John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, was the first Presidential candidate to successfully make use of the medium of television as a campaign tool. He was also the youngest elected President, as well as the only Catholic President, in the country's history. Tall and slender with rugged, non-threatening good looks, a great head of hair, and an affable, nonplused demeanor, Kennedy was the perfect candidate in the eye of the new medium. With a thick Boston accent, the Massachusetts Senator delivered beautiful and resounding speaches that were not entirely devoid of meaning. The Kennedy/Nixon debates marked the first time in the history of the United States that Presidential candidates met face to face to discuss election issues before a public forum. The upset victory of the calm and smiling young senator over the nervous-looking, though nevertheless more accomplished, Vice President in the general election was a testament to the importance of portraying a strong television image. During the debates, Senator Kennedy portrayed himself as the forerunner of a new generation of Americans who were dedicated to public service and cleaning up the mistakes of the past. Unlike Vice President Nixon, who was campaigning on the promise to continue the policies already in place under Eisenhower. Kennedy promised the American voters a future and made sure that he was perceived as the incarnation of that dream. President Kennedy's years in office, however, have been eclipsed by the tragedy of his assassination. He is not remembered for what he accomplished, but for what he had in mind. Though the years of the Kennedy Administration brought the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the commitment of the first 16,300 "military advisers" to Vietnam, President Kennedy is remembered not for his foreign policy of winning the Cold War at all costs, a policy which was central to his administration, but for his domestic policicy. President Kennedy was afraid to push his civil rights legistlation through, for it would split the support he needed to institute his foreign policy goals. This, of course, was a disappointment to African Americans who had turned out in record numbers to ensure Kennedy's victory over Vice President Nixon in 1960. In the end, President Kennedy's horrible, amply-televised death cemented the image he himself had devised three years ago on television. President Kennedy became an icon for American youthful idealism.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born May 29, 1917, in a three-story house in the Massachusetts suburb of Brookline. He was the second child of nine born to Rose and Joseph Kennedy. Joseph Kennedy was a self-made millionaire who would latter became the future chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Franklin Roosevelt. He also went on to hold a position as ambassador to Great Britain, also under Roosevelt. Both of John's grandfathers had served in the Massachusetts State Senate, and John Fitzgerald, Rose Kennedy's father, had served in the United States House of Representatives and as mayor of Boston. The Kennedy family moved from Brookline, Massachusetts to Riverdale, New York, while John was still very young. The family later moved to Bronxville, New York and finally to Hyanis Port, Massachusetts. John received his early elementary education at public schools in Brookline and in Riverdale. At the age of thirteen he enrolled in the Canterbury School, a prestigious college preparatory school in New Milford, Connecticut. One year later the boy enrolled at another, more prestigious college prep school, the Chaote School in Wallingford, Connecticut. Kennedy spent a summer studying economics at a school in London before returning to the United States to enroll at Princeton. Illness forced Kennedy to drop out of Princeton before the conclusion of his first term. The following year, Kennedy enrolled at Harvard were he studied economics and political science. During the summer of 1939 John Kennedy returned to England where he conducted a series of interviews with top government officials, and the resulting "Why England Slept," an examination of England's appeasement of fascism in the years prior to World War II, became his senior thesis. Kennedy graduated Harvard with honors in 1940, and "Why England Slept," published that same year, met with critical acclaim.
When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Kennedy tried to enlist in the army, but failed the physical examination because of a back injury he had received while playing football at Harvard. He put himself on an exercise program to strengthen his back and passed the Navy's entrance examination in September. After a PT (patrol torpedo) boat training period, Kennedy was commissioned with the rank of lieutenant and given command of a small PT boat in the South Pacific. On April 2, 1943 Lieutenant Kennedy's boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer. Two of the thirteen men in Kennedy's crew were killed in the collision. While using a life preserver to drag a badly-injured crew member who couldn't swim on his own, Lieutenant Kennedy led his men on a four-hour swim to a nearby island. After a number of days on the island, they managed to get a message carved on a coconut to a nearby Allied base by way of the islands natives. Upon being rescued, Kennedy was sent back to the United States where he was hospitalized first for malaria, and later for an operation on his back. Lieutenant Kennedy was recognized for valor with the Navy and Marine Corps medal and the Purple Heart before being discharged in 1945.
When John's older brother, Joseph Kennedy Jr., was killed in action in 1945, John was left with the burden of becoming the statesman that Joseph Kennedy Sr. had always wanted for a son. John edited a collection of his family's personal accounts of his brother, which were published in 1945 in a book called As We Remember Joe. John Kennedy was working as a reporter for the International News Service when he decided to run as the Democratic candidate for Representative of the 11th District of Massachusetts in 1946. Kennedy won the election and was reelected to his seat in 1948, and again in 1950. During his years in the House, Kennedy was a champion of labor and educational reform. He served on the Education and Labor Committee, the Subcommittee on Education, and the Joint Committee on Labor-Management Relations. His most notable contribution was his opposition to the Hartley Bill which he felt limited the bargaining power of unions. Kennedy also served on the District of Columbia Committee and as chairman of the Subcommittee on Public Utilities, Banking and Insurance.
In 1952 Kennedy challenged the Republican candidate, incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., for a seat in the Senate. Despite the loss of the Democratic national candidate Adlai Stevenson in the Presidential election that year, Kennedy beat Lodge by a considerable margin. In the Senate, Kennedy served on the Labor and Public Welfare Committee, the Government Operations Committee, the Special Committee to Investigate Lobbying, and the Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field. Senator Kennedy began his involvement in foreign affairs when he joined the Foreign Relations Committee in 1957. He later served as chairman of the International Organization Affairs Subcommittee and the African Affairs Subcommittee. He spent the majority of 1954 and 1955 on sick leave from the Senate while he underwent a series of operations on his back. During this time, Kennedy missed the hearings which resulted in the censure of Senator Joe McCarthy. Kennedy was often criticized for not taking a stand on this issue, but he later declared his support of the censure and commented that if he didn't hesitate it would have looked like political opportuning in the wake of the decision. While recovering from his back operations, Senator Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage, which chronicled the lives of what Kennedy believed were the most courageous Senators in history. Profiles in Courage became a bestseller and won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography.
On September 12, 1953, John Fitzgerald Kennedy married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, the daughter of a wealthy Wall Street broker. Jacqueline was a graduate of Vassar College, Sorbonne in Paris, France, and George Washington University. The couple had four children, two daughters and two sons. One son was still born, and one daughter died in infancy. John Jr. and Caroline Kennedy were very young when their father was in the White House, and they became favorite subjects for the American press. The popular media frequently referred to the young family as "Camelot," from the legend of King Arthur. Mrs. Kennedy was responsible for restoring the White House with historic furnishings and opening it up to the public as a tourist attraction. Five years after President Kennedy's death, Jacqueline married Aristotle Onasis, a Greek shipping mogul.
In 1956 Senator Kennedy delivered a speech nominating Adlai Stevenson for President at the Chicago Democratic National Convention. Stevenson lost the bid to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, but Kennedy's nominating speech marked his transition onto the national political scene.
At the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 1960 Senator Kennedy secured the nomination on the first ballot. Speaker of the House Lyndon Baines Johnson, who came in second to Kennedy on the Presidential ballot, won the Vice Presidential nomination. The Republicans nominated Vice President Richard M. Nixon for President and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. for Vice President. Kennedy called his platform the "New Frontier" in which he promised sweeping civil rights legislation. According to Kennedy, the "New Frontier" marked the dawning of a new age of public service and the coming into power of a new generation of Americans. Senator Kennedy was considerably far behind Vice President Nixon in the polls when he challenged the Vice President to a series of four televised debates. Though the Vice President's answers were more exacting and feasible, his shaky delivery cost him considerable support. Kennedy's masterful performance in the debates enabled him to win the election by a slim margin in the popular vote and by 303-219 in the electoral college. John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the thirty-fifth President of the United States on January 20, 1961.
Near the end of the Eisenhower Administration, a communist government had come to power in Cuba under the leadership of Fidel Castro. The CIA devised a plan to assassinate Castro and overthrow the communist government by using 1,400 Cuban exiles whom they had trained in counter-revolutionary tactics. On April 17, 1961 the Bay of Pigs Invasion took place. The operation was an unprecedented failure: Of the 1,400 insurgents, 1,200 were either killed or captured. Castro's success in repelling the invaders earned him the status of national hero, and his government became stronger than ever. President Kennedy went on national television and took full responsibility for the failure.
In October of 1962 United States spy planes took pictures which confirmed the United States' suspicion that the Soviets were trying to construct an offensive nuclear missile base in Cuba. Rather than trying to solve the problem diplomatically, President Kennedy went on television and revealed the plan. He informed the American people that he was instituting a naval blockade of Soviet ships bound for Cuba and promised that he would stop at nothing, including total nuclear annihilation, to ensure that the base would not be built. The world waited and watched for three days while the international drama played itself out. In the end the Soviets backed down. The Cuban Missile Crisis was seen as a major victory for the Kennedy Administration. Tensions between the United States and the U.S.S.R. abated in the wake of the crisis to the point were both nations were willing to sign a treaty with Great Britain to ban the atmospheric, outer space, and underwater testing of nuclear weapons. In spite of this treaty, the Soviets began a massive military build up which, by the end of the decade, enabled them to have at their disposal a nuclear weapons arsenal equal to that of the United States. The Kennedy Administration built up the United States conventional military in the years following the Cuban Missile Crisis, becoming an advocate of limited, conventional warfare in fighting the battles of the Cold War.
In 1961 President Kennedy revealed his plan for the Peace Corps, a program designed to send educated volunteers into undeveloped regions in the world to help quell the disease, starvation and misery that were widespread in these areas. That year the Kennedy Administration also established the Alliance for Progress which was to help Latin American countries develop their natural resources. The Trade Expansion Act, passed in 1962, gave the President the power to reduce the protective tariffs in order to arrange reciprocal trade agreements with nations in the European common market. Communist insurgency in Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos escalated during the years of the Kennedy Administration, and the President sent in American "military advisers" to aid the non-communist forces fighting in those countries.
Domestically, the Kennedy Administration passed a bill to end racial and sexual discrimination in housing projects funded by federal loans. In 1962 President Kennedy sent in the National Guard to ensure the safety of the first African American students attending the University of Mississippi under desegregation laws. He also sent the National Guard into the University of Alabama, and later into a public school in Alabama in 1963, for the same reason. On August 28, 1963 a Freedom March on Washington, led by civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., demanded that President Kennedy live up to the promises of his campaign. Heeding their call, Kennedy proposed an across-the-board civil rights reform legislation, which was later passed by President Johnson in the wake of Kennedy's death.
On November 22, 1963, while President Kennedy was riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas during a tour of the nation to rally support for his reelection the following year, he was shot once in the head and once in the back. President Kennedy was taken to the Texas Medical Center where he was pronounced dead on arrival. His body was taken to Washington for ceremonies and later buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
Lee Harvey Oswald, a former marine who had renounced his United States citizenship in 1959, was arrested and charged with the assassination of President Kennedy. On Sunday November 24, just two days after the shooting, Oswald was being moved from the Dallas City Jail to a county jail when he was shot and fatally wounded by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner. The shooting of Oswald, which took place on national television, left many questions surrounding the assassination unanswered. Suspicion that Oswald may have acted as a pawn in a much larger operation moved President Johnson to establish a commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren to investigate the Kennedy assassination. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone, but the issue did not die there. In the mid 1970's, a special committee of the House of Representatives re-investigated the circumstances surrounding the Kennedy assassination and found in favor of a conspiracy. In 1982 the National Research Council, a council which had been set up to scientifically examine the evidence of the shooting, concluded that Oswald could not have acted alone.
