John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963) was the 35th president of the United States, serving from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963. [1] A decorated naval officer in the Second World War and a Democratic congressman and senator from Massachusetts, he was the youngest person elected to the presidency and the first Roman Catholic to hold the office. [2] His administration confronted the Cuban Missile Crisis, committed the United States to a crewed lunar landing, and faced escalating demands for civil rights legislation. [1]
Early life and war service
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on 29 May 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts, the second of nine children in a wealthy and politically prominent Irish-American family; his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, later served as United States ambassador to the United Kingdom. He was educated at Choate and at Harvard College, graduating in 1940. [2]
Kennedy served in the United States Navy during the war, commanding a patrol torpedo boat in the Pacific. After PT-109 was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer in 1943, he led surviving crew members to safety over several days, an episode for which he received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal; he was also awarded the Purple Heart. Chronic back problems, aggravated by the incident, affected him for the rest of his life. [1]
Congress and the 1960 election
Kennedy was elected to the House of Representatives from Massachusetts in 1946 and to the Senate in 1952. In 1957 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Profiles in Courage, a study of senators who took politically costly stands. [3]
He won the Democratic nomination in 1960 and defeated Vice President Richard Nixon in a close general election, in which the first televised presidential debates were widely judged to have helped him. His inaugural address, with its appeal to public service, became one of the most quoted in American political history. [2]
Presidency
Foreign policy dominated the administration. An attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro's government through the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 failed at once and damaged Kennedy's early standing. In October 1962 the discovery of Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba produced the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest approach to nuclear war between the superpowers; Kennedy imposed a naval quarantine and the crisis ended with the withdrawal of the missiles. The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty followed in 1963. [1]
Kennedy expanded American military advisory involvement in South Vietnam, established the Peace Corps, and in 1961 committed the United States to landing astronauts on the Moon before the end of the decade, a pledge fulfilled by the Apollo programme in 1969. [2]
Domestically he moved cautiously on civil rights before endorsing comprehensive legislation in June 1963, after federal intervention to enforce desegregation at southern universities and the confrontations in Birmingham, Alabama. The bill he proposed was enacted after his death as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. [4]
Assassination and legacy
Kennedy was shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963, and was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested and was himself shot two days later. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone, a finding that has remained the subject of public dispute. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded to the presidency. [1]
Kennedy was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously. His name is attached to institutions including the John F. Kennedy Space Center and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston preserves his papers.
