of the assassination
- "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" retort by Senator Lloyd Bentsen, 1988 VP debate
- US Presidents on US postage stamps
- Kennedy half dollar
Notes
- ^ Theodore Roosevelt was 9 months younger when he first assumed the presidency on September 14, 1901, but he was not elected to the presidency until 1904, when he was 46. Jewell 2005, p. 207.
- ^ Two hundred thousand gallons of defoliant were shipped, in violation of the Geneva Accords. By the end of 1962, American military personnel had increased from 2,600 to 11,500; 109 men were killed compared to 14 the previous year. During 1962, Viet Cong troops increased from 15,000 to 24,000. Depending on which assessment Kennedy accepted (Department of Defense or State) there had been zero or modest progress in countering the increase in communist aggression in return for an expanded U.S. involvement. Reeves 1993, p. 283.
- ^ Kennedy reversed the Defense Department rulings that prohibited the Special Forces wearing of the Green Beret. Reeves 1993, p. 116.
References
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- ^ Dallek 2003, p. 109.
- ^ Carroll, Wallace (January 21, 1961). "A Time of Change Facing Kennedy; Themes of Inaugural Note Future of Nation Under Challenge of New Era". The New York Times: p. 9. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60915FE385B147A93C3AB178AD85F458685F9&scp=1&sq=A%20Time%20of%20Change%20Facing%20Kennedy&st=cse. Retrieved February 23, 2012.
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- ^ Kennedy, John F. (July 15, 1960). "Address of Senator John F. Kennedy Accepting the Democratic Party Nomination for the Presidency of the United States". John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/JFK-Speeches/Address-of-Senator-John-F-Kennedy-Accepting-the-Democratic-Party-Nomination-for-the-Presidency-of-th.aspx. Retrieved February 22, 2012.
- ^ Kennedy, John F. (June 18, 2002). "Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association". American Rhetoric. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkhoustonministers.html. Retrieved September 17, 2007.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 15.
- ^ Tyner Allen, Erika. "The Kennedy-Nixon Presidential Debates, 1960". museum.tv. http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/K/htmlK/kennedy-nixon/kennedy-nixon.htm. Retrieved September 18, 2007.
- ^ Dudley & Shiraev 2008, p. 83.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 21.
- ^ Kennedy, John F. (January 20, 1961). "Inaugural Address". John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations/Inaugural-Address.aspx. Retrieved February 22, 2012.
- ^ Kempe 2011, p. 52.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 22.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 23, 25.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 46–47.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 60–61.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 56.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 66.
- ^ Kempe 2011, pp. 76–78.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 145.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 161–171.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 175.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 185.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 201.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 213.
- ^ "Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at Saint Anselm's College, Manchester, New Hampshire, March 5, 1960". JFKlibrary.org. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum. March 5, 1960. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/JFK-Speeches/Remarks-of-Senator-John-F-Kennedy-at-Saint-Anselms-College-Manchester-New-Hampshire-March-5-1960.aspx. Retrieved March 28, 2010.
- ^ Schlesinger 2002, pp. 233, 238.
- ^ Schlesinger 2002, p. 238.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 69–73.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 71, 673.
- ^ Schlesinger 2002, pp. 268–294, 838–839.
- ^ Jean Edward Smith, "Bay of Pigs: The Unanswered Questions", The Nation, April 13, 1964.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 95–97.
- ^ Schlesinger 2002, pp. 290, 295.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 264.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 345.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 245.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 387.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 388.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 389.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 390.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 403.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 426.
- ^ Kenney 2000, pp. 184–186.
- ^ Kenney 2000, p. 189.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 425.
- ^ JFK's "Address on the First Anniversary of the Alliance for Progress," White House reception for diplomatic cors of the Latin American republics, March 13, 1962. Public Papers of the Presidents – John F. Kennedy (1962), p. 223.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 140–142.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 152.
- ^ Dallek 2003, pp. 338–339.
- ^ Schlesinger 2002, pp. 606–607.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 75.
- ^ Karnow 1991, pp. 230, 268.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 119.
- ^ a b Dunnigan & Nofi 1999, p. 257.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 240.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 242.
- ^ "Vietnam War". College Peace Collection. http://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/conscientiousobjection/OverviewVietnamWar.htm.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 281.
- ^ McNamara 2000, p. 143.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 259.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 484.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 558.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 559.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 562–563.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 573.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 577.
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- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 595.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 602.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 609.
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- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 612.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 617.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 638.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 650.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 651.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 660.
- ^ Ellis, Joseph J. (2000). "Making Vietnam History". Reviews in American History 28 (4): 625–629. doi:10.1353/rah.2000.0068.
- ^ Talbot, David (June 21, 2007). "Warrior For Peace". Time Magazine. http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1635958_1635999_1634954-5,00.html. Retrieved March 1, 2012.
- ^ Blight & Lang 2005, p. 276.
- ^ Bundy, McGeorge (October 11, 1963). "National Security Action Memorandum # 263". JFK Lancer. http://www.jfklancer.com/NSAM263.html. Retrieved February 19, 2012.
- ^ Dallek 2003, p. 680.
- ^ "1963 Commencement" June 10, 1963. Retrieved February 14, 2010.
- ^ Steel, Ronald (May 25, 2003). "The World: New Chapter, Old Debate; Would Kennedy Have Quit Vietnam?". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/25/weekinreview/the-world-new-chapter-old-debate-would-kennedy-have-quit-vietnam.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm. Retrieved January 27, 2012.
- ^ a b Matthews 2011, pp. 393, 394.
- ^ Karnow 1991, pp. 339, 343.
- ^ Generations Divide Over Military Action in Iraq. Pew Research Center. October 2002. Archived from the original on February 2, 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080202203114rn_1/people-press.org/commentary/display.php3?AnalysisID=57.
- ^ Bundy, McGeorge (November 26, 1963). "National Security Action Memorandum Number 273". JFK Lancer. http://www.jfklancer.com/NSAM273.html. Retrieved February 19, 2012.
- ^ "NSAM 273: South Vietnam". http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/NSAMs/nsam273.asp. Retrieved February 19, 2012.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 513–514.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 514.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 534.
- ^ Dallek 2003, p. 624.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 537.
- ^ a b Salt 2008, p. 201.
- ^ a b Salt 2008, p. 202.
- ^ Salt 2008, p. 203.
- ^ Salt 2008, pp. 201–205.
- ^ JFK Library, Memorandum for The President from Robert W. Komer, February 8, 1963 (JFK, NSF, Countries, Iraq, Box 117, "Iraq 1/63-2/63", document 18), p. 1.
- ^ Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (20 November 1975), "C. Institutionalizing Assassination: the "Executive Action" capability," Alleged Assassination Plots involving Foreign Leaders, p. 181, http://history-matters.com/archive/church/reports/ir/contents.htm
- ^ Morris, Roger (March 14, 2003). "A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making". The New York Times (New York: NYTC). ISSN 0362-4331. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/14/opinion/a-tyrant-40-years-in-the-making.html. Retrieved February 21, 2012.
- ^ "The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq", Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978; Peter and Marion Sluglett, "Iraq Since 1958" London, I.B. Taurus, 1990
- ^ Reich, Bernard. Political Leaders of the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa: A Biographical Dictionary, Greenwood Press, 1990. p. 241. ISBN 0313262136.
- ^ Frontline. "James Chritchfield Interview." 1995. PBS. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/critchfield.html
- ^ Dreyfuss, Richard. Devil's Game: How The US Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. 2005. p. 3. ISBN 0805076522. Dreyfuss regards the 1963 coup in Iraq as an internal affair, in contrast to the 1953 coup in Iran, which he believes the CIA played a major role. Moreover, Dreyfuss claims that the US opposed the Ba’ath Party’s rise in 1968, and used the Shah’s Iran to balance out Iraq.
- ^ Sorensen 1966, p. 656.
- ^ "1963: Warm welcome for JFK in Ireland". BBC. June 27, 1963. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/27/newsid_4461000/4461115.stm. Retrieved February 23, 2012.
- ^ Cowell, Alan (December 29, 2006). "JFK faced 3 death threats during '63 visit to Ireland". Deseret News (Salt Lake City). http://www.deseretnews.com/article/650218799/JFK-faced-3-death-threats-during-63-visit-to-Ireland.html. Retrieved February 23, 2012.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 552.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 227.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 229.
- ^ a b c Reeves 1993, p. 243.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 542.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 548.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 550.
- ^ Jaikumar, Arjun (July 10, 2011). "On taxes, let's be Kennedy Democrats. Or Eisenhower Republicans. Or Nixon Republicans.". Daily Kos. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/10/992860/-On-taxes,-lets-be-Kennedy-Democrats-Or-Eisenhower-Republicans-Or-NixonRepublicans-. Retrieved February 23, 2012.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 453.
- ^ Barnes 2007, p. 8.
- ^ Frum 2000, p. 293.
- ^ Frum 2000, p. 324.
- ^ a b c "BEA: Quarterly GDP figures by sector, 1953–1964". United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis. http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=6&ViewSeries=NO&Java=no&Request3Place=N&3Place=N&FromView=YES&Freq=Qtr&FirstYear=1953&LastYear=1964&3Place=N&Update=Update&JavaBox=no. Retrieved February 23, 2012.
- ^ "Consumer and Gross Domestic Price Indices: 1913 to 2002" (PDF). U.S. Census Bureau. 2003. http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-36.pdf. Retrieved February 23, 2012.
- ^ "Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1964" (PDF). U.S. Department of Commerce. July 1964. http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1964-01.pdf. Retrieved March 28, 2010.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 298.
- ^ "The Presidency: Smiting the Foe". TIME. April 20, 1962. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,873526-3,00.html.
- ^ a b O'Brien 2005, p. 645.
- ^ "Inflation in Steel". New York Times. April 12, 1962. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00615FD3F5C117B93C0A8178FD85F468685F9&scp=2&sq=Inflation%20in%20Steel&st=cse.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 300.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 318–320.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 277.
- ^ "Executions 1790 to 1963". Web.archive.org. April 13, 2003. Archived from the original on April 13, 2003. http://web.archive.org/web/20030413002030/http://users.bestweb.net/~rg/execution/DATA%20FEDERAL.htm. Retrieved February 23, 2012.
- ^ Goldberg, Carey (May 6, 2001). "Federal Executions Have Been Rare but May Increase". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/us/federal-executions-have-been-rare-but-may-increase.html. Retrieved February 23, 2012.
- ^ Riechmann, Deb (July 29, 2008). "Bush: Former Army cook's crimes warrant execution". ABC News. Associated Press. Archived from the original on July 31, 2008. http://web.archive.org/web/20080731085456/http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=5468945. Retrieved February 23, 2012.
- ^ "Legislative Summary: District of Columbia". John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/Legislative-Summary-Main-Page/Legislative-Summary/District-of-Columbia.aspx. Retrieved February 23, 2012.
- ^ "Norton Letter to U.S. Attorney Says Death Penalty Trial That Begins Today Part of Troubling and Futile Pattern". Office of Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. January 8, 2007. http://www.norton.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=478. Retrieved February 23, 2012.
- ^ Dallek 2003, pp. 292–293.
- ^ Bryant 2006, pp. 60, 66.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 123–126.
- ^ Bryant 2006, p. 71.
- ^ Dallek 2003, p. 580.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 467.
- ^ In the first week of June there were 160 incidents of violence. Reeves 1993, p. 515.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 515.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 521–523.
- ^ Kennedy, John F.. "Civil Rights Address". AmericanRhetoric.com. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkcivilrights.htm. Retrieved September 20, 2007.
- ^ Schlesinger 2002, p. 966.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 524.
- ^ "John F. Kennedy: Executive Order 10980". http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=58918/. Retrieved January 25, 2011.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 433.
- ^ "The Equal Pay Act Turns 40". Archive.eeoc.gov. http://archive.eeoc.gov/epa/anniversary/epa-40.html. Retrieved March 26, 2011.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 580–584.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 599–560.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 628–631.
- ^ "The FBI's War on King". American Public Radio. http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/king/d1.html.
- ^ Frum 2000, p. 41.
- ^ Herst 2007, p. 372.
- ^ Herst 2007, pp. 372–374.
- ^ Garrow, David J. (2002-07/08). "The FBI and Martin Luther King". The Atlantic Monthly. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200207/garrow.
- ^ Ludden, Jennifer. "Q&A: Sen. Kennedy on Immigration, Then & Now". NPR. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5393857. Retrieved September 20, 2007.
- ^ "From Press Office: Senator John F. Kennedy, Immigration and Naturalization Laws, Hyannis Inn Motel, Hyannis, MA". americanpresidency.org. August 6, 1960. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=60440. Retrieved September 20, 2007.
- ^ Dallek 2003, p. 392.
- ^ Kenney 2000, pp. 115–116.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 138.
- ^ Dallek 2003, p. 502.
- ^ Dallek 2003, p. 393.
- ^ Kennedy, John F. (1961). "Apollo Expeditions to the Moon: Chapter 2". history.nasa.gov. http://history.nasa.gov/SP-350/ch-2-1.html. Retrieved February 26, 2012.
- ^ Kennedy, John F. (September 12, 1962). "President John F. Kennedy: The Space Effort". Rice University. http://webcast.rice.edu/speeches/19620912kennedy.html. Retrieved February 25, 2012.
- ^ Selverstone, Marc. "JFK and the Space Race". White House Tapes–Presidential Recordings Program, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia. http://whitehousetapes.net/exhibit/jfk-and-space-race. Retrieved February 26, 2012.
- ^ Dallek 2003, p. 652–653.
- ^ Dallek 2003, p. 654.
- ^ Bilharz 2002, p. 55.
- ^ Kennedy, John F. (August 11, 1961). "320 – Letter to the President of the Seneca Nation of Indians Concerning the Kinzua Dam on the Allegheny River". The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=8279. Retrieved February 25, 2012.
- ^ Russ. "26, 2009#P12844 Life in Legacy". Lifeinlegacy.com. http://www.lifeinlegacy.com/display.php?weekof=September. Retrieved March 28, 2010.
- ^ Lee Oswald claiming innocence (film), Youtube.com
- ^ Warren Commission Hearings, vol. 20, p. 366, Kantor Exhibit No. 3 – Handwritten notes made by Seth Kantor concerning events surrounding the assassination
- ^ "Jack Ruby: Biography". http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKruby.htm. Retrieved October 8, 2010.
- ^ Gus Russo and Stephen Molton "Did Castro OK the Kennedy Assassination?," American Heritage, Winter 2009.
- ^ Bugliosi 2007, p. 211.
- ^ Bugliosi 2007, p. 312.
- ^ This Day in History 1967: JFK's body moved to permanent gravesite, History.com. Retrieved April 8, 2008.
- ^ "Broadcast Yourself". YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IHYSwK9Xac. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
- ^ "I Have a Rendezvous with Death"
- ^ Cover story, Time magazine, January 20, 1961
- ^ Specious allegations in 1997 by UK journalist Terry O'Hanlon "JFK The Bigamist... The Truth At Last; Kennedy was already married when he got wed to Jackie...". Sunday Mirror. July 27, 1997. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/JFK+THE+BIGAMIST...+THE+TRUTH+AT+LAST%3b+Kennedy+was+already+married...-a061139564. Retrieved October 31, 2010. and by author Seymour Hersh Reingold, Joyce (March 26, 2008). "JFK 'Secret Marriage' A Story With Legs". Palm Beach Daily News. http://www.palmbeachdailynews.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/palmbeach/pbupd8/entries/2008/03/26/durie_appleton_spent_a_lifetim.html. Retrieved October 31, 2010. that Kennedy had married previously have been soundly disproven. Reeves states that Ben Bradlee, then at Newsweek, inspected FBI files on it, and confirmed the falsehood. Reeves 1993, p. 348; for further refutation, see O'Brien 2005, p. 706.
- ^ Rouse, Robert (March 15, 2006). "Happy Anniversary to the first scheduled presidential press conference – 93 years young!". American Chronicle. http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/6883.
- ^ The Personal Papers of Theodore H. White (1915–1986): Series 11. Camelot Documents, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum
- ^ Mandel, Lee R. (2009). "Endocrine and Autoimmune Aspects of the Health History of John F. Kennedy". Annals of Internal Medicine 151 (151(5)): 350–354. doi:10.1059/0003-4819-151-5-200909010-00011. PMID 19721023. http://www.annals.org/content/151/5/350.full#xref-ref-9-1.
- ^ Kempe 2011, p. 213.
- ^ New York Sun September 20, 2005: "Dr. Feelgood" Retrieved July 11, 2011
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 42, 152.
- ^ Online NewsHour with Senior Correspondent Ray Suarez and physician Jeffrey Kelman, "Pres. Kennedy's Health Secrets", The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer transcript, November 18, 2002
- ^ "Kennedy Plane Found to Be Fully Functional". The Washington Post. July 31, 1999. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/jfkjr/stories/kennedy073199.htm. Retrieved January 2, 2010.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 29.
- ^ Raymond, Emilie (2006). From my cold, dead hands: Charlton Heston and American politics. University Press of Kentucky. p. 246. ISBN 978-0-8131-2408-7.
- ^ "Books for Lawyers". American Bar Association Journal: 556. 1975.
- ^ The Gallup Poll 1999. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources Inc.. 1999. pp. 248–249.
- ^ "Greatest of the Century". Gallup/CNN/USA Today Poll. December 20, 1999 and December 21, 1999. http://www.pollingreport.com/20th.htm. Retrieved January 5, 2007.
- ^ Reeves 1993, pp. 315–316.
- ^ Bone, James (February 17, 2010), "How JFK's Riviera romance led to years of longing", The Times, London. Retrieved April 2, 2010.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 289.
- ^ Dallek 2003, p. 475.
- ^ Dallek 2003, p. 58.
- ^ Alford 2011.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 290.
- ^ Barnes 2007, p. 116.
- ^ Reeves 1993, p. 291.
- ^ Dallek 2003, p. 478.
- ^ Roberts, Patrick (December 13, 2009). "Kennedy Ancestral Home in Ireland to Be Landmarked". ABCNews.com. ABC News Internet Ventures. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/kennedy-ancestral-home-dunganstown-ireland-landmarked/story?id=9315950. Retrieved September 30, 2010.
- ^ Maier2004, p. 25.
- ^ Maier2004, p. 30.
- ^ Maier2004, p. 33.
- ^ Cronkite, Walter (1996). A Reporter's Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-57879-1.
- ^ Carter, Bill (September 15, 2001). "Viewers Again Return To Traditional Networks". The New York Times: p. A14. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/15/us/after-the-attacks-television-viewers-again-return-to-traditional-networks.html?pagewanted=print.
- ^ "Presidents Who Served in the U.S. Navy". Frequently Asked Questions. Naval History & Heritage Command. January 11, 2007. http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq60-1.htm. Retrieved May 12, 2011.
- ^ "Navy SEALs Were Launched in the JFK 'Man on the Moon' Speech". 11 Facts About Navy SEALs. Time Inc.. http://www.life.com/gallery/60031/image/1597398#index/1. Retrieved May 12, 2011.
- ^ Salinger, Pierre (1997). John F. Kennedy: Commander in Chief: A Profile in Leadership. New York: Penguin Studio. p. 97. ISBN 978-0-670-86310-5. http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/~/link.aspx?_id=79FD035EC0A44D0384F449BEEEA0CE5B. Retrieved February 22, 2012.
- ^ Page, Susan (October 4, 2011). "50 years after win, Kennedy's legacy endures". USA Today. http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-09-26-jfk-kennedy-mystique_N.htm. Retrieved December 25, 2011.
- ^ Douthat, Ross (November 26, 2011). "The Enduring Cult of Kennedy". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/opinion/sunday/Douthat-The-Enduring-Cult-of-Kennedy.html. Retrieved December 3, 2011.
- ^ Hanks, Patrick; Hardcastle, Kate; Hodges, Flavia (2006). A Dictionary of First Names. Oxford Paperback Reference (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 157. ISBN 978-0-19-861060-1.
- ^ "John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States". American Heraldry Society. http://www.americanheraldry.org/pages/index.php?n=President.Kennedy. Retrieved October 27, 2009.
Bibliography
- Alford, Mimi; Newman, Judith (2011). Once Upon A Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and its Aftermath. London: Hutchinson. ISBN 978-0-09-193175-9.
- Ballard, Robert D. (2002). Collision With History: The Search for John F. Kennedy's PT 109. Washington, DC: National Geographic. ISBN 978-0-7922-6876-5.
- Barnes, John (2007). John F. Kennedy on Leadership.
- Bilharz, Joy Ann (2002) [1998]. The Allegany Senecas and Kinzua Dam: Forced Relocation Through Two Generations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-1282-4.
- Blight, James G.; Lang, Janet M. (2005). The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-0-7425-4221-1.
- Bryant, Nick (Autumn 2006). "Black Man Who Was Crazy Enough to Apply to Ole Miss". The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (53).
- Bugliosi, Vincent (2007). Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
- Dallek, Robert (2003). An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co. ISBN 978-0-316-17238-7.
- Donovan, Robert J. (2001) [1961]. PT-109: John F. Kennedy in WW II (40th Anniversary ed.). McGraw Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-137643-3.
- Dunnigan, James; Nofi, Albert (1999). Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War. St. Martin's. ISBN 978-0-312-19857-2.
- Dudley, Robert L.; Shiraev, Eric (2008). Counting Every Vote: The Most Contentious Elections in American History. Dulles, Virginia: Potomac Books. ISBN 978-1-59797-224-6.
- Frum, David (2000). How We Got Here: The '70s. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-04196-1.
- Herst, Burton (2007). Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-7867-1982-2.
- Jewell, Elizabeth (2005). U.S. Presidents Factbook. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-375-72073-4.
- Karnow, Stanley (1991). Vietnam, A History. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-670-74604-0.
- Kempe, Frederick (2011). Berlin 1961. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. ISBN 978-0-399-15729-5.
- Kenney, Charles (2000). John F. Kennedy: The Presidential Portfolio. PublicAffairs. ISBN 978-1-891620-36-2.
- Maier, Thomas (2004). The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings.
- McNamara, Robert S. (2000). Argument Without End: In Search of Answers to the Vietnam Tragedy.
- Matthews, Chris (2011). Jack Kennedy. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4516-3508-9.
- O'Brien, Michael (2005). John F. Kennedy: A Biography. Thomas Dunne. ISBN 978-0-312-28129-8.
- Reeves, Richard (1993). President Kennedy: Profile of Power. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-64879-4.
- Salt, Jermey (2008). The Unmaking of the Middle East: A History of Western Disorder in Arab lands. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-25551-7.
- Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr (2002) [1965]. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-618-21927-8.
- Sorensen, Theodore (1966) [1965] (paperback). Kennedy. New York: Bantam. OCLC 2746832.
Further reading
- Brauer, Carl. John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction (1977)
- Burner, David. John F. Kennedy and a New Generation (1988)
- Casey, Shaun. The Making of a Catholic President: Kennedy vs. Nixon 1960 (2009)
- Collier, Peter & Horowitz, David. The Kennedys (1984)
- Cottrell, John. Assassination! The World Stood Still (1964)
- Davis, F. Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America since 1960 (1999)
- Douglass, James W., JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters (2008)
- Fay, Paul B., Jr. The Pleasure of His Company (1966)
- Freedman, Lawrence. Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam (2000)
- Fursenko, Aleksandr and Timothy Naftali. One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (1997)
- Garrow, David J. The FBI and Martin Luther King (2002)
- Giglio, James. The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (1991)
- Goldzwig, Steven R. and Dionisopoulos, George N., eds. In a Perilous Hour: The Public Address of John F. Kennedy (1995)
- Hamilton, Nigel. JFK: Reckless Youth (1992)
- Harper, Paul, and Krieg, Joann P. eds. John F. Kennedy: The Promise Revisited (1988)
- Harris, Seymour E. The Economics of the Political Parties, with Special Attention to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy (1962)
- Heath, Jim F. Decade of Disillusionment: The Kennedy–Johnson Years (1976)
- Hellmann, John. The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK (1997)
- Hersh, Seymour. The Dark Side of Camelot (1997)
- Kunz, Diane B. The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade: American Foreign Relations during the 1960s (1994)
- Lynch, Grayston L. Decision for Disaster Betrayal at the Bay of Pigs (2000)
- Manchester, William. Portrait of a President: John F. Kennedy in Profile (1967)
- Manchester, William. The Death of a President: November 20 – 25 (1967)
- Martin, J. M. The Presidency and Women: Promise, Performance, and Illusion (2003)
- Newman, John M. JFK and Vietnam: Deception, Intrigue, and the Struggle for Power (1992)
- Parmet, Herbert. Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (1980)
- Parmet, Herbert. JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (1983)
- Parmet, Herbert. "The Kennedy Myth". In Myth America: A Historical Anthology, Volume II. Gerster, Patrick, and Cords, Nicholas. (editors.) (1997)
- Piper, Michael Collins. Final Judgment (2004: sixth edition). American Free Press
- Reeves, Thomas. A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy (1991)
- Sabato, Larry J. The Kennedy Half-Century: The Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy (forthcoming, 2013)
- Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. Robert Kennedy And His Times (2002) [1978]
- Smith, Jean E. The Defense of Berlin (1963)
- Smith, Jean E. The Wall as Watershed (1966)
- Walsh, Kenneth T. Air Force One: A History of the Presidents and Their Planes (2003)
- Wyden, Peter, Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story (1979)
External links
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- Works by or about John F. Kennedy in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- John F. Kennedy discography at Discogs
- John F. Kennedy at the Internet Movie Database
- John F. Kennedy: A Resource Guide from the Library of Congress
- 1963 ATC Audio – (Air Traffic Control) Unedited
- Video of Vincent Bugliosi discussing JFK assassination
- Kennedy's secret White House recordings, the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia
- Video, audio, text of John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address
- Kennedy discusses Cuban Missile Crisis with former President Eisenhower
- John F. Kennedy Library
- The White House Biography
- The Kennedys museum in Berlin, Germany with special exhibit on Kennedy's visit
- Birthplace of John F. Kennedy: Home of the Boy Who Would Be President, a National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places lesson plan
- Essay on JFK with shorter essays on each member of his cabinet and First Lady from the Miller Center of Public Affairs
- Kennedy Administration from Office of the Historian, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.
Titles and succession
| United States House of Representatives | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by James Curley |
Member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts's 11th congressional district 1947–1953 |
Succeeded by Tip O'Neill |
| Party political offices | ||
| Preceded by David Walsh |
Democratic nominee for Senator from Massachusetts (Class 1) 1952, 1958 |
Succeeded by Ted Kennedy |
| Preceded by Adlai Stevenson |
Democratic nominee for President of the United States 1960 |
Succeeded by Lyndon Johnson |
| United States Senate | ||
| Preceded by Henry Cabot Lodge |
United States Senator (Class 1) from Massachusetts 1953–1960 Served alongside: Leverett Saltonstall |
Succeeded by Benjamin Smith |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by Dwight Eisenhower |
President of the United States 1961–1963 |
Succeeded by Lyndon Johnson |
| Honorary titles | ||
| Preceded by Unknown Soldiers of World War II and the Korean War |
Persons who have lain in state or honor in the United States Capitol rotunda 1963 |
Succeeded by Douglas MacArthur |
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Mentioned in
Being with John F. Kennedy
(1983 History Film)
Great American Heritage
(1987 History Film)
Cape Canaveral
(Geography)
» More