Kennedy, John F.

Kennedy, John F. (1917–1963), thirty‐fifth president of the United States.Kennedy's standing in American political history far supersedes the actual achievements of his tragically foreshortened administration. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, the son of Joseph P. Kennedy, a wealthy and ambitious Irish‐American businessman, and his wife, Rose Fitzgerald, the daughter of a popular mayor of Boston, Kennedy early absorbed his father's expectations that he would go far in politics. Although plagued with lifelong serious health problems, he became a naval hero in World War II and won election to the House of Representatives in 1946 and to the Senate in 1952 and 1958, aided by his rugged good looks and youthful, energetic campaign style. He won the Democratic party's 1960 presidential nomination after a hotly contested series of primaries and went on to defeat the Republican Richard M. Nixon by the narrowest of margins. He thus became the youngest person (and the first Roman Catholic) ever elected to the White House. With his attractive and glamorous wife Jacqueline Bouvier (whom he married in 1953) as First Lady, Kennedy infused the presidency with an aura of excitement and sophistication.

Foreign policy was Kennedy's principal concern. The Cold War, he argued, required a more active use of American power than the inflexible policies of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration had permitted. While enlarging the nation's nuclear arsenal, he also backed the military's commitment to new forms of warfare suitable for fighting insurgences in what was becoming known as the “Third World.” He escalated the American drive to unseat Fidel Castro's communist regime in Cuba, first through the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion (whose plans he had inherited from his predecessor) and then through a series of covert assassination schemes hatched by the Central Intelligence Agency. A tense 1961 confrontation with the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev over Berlin was defused only by the Soviets' construction of the Berlin Wall. The Peace Corps, launched in 1961, stands as one of his most admired initiatives.

In the defining international event of his presidency, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy went to the brink of war to pressure the Soviets to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba. Perhaps ironically, the successful resolution of that crisis seemed to ease Soviet‐American relations. In 1963, Kennedy negotiated a ban on atmospheric nuclear tests and called for a new and more cooperative relationship with Moscow. At the same time, however, he increased Washington's commitment to the survival of a noncommunist government in South Vietnam, and in the Fall of 1963 he authorized a coup to topple South Vietnam's unpopular president, Ngo Dinh Diem, who was subsequently murdered by the coup leaders.

Domestically, the administration developed ambitious plans for a war on poverty, national health insurance for the elderly, and other initiatives, but none was implemented, stalled by an essentially conservative Congress. Kennedy's principal domestic achievement was one that Attorney General Robert Kennedy (his brother) at first sought to avoid: allying the federal government with the African American drive for civil rights. In June 1963, after the savage attacks of southern authorities against civil rights demonstrators had galvanized public opinion, Kennedy in a notable television speech expressed his and the nation's commitment to equal rights and proposed a bill that, after his death, would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963. In death, he came to symbolize a youthful idealism and optimism that many Americans ultimately concluded had died with him. For decades after, despite revelations of character blemishes largely unacknowledged during his lifetime, he loomed large in the American political imagination—his dynamism and radiant charm a reminder to millions of citizens of what seemed a better time and a loftier politics than what they had come to know in the difficult years that followed.
See also Civil Rights Legislation; Civil Rights Movement; Federal Government, Executive Branch: The Presidency; Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; Nuclear Strategy; Roman Catholicism; Sixties, The; Vietnam War.

Bibliography

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. , A Thousand Days, 1965.
Garry Wills , The Kennedy Imprisonment, 1982.
Herbert Parmet , J.F.K: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy, 1983.
Richard Reeves , President Kennedy, 1993.

Alan Brinkley