Professor Dave here, let’s talk about JFK.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected to the presidency, as well as
the first Roman Catholic, and the first to be born in the 20th Century.
His untimely death has lent his presidency an almost mythic aura; many feel the country
was never the same.
Though his administration was initially dubbed “The New Frontier,” after his assassination
it was sometimes referred to as “Camelot,” a reference to his fondness for the Broadway
musical about King Arthur.
Young John was educated at Harvard, and his master’s thesis on Britain’s appeasement
of Hitler at Munich became a best seller entitled “Why England Slept”.
When World War II broke out, Kennedy, who had been a sickly child, was initially rejected
from military service because of his bad back and poor health.
But he was determined to enlist, and after a strenuous exercise regime and some help
from his father’s friends in government, he received a commission in the Navy as skipper
of a Patrol Torpedo boat.
While on patrol in the South Pacific, his vessel was rammed by a Japanese destroyer
and cut in half.
Kennedy and his crew swam through barracuda-infested waters until they reached a nearby island.
For several days, Kennedy swam to nearby islands until he found one populated by natives, who
then took a message to an Australian lookout, thereby securing a rescue party.
Kennedy’s heroism was printed in the New Yorker and later became a best-selling book
and movie.
As a returning war hero, Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946 and then to the Senate
in 1952.
His poor health and acute back pain caused him to have low attendance in Congress, and
he adopted a regimen of painkillers and amphetamines that he would rely on for the rest of his
life.
In 1954 when recuperating from back surgery, he worked on a book called “Profiles in
Courage,” which saluted American politicians who had risked their careers to do what they
thought was right.
It won the Pulitzer Prize and secured Kennedy’s reputation as one of the rising stars of the
Democratic Party, setting the stage for his presidential campaign in 1960.
His victory came by a razor-thin margin over Eisenhower’s Vice President, Richard Nixon,
which some believe involved tampering by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s Democratic machine.
Nevertheless, Kennedy’s presidency was one of the most dramatic administrations in American
History.
His movie star good looks and cool intellect embodied the American image of itself in the
60s as a dynamic society capable of great deeds, ready and able to meet any challenge.
His announcement that the US would send a man to the moon before the end of the decade
is a prime example of the confidence he brought to the office.
With his glamorous wife Jacqueline and his two young children, Kennedy seemed to personify
his own stated desire for excellence, which was exemplified by his Cabinet, the best and
brightest of the post-war generation.
Among them was his brother Robert Kennedy, who would become one of the most influential
Attorney Generals in US History.
And yet, JFK’s “New Frontier”, the name given to his collection of programs and policies,
derailed almost immediately.
A plan to invade Cuba and remove the two-year-old Communist government of Fidel Castro was hatched
during the Eisenhower Administration, which had successfully removed governments in Iran
and Guatemala that were unfavorable to large corporations.
The CIA promised Kennedy that the invasion force would be welcomed as liberators by the
Cuban people, and would spark a mass uprising against Castro.
Kennedy was skeptical of this plan, wanting it to seem like an entirely Cuban effort.
The invasion was a disaster.
Due to poor planning, the invaders landed in a swampy area known as the Bay of Pigs,
and were pinned down by Castro’s troops.
No mass uprising materialized and the scattered invasion forces dispersed into the hills.
The hawkish Joint Chiefs of Staff urged Kennedy to provide air support after the botched landing
but he held firm to his stated refusal of American military involvement.
The invaders were quickly captured and the Bay of Pigs became an international humiliation.
Publicly, Kennedy accepted full responsibility for the fiasco, but privately, he fumed at
the bad intelligence the CIA had given him and their request for American military support.
The repercussions of the Bay of Pigs would linger throughout the remainder of Kennedy’s
term.
When he met with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna that spring, the tough peasant Russian
leader sized up Kennedy as a weak, young playboy, proceeding to lecture him on the evils of
capitalism and the virtues of the Communist system.
Kennedy’s hopes of easing tension with the Soviet Union were dashed, and he remarked
to an aide, “It's going to be a cold winter.”
Kennedy feared that if war broke out between the two superpowers it would be in Berlin.
Residents of Soviet-controlled East Germany were fleeing the Communist state by the thousands.
To stem the exodus, Khrushchev ordered the construction of a wall separating West and
East Berlin in 1961.
Tensions rose to a fever pitch when American and Russian tanks faced off at Checkpoint
Charlie, the border crossing between East and West Berlin.
A single error on either side would lead to war and Kennedy was relieved when the Russians
agreed to withdraw their tanks if the Americans withdrew theirs.
Meanwhile, domestically, the Civil Rights Movement was emerging as the most pressing
social movement of the times.
A century after the Civil War, African-Americans were in many areas still denied the right
to vote or attend state universities.
Kennedy had communicated with Martin Luther King during the campaign, sparking hope among
Civil Rights activists that he would be far more sympathetic to their cause than Eisenhower
had been.
Kennedy was caught in a political quandary.
At that time, the vast majority of the Congressional leadership was Southern Democrat.
They controlled whether legislation would be brought to the floor for a vote or remain
bottled up in committee.
The Civil Rights activists pressed for action, and Kennedy was sympathetic, but he pleaded
for patience.
His pleas fell on deaf ears, and in 1961, busloads of Activists, dubbed the “Freedom
Riders” descended upon the South to protest the Jim Crow laws that relegated African-Americans
to second-class citizenship and constant segregation.
Activists were killed, both black and white.
Church bombings, police beatings, and cross burnings became frequent.
Finally, both the President and Attorney General Robert Kennedy decided to use federal troops
to protect black students who had enrolled in segregated schools in Mississippi and Alabama.
Kennedy also proposed a Civil Rights bill that would end the disenfranchisement of African-Americans
and ensure they had full access to every public facility in the country.
The bill would languish in Congress until his death.
But October of 1962 brought Kennedy’s gravest challenge, and would be the closest the United
States and the USSR would ever come to nuclear war.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, as it came to be known, began when U-2 spy planes noticed Russian-made
missile launchers being constructed in Cuba.
Kennedy was urged by his Joint Chiefs to launch a preemptive attack but a note from his brother
Robert that read, “Now I know how Tojo felt at Pearl Harbor,” pushed enthusiasm for
a surprise attack to the back burner.
Kennedy announced a blockade of the island, what he called a “quarantine” that would
allow inspected commercial ships to proceed but would turn back any military vessels containing
offensive weapons.
The world watched and waited as the two nuclear superpowers went eye to eye, until the Russians
blinked.
They would remove their missile launchers while Kennedy privately agreed to remove obsolete
American missiles in Turkey.
Coming so close to nuclear war was a transformative experience for both Kennedy and Khrushchev,
and they vowed to reduce the possibility of World War III by establishing a “hot line,”
a direct telephone link from Moscow to Washington.
The Joint Chiefs were furious at what they saw as Kennedy’s betrayal by not attacking
the Soviet Union while the U.S. still had nuclear superiority.
Again, Kennedy was appalled at their belligerence and became determined to never again steer
the nation towards nuclear war.
In what may have been his finest speech, given at the American University in spring of 1963,
Kennedy proposed an end to the madness of nuclear testing.
The crisis had been a sobering wake up call as to the dangers of gambling with all human
life, and Khrushchev responded positively to Kennedy’s speech.
With the possibility of a thaw in the Cold War, Kennedy felt that events were now under
control, and he looked forward to the upcoming election.
Meanwhile, even though the Communist North was winning the civil war in South Vietnam,
Kennedy had privately declared his intentions to bring American forces home after the 1964
election, a decision verified by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, brother Robert
Kennedy, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who disagreed with the decision.
When Kennedy became president, Laos was the likely flashpoint for a war.
But Kennedy, who had been to Southeast Asia in the 50s, was wary of involvement in a land
war in Southeast Asia.
Kennedy’s dynamism and inspirational speeches endeared him to much of the country, his Boston
accent affectionately mocked by television personalities.
He founded programs such as the Peace Corps, which sent idealistic young Americans around
the world to help improve the living standards of impoverished countries.
The Alliance for Progress sought better relations with Latin America.
And he supported the space program, which sent astronauts Alan Shepard, Gus Grisson
and John Glenn into space.
These programs were popular, and presented American “can do” optimism at its finest.
But tragedy would cut progress short.
On November 22nd 1963, while on an early campaign trip to shore up support for the Texas Democratic
Party, Kennedy was assassinated.
His death shocked the world and leaders from around the globe attended his funeral.
This event has been the subject of intense speculation ever since, as the idea that the
gunman Lee Harvey Oswald could have acted alone, however possible, seems unfathomable.
Between Robert’s prosecution of the mafia and John’s involvement with notable mafia
mistress Judith Exner, involvement by the mob is possible, which would explain Oswald’s
murder two days later by Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner with mob ties, likely to silence him
from talking.
Evidence exists that suggests rogue CIA agents were involved, or any number of other less
likely suspects.
To this day there is no firm consensus about this event.
The traumatic upheavals yet to come – the Vietnam War, race riots, counterculture, and
Watergate, would shake America’s confidence to the core, and the Kennedy years would be
seen as the last Golden Age.
It is a testament to Kennedy’s enduring influence that both parties now try and claim
him as one of their own.
Despite his reckless sexual escapades, unreported at the time, Kennedy’s cool temperament
served the nation well during some of its most perilous crises.
Had he listened to military hawks like General Curtis LeMay, there very well could have been
nuclear war over Cuba.
Although there were major pressures on him to eliminate Castro, which led to some deeply
flawed alliances with the mob and bungled assassination attempts, by the time of his
death, Kennedy had begun backdoor feelers towards establishing relations with the Castro
regime and was even contemplating establishing relations with Red China in his second term.
He was one of the finest orators ever to serve in the office, and speeches like his inaugural
address, televised addresses on Civil Rights and the Cuban Missile Crisis, his famous “Ich
bin ein Berliner” speech in West Berlin, and his American University speech, remain
models of presidential eloquence.
His brief time in office, just under three years, was one of the most dramatic presidencies
in our nation’s history.
His greatest setbacks were in his failures to get his legislative agenda passed by Congress,
including the Civil Rights Act, Medicare for senior citizens, and a tax cut to stimulate
a stagnant economy.
But with the legislative prowess of his successor, who called JFK “the greatest leader of our
time”, these initiatives would become law.
Even in his death, the memory of John F. Kennedy continues to inspire his country.