John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
Main
president of United States
in full John Fitzgerald Kennedy, byname JFK
born May 29, 1917, Brookline, Massachusetts, U.S.
died November 22, 1963, Dallas, Texas
35th president of the United States (1961–63), who faced a number of
foreign crises, especially in Cuba and Berlin, but managed to secure
such achievements as the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty and the Alliance for
Progress. He was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas.
(For a discussion of the history and nature of the presidency, see
presidency of the United States of America.)
John F. Kennedy commanding the U.S. Navy torpedo boat PT 109, 1943.
Early life
The second of nine children, Kennedy was reared in a family that
demanded intense physical and intellectual competition among the
siblings—the family’s touch football games at their Hyannis Port retreat
later became legendary—and was schooled in the religious teachings of
the Roman Catholic church and the political precepts of the Democratic
Party. His father, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, had acquired a
multimillion-dollar fortune in banking, bootlegging, shipbuilding, and
the film industry, and as a skilled player of the stock market. His
mother, Rose, was the daughter of John F. (“Honey Fitz”) Fitzgerald,
onetime mayor of Boston. They established trust funds for their children
that guaranteed lifelong financial independence. After serving as the
head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Joseph Kennedy became
the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, and for six months in 1938 John
served as his secretary, drawing on that experience to write his senior
thesis at Harvard University (B.S., 1940) on Great Britain’s military
unpreparedness. He then expanded that thesis into a best-selling book,
Why England Slept (1940).
In the fall of 1941 Kennedy joined the U.S. Navy and two years later
was sent to the South Pacific. By the time he was discharged in 1945,
his older brother, Joe, who their father had expected would be the first
Kennedy to run for office, had been killed in the war, and the family’s
political standard passed to John, who had planned to pursue an academic
or journalistic career.
John Kennedy himself had barely escaped death in battle. Commanding a
patrol torpedo (PT) boat, he was gravely injured when a Japanese
destroyer sank it in the Solomon Islands. Marooned far behind enemy
lines, he led his men back to safety and was awarded the U.S. Navy and
Marine Corps Medal for heroism. He also returned to active command at
his own request. (These events were later depicted in a Hollywood film,
PT 109 [1963], that contributed to the Kennedy mystique.) However, the
further injury to his back, which had bothered him since his teens,
never really healed. Despite operations in 1944, 1954, and 1955, he was
in pain for much of the rest of his life. He also suffered from
Addison’s disease, though this affliction was publicly concealed. “At
least one-half of the days he spent on this earth,” wrote his brother
Robert, “were days of intense physical pain.” (After he became
president, Kennedy combated the pain with injections of
amphetamines—then thought to be harmless and used by more than a few
celebrities for their energizing effect. According to some reports, both
Kennedy and the first lady became heavily dependent on these injections
through weekly use.) None of this prevented Kennedy from undertaking a
strenuous life in politics. His family expected him to run for public
office and to win.
John F. Kennedy
Congressman and senator
Kennedy did not disappoint his family; in fact, he never lost an
election. His first opportunity came in 1946, when he ran for Congress.
Although still physically weak from his war injuries, he campaigned
aggressively, bypassing the Democratic organization in the Massachusetts
11th congressional district and depending instead upon his family,
college friends, and fellow navy officers. In the Democratic primary he
received nearly double the vote of his nearest opponent; in the November
election he overwhelmed the Republican candidate. He was only 29.
Kennedy served three terms in the House of Representatives (1947–53)
as a bread-and-butter liberal. He advocated better working conditions,
more public housing, higher wages, lower prices, cheaper rents, and more
Social Security for the aged. In foreign policy he was an early
supporter of Cold War policies. He backed the Truman Doctrine and the
Marshall Plan but was sharply critical of the Truman administration’s
record in Asia. He accused the State Department of trying to force
Chiang Kai-shek into a coalition with Mao Zedong. “What our young men
had saved,” he told the House on January 25, 1949, “our diplomats and
our President have frittered away.”
His congressional district in Boston was a safe seat, but Kennedy was
too ambitious to remain long in the House of Representatives. In 1952 he
ran for the U.S. Senate against the popular incumbent, Henry Cabot
Lodge, Jr. His mother and sisters Eunice, Patricia, and Jean held
“Kennedy teas” across the state. Thousands of volunteers flocked to
help, including his 27-year-old brother Robert, who managed the
campaign. That fall the Republican presidential candidate, General
Dwight D. Eisenhower, carried Massachusetts by 208,000 votes; but
Kennedy defeated Lodge by 70,000 votes. Less than a year later, on
September 12, 1953, Kennedy enhanced his electoral appeal by marrying
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). Twelve years
younger than Kennedy and from a socially prominent family, the beautiful
“Jackie” was the perfect complement to the handsome politician; they
made a glamorous couple.
As a senator, Kennedy quickly won a reputation for responsiveness to
requests from constituents, except on certain occasions when the
national interest was at stake. In 1954 he was the only New England
senator to approve an extension of President Eisenhower’s
reciprocal-trade powers, and he vigorously backed the opening of the St.
Lawrence Seaway, despite the fact that over a period of 20 years no
Massachusetts senator or congressman had ever voted for it.
The Kennedy brothers in Palm Beach, Florida, 1957.
To the disappointment of liberal Democrats, Kennedy soft-pedaled the
demagogic excesses of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, who in
the early 1950s conducted witch-hunting campaigns against government
workers accused of being communists. Kennedy’s father liked McCarthy,
contributed to his campaign, and even entertained him in the family’s
compound at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Kennedy himself
disapproved of McCarthy, but, as he once observed, “Half my people in
Massachusetts look on McCarthy as a hero.” Yet, on the Senate vote over
condemnation of McCarthy’s conduct (1954), Kennedy expected to vote
against him. He prepared a speech explaining why, but he was absent on
the day of the vote. Later, at a National Press Club Gridiron dinner,
costumed reporters sang, “Where were you, John, where were you, John,
when the Senate censured Joe?” Actually, John had been in a hospital, in
critical condition after back surgery. For six months afterward he lay
strapped to a board in his father’s house in Palm Beach, Florida. It was
during this period that he worked on Profiles in Courage (1956), an
account of eight great American political leaders who had defied popular
opinion in matters of conscience, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in
1957. Although Kennedy was credited as the book’s author, it was later
revealed that his assistant Theodore Sorensen had done much of the
research and writing.
Back in the Senate, Kennedy led a fight against a proposal to abolish
the electoral college, crusaded for labour reform, and became
increasingly committed to civil rights legislation. As a member of the
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the late 1950s, he advocated
extensive foreign aid to the emerging nations in Africa and Asia, and he
surprised his colleagues by calling upon France to grant Algerian
independence.
During these years his political outlook was moving leftward.
Possibly because of their father’s dynamic personality, the sons of
Joseph Kennedy matured slowly. Gradually John’s stature among Democrats
grew, until he had inherited the legions that had once followed Governor
Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois, the two-time presidential candidate who
by appealing to idealism had transformed the Democratic Party and made
Kennedy’s rise possible.
Televised debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon during
the 1960 U.S. presidential campaign.
Presidential candidate and president
Kennedy had nearly become Stevenson’s vice presidential running
mate in 1956. The charismatic young New Englander’s near victory and his
televised speech of concession (Estes Kefauver won the vice presidential
nomination) brought him into some 40 million American homes. Overnight
he had become one of the best-known political figures in the country.
Already his campaign for the 1960 nomination had begun. One newspaperman
called him a “young man in a hurry.” Kennedy felt that he had to
redouble his efforts because of the widespread conviction that no Roman
Catholic candidate could be elected president. He made his 1958 race for
reelection to the Senate a test of his popularity in Massachusetts. His
margin of victory was 874,608 votes—the largest ever in Massachusetts
politics and the greatest of any senatorial candidate that year.
A steady stream of speeches and periodical profiles followed, with
photographs of him and his wife appearing on many a magazine cover.
Kennedy’s carefully calculated pursuit of the presidency years before
the first primary established a practice that became the norm for
candidates seeking the nation’s highest office. To transport him and his
staff around the country, his father bought a 40-passenger Convair
aircraft. His brothers Robert (“Bobby,” or “Bob”) and Edward (“Teddy,”
or “Ted”) pitched in. After having graduated from Harvard University
(1948) and from the University of Virginia Law School (1951), Bobby had
embarked on a career as a Justice Department attorney and counsellor for
congressional committees. Ted likewise had graduated from Harvard (1956)
and from Virginia Law School (1959). Both men were astute campaigners.
In January 1960 John F. Kennedy formally announced his presidential
candidacy. His chief rivals were the senators Hubert H. Humphrey of
Minnesota and Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. Kennedy knocked Humphrey out
of the campaign and dealt the religious taboo against Roman Catholics a
blow by winning the primary in Protestant West Virginia. He tackled the
Catholic issue again, by avowing his belief in the separation of church
and state in a televised speech before a group of Protestant ministers
in Houston, Texas. Nominated on the first ballot, he balanced the
Democratic ticket by choosing Johnson as his running mate. In his
acceptance speech Kennedy declared, “We stand on the edge of a New
Frontier.” Thereafter the phrase “New Frontier” was associated with his
presidential programs.
Another phrase—“the Kennedy style”—encapsulated the candidate’s
emerging identity. It was glamorous and elitist, an amalgam of his
father’s wealth, John Kennedy’s charisma and easy wit, Jacqueline
Kennedy’s beauty and fashion sense (the suits and pillbox hats she wore
became widely popular), the charm of their children and relatives, and
the erudition of the Harvard advisers who surrounded him (called the
“best and brightest” by author David Halberstam).
Kennedy won the general election, narrowly defeating the Republican
candidate, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, by a margin of less than
120,000 out of some 70,000,000 votes cast. Many observers, then and
since, believed vote fraud contributed to Kennedy’s victory, especially
in the critical state of Illinois, where Joe Kennedy enlisted the help
of the ever-powerful Richard J. Daley, mayor of Chicago. Nixon had
defended the Eisenhower record; Kennedy, whose slogan had been “Let’s
get this country moving again,” had deplored unemployment, the sluggish
economy, the so-called missile gap (a presumed Soviet superiority over
the United States in the number of nuclear-armed missiles), and the new
communist government in Havana. A major factor in the campaign was a
unique series of four televised debates between the two men; an
estimated 85–120 million Americans watched one or more of the debates.
Both men showed a firm grasp of the issues, but Kennedy’s poise in front
of the camera, his tony Harvard accent, and his good looks (in contrast
to Nixon’s “five o’clock shadow”) convinced many viewers that he had won
the debate. As president, Kennedy continued to exploit the new medium,
sparkling in precedent-setting televised weekly press conferences.
He was the youngest man and the first Roman Catholic ever elected to
the presidency of the United States. His administration lasted 1,037
days. From the onset he was concerned with foreign affairs. In his
memorable inaugural address (see original text), he called upon
Americans “to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle…against the
common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.” (See
also primary source document: A Long Twilight Struggle.) He declared:
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been
granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I
do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.…The energy, the
faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our
country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light
the world. And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do
for you—ask what you can do for your country.
The administration’s first brush with foreign affairs was a disaster.
In the last year of the Eisenhower presidency, the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) had equipped and trained a brigade of anticommunist Cuban
exiles for an invasion of their homeland. The Joint Chiefs of Staff
unanimously advised the new president that this force, once ashore,
would spark a general uprising against the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro.
But the Bay of Pigs invasion was a fiasco; every man on the beachhead
was either killed or captured. Kennedy assumed “sole responsibility” for
the setback. Privately he told his father that he would never again
accept a Joint Chiefs recommendation without first challenging it.
The Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, thought he had taken the young
president’s measure when the two leaders met in Vienna in June 1961.
Khrushchev ordered a wall built between East and West Berlin and
threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany. The
president activated National Guard and reserve units, and Khrushchev
backed down on his separate peace threat. Kennedy then made a dramatic
visit to West Berlin, where he told a cheering crowd, “Today, in the
world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein [I am a] Berliner.’
” In October 1962 a buildup of Soviet short- and intermediate-range
nuclear missiles was discovered in Cuba. Kennedy demanded that the
missiles be dismantled; he ordered a “quarantine” of Cuba (see original
text)—in effect, a blockade that would stop Soviet ships from reaching
that island. For 13 days nuclear war seemed near; then the Soviet
premier announced that the offensive weapons would be withdrawn. (See
Cuban missile crisis.) Ten months later Kennedy scored his greatest
foreign triumph when Khrushchev and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of
Great Britain joined him in signing the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. Yet
Kennedy’s commitment to combat the spread of communism led him to
escalate American involvement in the conflict in Vietnam, where he sent
not just supplies and financial assistance, as President Eisenhower had,
but 15,000 military advisers as well.
The Kennedy family
Because of his slender victory in 1960, Kennedy approached Congress
warily, and with good reason; Congress was largely indifferent to his
legislative program. It approved his Alliance for Progress (Alianza) in
Latin America and his Peace Corps, which won the enthusiastic
endorsement of thousands of college students. But his two most cherished
projects, massive income tax cuts and a sweeping civil rights measure,
were not passed until after his death. (See primary source document: The
American Promise to African Americans.) In May 1961 Kennedy committed
the United States to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade,
and, while he would not live to see this achievement either, his
advocacy of the space program contributed to the successful launch of
the first American manned spaceflights.
He was an immensely popular president, at home and abroad. At times
he seemed to be everywhere at once, encouraging better physical fitness,
improving the morale of government workers, bringing brilliant advisers
to the White House, and beautifying Washington, D.C. His wife joined him
as an advocate for American culture. Their two young children, Caroline
Bouvier and John F., Jr., were familiar throughout the country. The
charm and optimism of the Kennedy family seemed contagious, sparking the
idealism of a generation for whom the Kennedy White House became, in
journalist Theodore White’s famous analogy, Camelot—the magical court of
Arthurian legend, which was celebrated in a popular Broadway musical of
the early 1960s.
(Left to right) Robert F. Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, and Pres. John F.
Kennedy, c. 1962.
Joseph Kennedy, meanwhile, had been incapacitated in Hyannis Port by
a stroke, but the other Kennedys were in and out of Washington. Robert
Kennedy, as John’s attorney general, was the second most powerful man in
the country. He advised the president on all matters of foreign and
domestic policy, national security, and political affairs.
In 1962 Ted Kennedy was elected to the president’s former Senate seat
in Massachusetts. Their sister Eunice’s husband, Sargent Shriver, became
director of the Peace Corps. Their sister Jean’s husband, Stephen Smith,
was preparing to manage the Democratic Party’s 1964 presidential
campaign. Another sister, Patricia, had married Peter Lawford, an
English-born actor who served the family as an unofficial envoy to the
entertainment world. All Americans knew who Rose, Jackie, Bobby, and
Teddy were, and most could identify Bobby’s wife as Ethel and Teddy’s
wife as Joan. But if the first family had become American royalty, its
image of perfection would be tainted years later by allegations of
marital infidelity by the president (most notably, an affair with
motion-picture icon Marilyn Monroe) and of his association with members
of organized crime.
JFK, Jackie, and the Connallys in the presidential
limousine before the assassination
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President Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally, and
Jacqueline Kennedy,
minutes before the president was shot.
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John F. Kennedy assassination
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Assassination
President Kennedy believed that his Republican opponent in 1964
would be Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. He was convinced that he
could bury Goldwater under an avalanche of votes, thus receiving a
mandate for major legislative reforms. One obstacle to his plan was a
feud in Vice President Johnson’s home state of Texas between Governor
John B. Connally, Jr., and Senator Ralph Yarborough, both Democrats. To
present a show of unity, the president decided to tour the state with
both men. On Friday, November 22, 1963, he and Jacqueline Kennedy were
in an open limousine riding slowly in a motorcade through downtown
Dallas. At 12:30 pm the president was struck by two rifle bullets, one
at the base of his neck and one in the head. He was pronounced dead
shortly after arrival at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Governor Connally,
though also gravely wounded, recovered. Vice President Johnson took the
oath as president at 2:38 pm. Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24-year-old Dallas
citizen, was accused of the slaying. Two days later Oswald was shot to
death by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner with connections to the
criminal underworld, in the basement of a Dallas police station. A
presidential commission headed by the chief justice of the United
States, Earl Warren, later found that neither the sniper nor his killer
“was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate
President Kennedy,” but that Oswald had acted alone. The Warren
Commission, however, was not able to convincingly explain all the
particular circumstances of Kennedy’s murder. In 1979 a special
committee of the U.S. House of Representatives declared that although
the president had undoubtedly been slain by Oswald, acoustic analysis
suggested the presence of a second gunman who had missed. But this
declaration did little to squelch the theories that Oswald was part of a
conspiracy involving either CIA agents angered over Kennedy’s handling
of the Bay of Pigs fiasco or members of organized crime seeking revenge
for Attorney General Bobby Kennedy’s relentless criminal investigations.
Kennedy’s assassination, the most notorious political murder of the 20th
century, remains a source of bafflement, controversy, and speculation.
John Kennedy was dead, but the Kennedy mystique was still alive. Both
Robert and Ted ran for president (in 1968 and 1980, respectively). Yet
tragedy would become nearly synonymous with the Kennedys when Bobby,
too, was assassinated on the campaign trail in 1968.
Jacqueline Kennedy and her two children moved from the White House to
a home in the Georgetown section of Washington. Continuing crowds of the
worshipful and curious made peace there impossible, however, and in the
summer of 1964 she moved to New York City. Pursuit continued until
October 20, 1968, when she married Aristotle Onassis, a wealthy Greek
shipping magnate. The Associated Press said that the marriage “broke the
spell of almost complete adulation of a woman who had become virtually a
legend in her own time.” Widowed by Onassis, the former first lady
returned to the public eye in the mid-1970s as a high-profile book
editor, and she remained among the most admired women in the United
States until her death in 1994. As an adult, daughter Caroline was
jealous of her own privacy, but John Jr.—a lawyer like his sister and
debonair and handsome like his father—was much more of a public figure.
Long remembered as “John-John,” the three-year-old who stoically saluted
his father’s casket during live television coverage of the funeral
procession, John Jr. became the founder and editor-in-chief of the
political magazine George in the mid-1990s. In 1999, when John Jr., his
wife, and his sister-in-law died in the crash of the private plane he
was piloting, the event was the focus of an international media watch
that further proved the immortality of the Kennedy mystique. It was yet
another chapter in the family’s “curse” of tragedy.
William Manchester
Ed.
Encyclopaedia Britannica
