John F.

Kennedy
“The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the
dissemination of truth”

• Name: John Fitzgerald Kennedy

• Nationality: American
• Work: 35th President of the United States
• Dates: 1917- 1963
• Achievements: Moving the government toward positive action on civil
rights.
Elected in 1960 as the 35th president of the United States, 43-
year-old John F. Kennedy became the youngest man and the first
Roman Catholic to hold that office. He was born into one of
America’s wealthiest families and parlayed an elite education and
a reputation as a military hero into a successful run for Congress
in 1946 and for the Senate in 1952. As president, Kennedy
confronted mounting Cold War tensions in Cuba, Vietnam and
elsewhere. He also led a renewed drive for public service and
eventually provided federal support for the growing civil rights
movement. His assassination on November 22, 1963, in Dallas,
Texas, sent shockwaves around the world and turned the all-too-
human Kennedy into a larger-than-life heroic figure. To this day,
historians continue to rank him among the best-loved presidents in American history

-John F. Kennedy’s Early Life-

Born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy (known as Jack)
was the second of nine children. His parents, Joseph and Rose Kennedy, were members of
two of Boston’s most prominent Irish Catholic political families. Despite persistent health
problems throughout his childhood and teenage years (he would later be diagnosed with a
rare endocrine disorder called Addison’s disease), Jack led a privileged youth, attending
private schools such as Canterbury and Choate and spending summers in Hyannis Port on
Cape Cod. Joe Kennedy, a hugely successful businessman and an early supporter of
Franklin D. Roosevelt, was appointed chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission
in 1934 and in 1937 was named U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. As a student at Harvard
University, Jack traveled in Europe as his father’s secretary. His senior thesis about British’s
unpreparedness for war was later published as an acclaimed book, “Why England Slept”
(1940). Jack joined the U.S. Navy in 1941 and two years later was sent to the South Pacific,
where he was given command of a Patrol-Torpedo (PT) boat. In August 1943, a Japanese
destroyer struck the craft, PT-109, in the Solomon Islands. Kennedy helped some of his
marooned crew back to safety, and was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for
heroism. His older brother, Joe Jr., was not so fortunate: He was killed in August 1944 when
his Navy airplane exploded on a secret mission against a German rocket-launching site. A
grieving Joe Sr. told Jack it was his duty to fulfill the destiny once intended for Joe Jr.: to
become the first Catholic president of the United States.
 -JFK’s Beginnings in Politics-
Abandoning plans to be a journalist, Jack left the Navy by the end of 1944. Less than a
year later, he was back in Boston preparing for a run for Congress in 1946. As a moderately
conservative Democrat, and backed by his father’s fortune, Jack won his party’s nomination
handily and carried the mostly working-class Eleventh District by nearly three to one over his
Republican opponent in the general election. He entered the 80th Congress in January
1947, at the age of 29, and immediately attracted attention (as well as some criticism from
older members of the Washington establishment) for his youthful appearance and relaxed,
informal style.
Kennedy won reelection to the House of Representatives in 1948 and 1950, and in 1952
ran successfully for the Senate, defeating the popular Republican incumbent Henry Cabot
Lodge Jr. On September 12, 1953, Kennedy married the beautiful socialite and journalist
Jacqueline (Jackie) Lee Bouvier. Two years later, he was forced to undergo a painful
operation on his back. While recovering from the surgery, Jack wrote another best-selling
book, Profiles in Courage, which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957. (The book
was later revealed to be mostly the work of Kennedy’s longtime aide, Theodore Sorenson.)

-Kennedy’s Road to Presidency-

After nearly earning his party’s nomination for vice president (under Adlai Stevenson) in
1956, Kennedy announced his candidacy for president on January 2, 1960. He defeated a
primary challenge from the more liberal Hubert Humphrey and chose the Senate majority
leader, Lyndon Johnson of Texas, as his running mate. In the general election, Kennedy
faced a difficult battle against his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, a two-term vice
president under the popular Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Offering a young, energetic alternative to Nixon and the
status quo, Kennedy benefited from his performance (and
telegenic appearance) in the first-ever televised debates,
watched by millions of viewers. In November’s election,
Kennedy won by a narrow margin–less than 120,000 out of
some 70 million votes cast–becoming the youngest man
and the first Roman Catholic to be elected president of the
United States.
With his beautiful young wife and their two small children
(Caroline, born in 1957, and John Jr., born just weeks after the election), Kennedy lent an
unmistakable aura of youth and glamour to the White House. In his inaugural address, given
on January 20, 1961, the new president called on his fellow Americans to work together in
the pursuit of progress and the elimination of poverty, but also in the battle to win the
ongoing Cold War against communism around the world. Kennedy’s famous closing words
expressed the need for cooperation and sacrifice on the part of the American people: “Ask
not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

-Kennedy’s Foreign Policy Challenges-

An early crisis in the foreign affairs arena occurred in April 1961, when Kennedy approved
the plan to send 1,400 CIA-trained Cuban exiles in an amphibious landing at the Bay of Pigs
in Cuba. Intended to spur a rebellion that would overthrow the communist leader Fidel
Castro, the mission ended in failure, with nearly all of the exiles captured or killed. That
June, Kennedy met with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna to discuss the city of
Berlin, which had been divided after World War II between Allied and Soviet control. Two
months later, East German troops began erecting a wall to divide the city. Kennedy sent an
army convoy to reassure West Berliners of U.S. support, and would deliver one of his most
famous speeches in West Berlin in June 1963.
Kennedy clashed again with Khrushchev in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis.
After learning that the Soviet Union was constructing a number of nuclear and long-range
missile sites in Cuba that could pose a threat to the continental United States, Kennedy
announced a naval blockade of Cuba.
The tense standoff lasted nearly two weeks before Khrushchev agreed to dismantle Soviet
missile sites in Cuba in return for America’s promise not to invade the island and the removal
of U.S. missiles from Turkey and other sites close to Soviet borders. In July 1963, Kennedy
won his greatest foreign affairs victory when Khrushchev agreed to join him and Britain’s
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in signing a nuclear test ban treaty. In Southeast Asia,
however, Kennedy’s desire to curb the spread of communism led him to escalate U.S.
involvement in the conflict in Vietnam, even as privately he expressed his dismay over the
situation.

-Kennedy’s Leadership at Home-

During his first year in office, Kennedy oversaw the launch of the Peace Corps, which
would send young volunteers to underdeveloped countries all over the world. Otherwise, he
was unable to achieve much of his proposed legislation during his lifetime, including two of
his biggest priorities: income tax cuts and a civil rights bill. Kennedy was slow to commit
himself to the civil rights cause, but was eventually forced into action, sending federal troops
to support the desegregation of the University of Mississippi after riots there left two dead
and many others injured. The following summer, Kennedy announced his intention to
propose a comprehensive civil rights bill and endorsed the massive March on Washington
that took place that August.
Kennedy was an enormously popular president, both at home and abroad, and his family
drew famous comparisons to King Arthur’s court at Camelot. His brother Bobby served as
his attorney general, while the youngest Kennedy son, Edward (Ted), was elected to Jack’s
former Senate seat in 1962. Jackie Kennedy became an international icon of style, beauty
and sophistication, though stories of her husband’s numerous marital infidelities (and his
personal association with members of organized crime) would later emerge to complicate
the Kennedys’ idyllic image.

-JFK’s Assassination-
On November 22, 1963, the president and his
wife landed in Dallas; he had spoken in San
Antonio, Austin and Fort Worth the day before.
From the airfield, the party then traveled in a
motorcade to the Dallas Trade Mart, the site of
Jack’s next speaking engagement. Shortly after
12:30 p.m., as the motorcade was passing
through downtown Dallas, shots rang out;
Kennedy was struck twice, in the neck and
head, and was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at a nearby hospital.
 Twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, known to have Communist sympathies, was
arrested for the killing but was shot and fatally wounded two days later by local nightclub
owner Jack Ruby while being led to jail. Almost immediately, alternative theories of
Kennedy’s assassination emerged–including conspiracies run by the KGB, the Mafia and the
U.S. military-industrial complex, among others. A presidential commission led by Chief
Justice Earl Warren concluded that Oswald had acted alone, but speculation and debate
over the assassination has persisted.

- JFK and NASA-

John F. Kennedy will no doubt be remembered as the U.S. leader who in 1961 asked the
country to commit to sending Americans to the moon “before this decade is out.” But
Kennedy’s attitude toward the space program was complex. He entered the White House
thinking space could be an area for tension-reducing cooperation with the Soviet Union, and
he never gave up that hope even as he approved the peaceful mobilization of the substantial
human and financial resources needed to meet the lunar landing goal he had proposed. At
his June 3-4, 1961 summit meeting in Vienna with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev,
Kennedy suggested, “Why don’t we do it together?” After first responding positively, the next
day Khrushchev reportedly said “no,” on the grounds that an agreement on disarmament
must come first. One positive development of the Vienna summit came when Jacqueline
Kennedy talked to Khrushchev about the Soviet space effort at a state dinner. She
innocently asked if the premier could send her one of the puppies of a dog that the Soviets
had flown in orbit. According to Kennedy advisor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., two months later
“two nervous Russians came with Ambassador Menshikov into the Oval Office at the White
House bearing a terrified small dog. The president said, “How did this dog get here?” His
wife said, “I’m afraid I asked Khrushchev for it in Vienna. I was just running out of things to
say.”
Near the end of his presidency, Kennedy returned to the idea of superpower cooperation in
space. Speaking before the United Nations on Sept. 20, 1963, he proposed “a joint
expedition to the moon” and asked, “why should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of
national competition?”
However much he might have wished to cooperate, Kennedy in 1961 had set the United
States on a course to enter, and win, a race to the moon. This decision came in the
aftermath of the huge global and domestic reaction to the April 12, 1961 Soviet launch of the
first human to orbit Earth, Yuri Gagarin. Eight days later, Kennedy asked for a crash review
to identify a “space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win.” As part
of the crash review that the president had ordered, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson met
with, among others, Wernher von Braun. After that meeting, von Braun wrote a letter saying
of a moon landing goal, “We have a sporting chance. With an all-out crash program I think
we could accomplish this objective in 1967-68.” Johnson quickly reported this judgment to
Kennedy, and in effect the die was cast.
On May 25, 1961, Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress to
announce his decision to go to the moon. He backed up this decision
with remarkable financial commitments. In the immediate aftermath of
his speech, NASA’s budget was increased by 89 percent, and by
another 101 percent the following year. To carry out Apollo, NASA
became the large engineering organization centered on developing
capabilities for human space flight that it is today.
 Kennedy was particularly drawn to the astronauts, who became popular symbols of an
administration that embraced the New Frontier. John Glenn was a frequent visitor to the
Kennedys' Hyannisport, Mass., compound, where he water skied with Jacqueline Kennedy
and successfully lobbied the president on behalf of the astronauts' right to sell their exclusive
stories to Life magazine. When Glenn’s Friendship Seven mission launched Feb. 20, 1962
on live national television Kennedy watched raptly along with millions of his fellow
countrymen.
Kennedy had a deep commitment to the political goal of beating the Soviets, but privately
lacked a visionary interest in space, despite his often stirring public rhetoric (“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”). This contradiction is apparent in a tape recording of a White House
meeting that occurred Nov. 21, 1962. The recording, released in 2001 by the John F.
Kennedy Library in Boston, documents Kennedy fending off the concerns of NASA
Administrator James Webb that the United States risked a very public failure in its push to
achieve the lunar landing goal. Webb asserted that we should have broader goals in space
activities. “This is, whether we like it or not a race,” Kennedy said. "Everything we do [in
space] ought to be tied into getting to the moon ahead of the Russians.” Kennedy told Webb
that winning the moon race “is the top priority of the agency and except for defense, the top
priority of the United States government. Otherwise, we shouldn’t be spending this kind of
money, because I’m not that interested in space.”
After the United States forced the Soviet Union to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba,
Kennedy started to believe there was a possibility of less tense relations between the two
countries. His 1963 proposal for a joint mission to the moon was likely a product of that
belief. With the possibility of superpower confrontation diminished, he could return to his
original concept of space as an arena for enhanced cooperation between the superpowers.
That possibility quickly disappeared with Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. What
might have happened to Apollo and NASA overall, had Kennedy spent another five years in
the White House, can only be a matter of speculation. We know the public’s association of
the space program with Kennedy was so strong that six days after Kennedy was
assassinated, the new president, Lyndon Johnson, announced in a nationwide television
address that the NASA center from which our moon voyagers would launch would be named
in Kennedy’s honor. (NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center was named in Johnson’s honor in
1973, shortly after his death.) A less grand but very fitting tribute to the assassinated
president took place on the evening of July 20, 1969, when an anonymous citizen placed a
small bouquet of flowers on the Kennedy gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery with a
note that read, “Mr. President, the Eagle has landed.”