John F. Kennedy

President of the United States (1961–1963)

• Born: May 29, 1917
• Birthplace: Brookline, Massachusetts
• Died: November 22, 1963
• Place of death: Dallas, Texas

Combining intelligence with personal charm, Kennedy became a model to millions around the globe, inspiring them to seek new goals and to work toward those goals with self-confidence. His assassination is still studied and debated.

Early Life

John F. Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, an inner suburb of Boston. He was the second son of Joseph P. Kennedy, a businessman rapidly growing wealthy, and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, daughter of former Boston mayor John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. He was educated at Choate School in Connecticut and graduated from Harvard in 1940. While his earlier years were plagued by illness and his grades were often mediocre, he revealed himself to be an original thinker. His senior thesis was published as Why England Slept (1940), largely by the efforts of Joseph Kennedy’s friends. John Kennedy was able to travel widely in Europe in 1937 and 1938 and to spend the spring of 1939 in Britain, where his father was United States ambassador. Still there when World War II began in September, he assisted in caring for American survivors of the first torpedoed passenger ship, gaining a sense of realism about war.

As US entrance into the war became likely, he entered the US Navy as an ensign, September, 1941, six feet tall but extremely thin and looking younger than his years. A thatch of often rumpled, sandy hair added to his boyish appearance. He was sent to the South Pacific where he commanded PT 109, a patrol torpedo boat. The boat was sunk in action on August 2, 1943, and Kennedy not only rescued survivors but also swam for help though badly injured. Awarded the Navy and US Marine Corps medal, he briefly commanded another boat but soon went on sick leave and was discharged for disability as a full lieutenant in December, 1944. Because of his injury, coming in the wake of earlier illnesses, he was often sick.

Life’s Work

Kennedy had thought of writing as a career and covered the United Nations Conference at San Francisco, April–July, 1945, and the 1945 British elections for the New York Journal-American. His older brother, Joseph Jr., slated to be the family’s political success, had been killed in the war in Europe, and John took up that task. In 1946, he ran for the House of Representatives from the Eleventh District of Massachusetts, narrowly gaining the Democratic nomination but winning the November election with 72.6 percent of the vote. The district sent him to Washington for three terms, during which time his record was mixed. In favor of public housing and an opponent of the then reactionary leadership of the American Legion, he was friendly with Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, whose “red-baiting” began in 1950. Plagued by a painful back, he was diagnosed in 1947 as having Addison’s disease also, then usually fatal, and was often absent from the House. He showed more interest in national issues than local ones and became deeply interested in foreign policy. He rejected his father’s isolationism, supported the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, but joined right-wing critics of the so-called loss of China to Mao Zedong. In 1951, he toured Europe and Asia for several weeks and returned better balanced regarding a Soviet threat to Western Europe and the significance of Asian anticolonialism.

Unwilling to spend many years gaining seniority in the House, in 1952 Kennedy ran against Henry Cabot Lodge for the United States Senate. Despite illness, explained to the public as wartime injuries or malaria, he campaigned effectively, helped by family money and friends, building his own political organization. He won 51.5 percent of the vote and would be easily reelected in 1958.

He married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier on September 12, 1953, and they had two children, Caroline, born November 27, 1957, and John Jr., born November 26, 1960. A third child, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, born in August, 1963, lived only a few hours. Jacqueline Kennedy’s beauty, charm, and linguistic skills helped the future president on countless occasions.

As a senator, Kennedy gained national publicity by working to cure the economic ills of all of New England. He continued to speak out on foreign policy, often against French colonialism in Indochina or Algeria. He finally turned away from McCarthy as the Senate censured the latter. During one long illness, he put together another book, Profiles in Courage (1956), based heavily on others’ research, winning a Pulitzer Prize and good publicity. One result of Kennedy’s growing national reputation was his almost becoming Adlai E. Stevenson’s running mate in the 1956 presidential election. While older politicians often regarded him as a rich young man with no serious intentions, his popularity was growing among voters.

Kennedy began, in 1956, to work for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. His brother Robert observed the Stevenson campaign, and afterward, the brothers began building a national organization. Finding his health improving, thanks to the use of cortisone, Kennedy made speeches throughout the country and created a “brain trust” of academic and other specialists who could advise him on policy. To win the nomination and then the 1960 election, Kennedy had to overcome anti-Catholicism and his own image as too young and inexperienced. Campaigning hard both times, he convinced millions of voters that he was intelligent and prepared for the office as well as a believer in the separation of church and state. He named as his running mate Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, Democratic majority leader in the Senate, who was strong where Kennedy was weak, especially in the South. In televised debates with his opponent, Vice President Richard Nixon, Kennedy appeared competent and vigorous; Nixon, exhausted from campaigning, did poorly. Kennedy won the election by 303 electoral votes to 219, with a popular vote margin of only 119,450 out of 68,836,385, so narrow a victory that it limited his political strength. He named a cabinet representing all factions of the Democratic Party and including two Republicans. Despite the administration’s New Frontier label, it was balanced between liberals and conservatives.

As president, Kennedy sought a constant flow of ideas of all shades of opinion. He held few Cabinet meetings, preferring the informality of task forces on various problems. To reach the public, he used “live” televised press conferences. A handsome face, no longer gaunt and pained, the thatch of hair, plus Kennedy’s spontaneity and wit, captivated millions. His inaugural address had promised boldness, especially in the Cold War , and he acted on that in agreeing to a Central Intelligence Agency plan for an invasion of Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro. When the CIA fumbled and the Cuban exile invaders were killed or captured at the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy publicly took the blame and found his popularity rising. He went to Europe to meet French president Charles de Gaulle, who warned against American involvement in Vietnam, and also Nikita S. Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, finding the Communist leader tough, belligerent, and unwilling to help solve any problems.

In domestic matters, Kennedy accomplished little during his thousand days in office. He sought and obtained minor increases in the minimum wage and Social Security coverage, plus money for public housing, and forced a temporary rollback in steel prices. Jacqueline Kennedy supervised a notable redecoration of the White House in Early American style. Only late in his brief term did Kennedy take up the issue of civil rights, because of increasing violence in some southern states. He took executive action where he could and proposed an anti-poll-tax amendment to the Constitution, which passed the Congress while he was still president. He also called for increased federal power to enforce voting rights and a major civil rights act to include the opening of public accommodations and an end to job discrimination.

Kennedy was more active in foreign affairs. Concerned about Soviet moves in the developing world, he founded the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress. After the Bay of Pigs and his encounter with Khrushchev, he became “hard line,” appointing such militant anticommunists as John McCone as CIA director and General Curtis LeMay as commander of the Air Force. He also vowed that the Western powers would remain in West Berlin.

The major event of Kennedy’s foreign policy was the crisis that arose when Khrushchev tried to establish nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962. Using all of the information and ideas he could get from another task force and forcing his advisers to debate their ideas in his presence, he chose to blockade Cuba and threaten Khrushchev, keeping in reserve an air attack on the missile sites. Khrushchev withdrew the missiles and countless millions around the world were relieved that no nuclear war took place.

Kennedy learned from the Cuban missile crisis. Afterward he was interested in “peace as a process,” as he put it in the spring of 1963; the United States and the Soviet Union had to find ways to end the nuclear threat. Kennedy established a “hotline” for communication between the White House and the Kremlin and negotiated a treaty that stopped American and Russian outdoor nuclear tests, reducing radioactivity in the atmosphere. It is this, Kennedy’s admirers say, that indicates how he would have acted in a second term. Yet Kennedy also listened to advisers who insisted that the United States send troops to Vietnam to go into combat and show the South Vietnamese army how to fight. Skeptical, Kennedy agreed, saying that if this did not work he could change his mind and withdraw the American forces.

Tragically, Kennedy did not live to follow that plan. In Dallas on a trip to heal a split among the Texas Democrats, he was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

Significance

Kennedy represented a new generation in American politics, for whom World War II and the Cold War were the major events, rather than the 1920s and the Depression of the 1930s. He brought with him a style different from that of Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, a contemporary style without formality and with wry, self-deprecatory humor. While his actual accomplishments were limited largely to proposing domestic legislation and to steps toward détente in foreign policy, he inspired millions in the United States and abroad to reach toward new goals in a spirit of confidence that they could make a difference. As did another assassinated president, Abraham Lincoln, Kennedy left a legacy of legend, in this case of Camelot or a new King Arthur’s court engaged in serving good ends.

Kennedy has remained one of the most admired and highly rated American presidents of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The year 2013 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, a pivotal event in the minds of those who remember where they were when it happened as well as those who were born long after it took place. A poll conducted by Peter Hart and Geoffrey Garin around the time of the fiftieth anniversary revealed that 75 percent of respondents surveyed questioned the Warren Commission’s finding that the assassination was the work of a single gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Bibliography

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"Life of John F. Kennedy." John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/life-of-john-f-kennedy. Accessed 21 Feb. 2023.

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