JOHN F. KENNEDY
Biography
John F. Kennedy, whose ancestors came from Ireland, was the first Roman Catholic to become President of the United States. Aged 43 at the time of his election in 1960, he was also the youngest person ever elected to the country's highest office, although he was not the youngest to serve in it. Theodore Roosevelt was not quite 43 when the assassination of President William Mckinley in 1901 elevated him to the presidency. Like McKinley, Kennedy was to die at the hands of an assassin.
The War Years
Out of college, (in 1940, he graduated from Harvard cum laude, “with honor”) Kennedy was uncertain about his future. He thought about attending Yale Law School, went to business school at Stanford University for six months instead, then toured South America. In 1941 he tried to enlist in the Army but was rejected because of his old back injury. After five months of exercise to strengthen his back, he was accepted for service by the Navy.
Kennedy found his assignments, mostly paperwork, dull. When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, he applied for sea duty, underwent torpedo boat training, and was commissioned an ensign. The next year he shipped out for the South Pacific. There he became the central figure in one of the dramatic episodes of the war.
Exploits of PT-109
In the early hours before dawn on August 2, 1943, Kennedy, now a lieutenant (junior grade), was in command of the torpedo boat PT-109 on patrol near the Solomon Islands. Suddenly a Japanese destroyer plowed through the darkness and cut Kennedy's boat in half. Two of the twelve-man crew disappeared, one was badly burned, and others were less seriously hurt. Kennedy himself was thrown to the deck and his back re-injured, but he gathered his men on the bobbing bow, all that remained of his boat. When it seemed as if the bow would sink, Kennedy ordered everyone to make for an island about 3 miles (5 kilometers) away. Those who could not swim were told to hang onto a plank, once part of the gun mount, and push. Kennedy took charge of the burned crew member, and holding the straps of the man's life vest with his teeth, he towed him to the island.
Kennedy swam to other islands to try to find help but got caught in an ocean current and passed out, only his life vest saving him. Eventually, he and another officer found two natives in a canoe. Scratching a message on a coconut, Kennedy handed it to the natives, who carried it to a U.S. naval base. The men were rescued five days later. For his courage and leadership, Kennedy won the Navy and Marine Corps Medal.
He refused a chance to leave active duty, but malaria and his old back injury finally forced him into the hospital in 1944. After back surgery, he was discharged from the Navy in 1945.
Journalism, Politics, and Marriage
Still searching for a career, Kennedy went to work for the Hearst chain of newspapers. He covered the San Francisco conference that established the United Nations, British elections, and the Potsdam Conference held by the victorious Allied leaders at the end of World War II. Deciding that journalism was not for him, however, Kennedy turned to politics.
In 1946 he ran for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives from a Boston district. By hard campaigning, he defeated a large field of rivals for the nomination and easily won the election. After twice winning re-election, in 1952 he sought and won election to the U.S. Senate.
In 1953, Kennedy married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in Newport, Rhode Island. They had three children—Caroline, John, Jr., and Patrick, who lived only a few days.
Campaign for the Presidency
Kennedy missed being nominated for vice president by a few votes at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1956. But he gained an introduction to the millions of Americans who watched the convention on television, and when he decided to run for president in 1960, his name was widely known. Many people thought that his religion and his youthful appearance would handicap him. Kennedy faced the religion issue frankly, declaring his firm belief in the separation of church and state. He drew some criticism for his family's wealth, which enabled him to assemble a large staff and to get around the country in a private plane. But he attracted many doubting Democratic politicians to his side by winning delegate contests in every state primary he entered.
On gaining his party's nomination, Kennedy amazed nearly everybody by choosing Lyndon B. Johnson, who had opposed him for the nomination, as his vice-presidential running mate. Again, he used his considerable political skills to convince doubting friends that this was the practical course.
Kennedy's four television debates with the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon, were a highlight of the 1960 campaign. In the opinion of one television network president, they were “the most significant innovation in Presidential campaigns since popular elections began.” The debates were important in Kennedy's victory—303 electoral votes to 219 for Nixon. The popular vote was breathtakingly close: Kennedy's winning margin was a fraction of 1 percent of the total vote.
His Administration
Kennedy’s major problems as president were the Cold War with the Soviet Union and its Communist allies, the resistance of southerners in his own party to the demands of blacks for full civil rights, and unemployment. Soon after taking office in 1961, he had to deal with two dangerous confrontations with the Soviet Union.
Berlin
As if to test the new president’s courage, the Soviets chose to make Berlin, the capital of pre-war Germany, a chief battleground of the Cold War. In the summer of 1961, they intensified their pressures on West Berlin, which was under the protection of the United States, Britain, and France and was entirely surrounded by Communist East German territory. Kennedy insisted on the Western Allies’ right of access to West Berlin, and when the Communist authorities built a wall separating the city’s eastern and western sectors, he responded by increasing U.S. military forces. The Soviet threat subsided in Berlin by 1962 but soon flared elsewhere.
Cuban Crisis
It struck closer to home, on the island of Cuba. Earlier, in April 1961, a group of Cubans, trained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had launched an unsuccessful invasion of the island in an attempt to overthrow the Communist regime of Fidel Castro. Kennedy accepted responsibility for the affair, although its planning had begun under the previous administration of President Dwight Eisenhower. The Cuban issue became far more serious in the fall of 1962, when aerial photographs revealed the presence of Soviet missiles and troops on the island. Kennedy insisted on their withdrawal, proclaiming a naval blockade of the island. The crisis lasted for more than a week, ending when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to the U.S. demand.
Other Foreign Policy Measures
Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union improved after the end of the Cuban missile crisis, at least on the surface, but Cold War tensions continued. Increased Communist guerrilla activity in South Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia led Kennedy to greatly increase the number of U.S. military advisors there. To counter Communist influence in Latin America, he established in 1961 the Alliance for Progress, a program of aid and cooperation between the United States and the countries of the region. A hopeful step was a treaty banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere, signed in 1963, after long and difficult negotiations, by the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain.
Civil Rights
The civil rights issue presented the most difficult challenge to the president at home. Demonstrations by blacks in the South for an end to segregation led Kennedy to declare a “moral crisis” and call for legislation providing equal rights for all. When rioting broke out at the University of Mississippi in 1962 over the enrollment of a black, James Meredith, the administration sent federal marshals backed by national guardsmen to the scene to restore order. This resulted in a white anti-Kennedy backlash in the South, directed not only at the president but also at his brother Robert, who was attorney general.
Other Domestic Issues
Kennedy called his domestic program the New Frontier. Delaying tactics, more than actual rejections, by Congress hampered his record of legislative achievements. His hopes for new civil rights laws and a tax cut to help provide more jobs were unfulfilled at the time of his death. However, Congress did pass the Trade Expansion Act, which enabled the president to lower tariffs, or taxes on imports, to compete with nations of the European Community (now the European Union). One of Kennedy's most popular achievements was the Peace Corps, a volunteer organization that brought education and skills to developing countries of the world.
Kennedy also appointed two new justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, Byron R. White and Arthur J. Goldberg. Goldberg had served as his secretary of labor.
Life and Death
During all this, pain from his old back injury returned. Kennedy wore a small brace and suffered more than the public knew. Yet he loved life and politics. The image of vigor, friendliness, and humor that he gave to the country was real. Even with the burden of the presidency, he found time to read both for information and for pleasure. He wrote two books after he had entered politics, Profiles in Courage in 1956, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and Strategy of Peace in 1960. He had a deep sense of history and an appreciation of scholarship and was able to convey his thoughts in clear, forceful language.
On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was in Dallas, Texas, on a political tour of the state. Accompanied by Mrs. Kennedy and Texas governor John B. Connally, he was riding in an open car in a motorcade when shots rang out, striking the president in the head and neck. Kennedy was rushed to the hospital, but he died soon after without regaining consciousness. Governor Connally was also wounded but he recovered. As the news was relayed to a shocked nation,Vice President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president and flown to Washington, D.C.
Police arrested a man named Lee Harvey Oswald for the murder. Two days later, while being transferred from one jail to another, Oswald himself was shot to death by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.
A seven-member commission, headed by U. S. Chief Justice Earl Warren, was appointed by President Johnson to investigate the assassination. It reported that Oswald, alone, had fired the shots that killed the president, although questions surrounding Kennedy's death have continued to arouse speculation ever since.
Joseph A. Loftus
The New York Times Washington Bureau