John F. Kennedy

• 1. Introduction

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  John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas on the 22nd of November 1963, while riding in a presidential motorcade. He was 46 years old, and had served as the 35th president of the United States for less than three years. The man arrested for his murder, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself shot and killed two days later by Jack Ruby. No trial ever took place. Both the FBI and the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald had acted alone, but the question has never fully settled in the American mind. Kennedy is still the most recent U.S. president to have died in office. His brief presidency contained some of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War, a near-miss with nuclear catastrophe, a fumbled invasion of Cuba, and a slow entanglement in Southeast Asia. And yet the polls consistently show historians and the public ranking him among the country's most admired leaders. How did a politician described by Lyndon Johnson as someone who did not "like the grunt work" become one of the most studied figures of the 20th century? The answers lie in a story that begins in Brookline, Massachusetts, runs through the Pacific theater of World War II, and ends on the streets of Dallas.

• 2. The Family Forge

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  Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. established trust funds for all nine of his children, guaranteeing them lifelong financial independence from birth. That wealth was both a gift and a pressure. Joe Sr. demanded high academic achievement at the dinner table, encouraged ambition relentlessly, and believed that if his sons were to compete in the political world they needed to attend school alongside boys from prominent Protestant families. It was why he sent John and his older brother Joseph Jr. to Choate, the preparatory boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut, rather than the Catholic school their mother Rose preferred. John spent his first years at Choate in his older brother's shadow. He compensated with rebellious behavior, eventually forming a clique whose most notorious stunt was exploding a toilet seat with a firecracker. When the headmaster, George St. John, brandished the ruined toilet seat at chapel and spoke of "muckers" who would "spit in our sea," Kennedy cheerfully named his group The Muckers Club. His lifelong friend Lem Billings was the roommate who shared that early notoriety. Kennedy graduated from Choate in June 1935, finishing 64th of 112 students. He was nevertheless voted "most likely to succeed." His path to Harvard was not straightforward. Ill health forced him home from a planned term at the London School of Economics, and he had to withdraw from Princeton after two months due to gastrointestinal illness. Harvard finally stuck, and while he was never a dedicated student at first, a trip to Europe in 1938 and 1939 changed him. He was in Berlin when a U.S. diplomatic representative gave him a secret message about the coming war to pass on to his father, and he was in London on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. By the time he graduated cum laude in 1940 with a thesis called "Appeasement in Munich," later published as Why England Slept, he had seen enough of the world to take his studies seriously. The book became a bestseller, the first to offer a broad public account of the war and its origins, and it followed him into politics as evidence of substance and seriousness.

• 3. War and the Making of a Hero

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  Kennedy tried to enlist in the Army's Officer Candidate School in 1940, but chronic back problems led to his medical disqualification. He eventually entered the Naval Reserve on the 24th of September 1941, with assistance from Alan Goodrich Kirk, the director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, who had been the naval attaché to Kennedy's father. His father again smoothed his path to active duty by providing misleading medical records and persuading PT boat officers that Kennedy's presence would generate favorable publicity for the fleet. On the 24th of April 1943, Kennedy took command of PT-109, then based on Tulagi Island in the Solomon Islands. On the night of August 1-2, the boat was on patrol to block Japanese destroyers carrying supplies and 900 soldiers to a garrison on Kolombangara Island. At approximately 2:00 a.m. on that moonless night, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri rammed PT-109 at an angle and cut it in half, killing two crew members. Kennedy re-injured his already damaged back in the collision. He then spent hours in the water towing a badly burned crewman named Patrick McMahon toward Plum Pudding Island, 3.5 miles to the southwest, with a life jacket strap clenched between his teeth. Seven days after the sinking, after Kennedy carved his location into a coconut shell and passed it to an English-speaking native with a canoe, the surviving crew was rescued. The story was written up by John Hersey in The New Yorker in 1944. Hersey portrayed Kennedy as a modest, self-deprecating hero, and the article's reach extended far beyond the magazine. During Kennedy's first congressional campaign, his father arranged for the Hersey piece to be mass-mailed to voters. Kennedy received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his courage, along with a Purple Heart for his injuries. When later asked how he became a war hero, Kennedy answered: "It was easy. They cut my PT boat in half." His brother Joe Jr., the family's political standard-bearer, died on the 12th of August 1944, when his aircraft was destroyed on a Navy air mission. His body was never recovered. That loss transferred the family's presidential ambitions onto John, the second eldest son.

• 4. The Rise Through Congress

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  Kennedy won the Democratic primary in the 11th congressional district of Massachusetts in 1946 with 42 percent of the vote, defeating nine other candidates. His father spent hours on the phone with reporters and editors, trading confidences and nudging them toward favorable coverage. The campaign had what one account described as a virtual monopoly on Boston subway advertising space, and it mass-mailed the Hersey PT-109 article as campaign literature. In the general election, Kennedy took 73 percent of the vote. His conduct in the House was not exactly distinguished. He had one of the highest absenteeism rates among members, and his friend George Smathers recalled that Kennedy seemed more interested in being a writer than a politician. Kennedy himself found most of his fellow congressmen boring. He served six years in the House before setting his sights on the Senate. The 1952 Senate race pitted him against Republican three-term incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., and Joe Sr. financed the campaign with particular ingenuity, including persuading the Boston Post to switch its endorsement to Kennedy by promising the publisher a $500,000 loan. Kennedy's mother and sisters hosted a series of "teas" at hotels and parlors across Massachusetts to reach women voters directly. In a year when Republican Dwight Eisenhower carried Massachusetts by 208,000 votes, Kennedy still defeated Lodge by 70,000 votes for the Senate seat. In the Senate, Kennedy chaired no major legislation into law, but he drafted more than 300 bills for Massachusetts and New England. During his convalescence from spinal surgery in 1956, he published Profiles in Courage, about senators who risked their careers for their personal beliefs. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1957. Lyndon Johnson, then the Senate majority leader, described Kennedy's Senate and House performance as "pathetic" on one occasion and called him a "playboy" on others. Robert Caro, who recorded these observations, also noted that Kennedy himself once called being a senator "the most corrupting job in the world." When Kennedy was re-elected in 1958 with 73.6 percent of the vote, the largest winning margin in Massachusetts political history up to that point, he was already traveling the country to build support for a presidential run.

• 5. Winning the Presidency

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  On the 2nd of January 1960, Kennedy formally announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he quickly identified his strategy: win primaries to show party bosses that a Catholic could attract popular support. Victories over Senator Hubert Humphrey in the Wisconsin and West Virginia primaries gave him the momentum he needed heading into the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. At the convention, Kennedy faced opposition from Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, two-time nominee Adlai Stevenson II, and former President Harry Truman, who publicly doubted Kennedy's experience. Kennedy's campaign was organized well enough to secure the nomination on the first ballot. Against his brother Robert's wishes, Kennedy chose Johnson as his running mate, reasoning that the Texas senator could deliver the South. In accepting the nomination, Kennedy delivered what became known as the "New Frontier" speech, telling the convention that the frontier he described was "not a set of promises" but "a set of challenges." At the start of the fall campaign, Nixon led in polls by six points. Kennedy's Catholicism, the space race, and Cuba all dominated the general election contest. On September 12, before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Kennedy addressed his faith directly: "I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party candidate for president who also happens to be a Catholic." The first of the televised debates, on September 26, drew an estimated 70 million viewers. Kennedy had met the day before with the producer to discuss camera placement. Nixon, recently released from the hospital after a knee injury, perspired under harsh studio lighting and looked into the reporters' faces rather than the camera. Kennedy wore a blue suit and shirt to reduce glare and looked directly into the camera throughout. Pollster Elmo Roper estimated that the debates gave Kennedy roughly two million additional votes. Kennedy defeated Nixon by just two-tenths of one percent in the national popular vote, winning 303 Electoral College votes to Nixon's 219.

• 6. The Brink of Nuclear War

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  On the 14th of October 1962, CIA U-2 spy planes photographed Soviet construction of intermediate-range ballistic missile sites in Cuba. The photographs reached Kennedy two days later. The missiles, positioned approximately 90 miles from the Florida coast, posed what his advisers immediately identified as an immediate nuclear threat. Kennedy formed an ad-hoc advisory body known as EXCOMM, which met secretly from October 16 through October 28. More than a third of the National Security Council members initially favored an unannounced air assault on the sites; some in the group compared this approach to "Pearl Harbor in reverse." Kennedy chose instead a naval blockade, which he publicly announced on October 22. Several Soviet ships approached the blockade line before stopping or reversing course. A U.S. Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet missile during the standoff, killing the pilot, Rudolf Anderson. Kennedy resisted pressure to respond with force. Through a backchannel arrangement, Robert Kennedy privately told Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that the U.S. would remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey after the crisis ended. On October 28, Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the missile sites. The U.S. publicly promised not to invade Cuba and privately agreed to remove its Jupiter missiles from both Italy and Turkey, which had by then been supplanted by submarines equipped with UGM-27 Polaris missiles. In the aftermath, a direct communications line between Moscow and Washington was established. Kennedy's approval rating climbed from 66 percent to 77 percent immediately following the resolution. Less than a year later, Kennedy signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty on the 7th of October 1963, prohibiting atomic testing on the ground, in the atmosphere, and underwater. The idea for the treaty had originally been proposed in Adlai Stevenson's 1956 presidential campaign. The U.S. Senate approved it on the 23rd of September 1963.

• 7. Berlin, Civil Rights, and the New Frontier

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  On the 26th of June 1963, Kennedy stood in front of hundreds of thousands of Berliners outside the city hall and delivered a speech that became one of the defining moments of the Cold War. He held up the Berlin Wall as evidence of communism's failure, saying: "Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect. But we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us." The phrase "Ich bin ein Berliner" closed the speech and drew an ecstatic response from the crowd. Kennedy told aides afterward that the Ireland trip the same week, his four-day visit to his ancestral homeland beginning June 26, was the best four days of his life. He was the first foreign leader to address the Irish parliament, the Houses of the Oireachtas. At home, Kennedy's domestic program, which he called the New Frontier, ran into persistent congressional resistance. His narrow victory margin, his thin connections to senior members of Congress, and his administration's foreign-policy preoccupations all limited what he could pass. He did win an increase in the federal minimum wage to $1.25 an hour in early 1961, though conservative Representative Carl Vinson inserted an amendment exempting laundry workers. The Area Redevelopment Act, a $394 million program directed primarily at Appalachian communities, also passed, along with the Housing Act of 1961. Kennedy proposed $2.3 billion in federal educational aid to states, but the House defeated it. His health insurance bill for the elderly failed to pass either chamber. On civil rights, Kennedy supported the movement but moved cautiously. As senator from Massachusetts, which lacked a large Black population, he had not made the cause a priority, and Robert Kennedy later acknowledged that the family had not been thinking about the situation of Black Americans in Mississippi or Alabama. After Kennedy's death, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a measure Kennedy had been advancing before his assassination.

• 8. Dallas and What Followed

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  On the 22nd of November 1963, Kennedy was shot while riding in a motorcade through Dallas. Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president the same day. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the killing, but Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald two days later, before any trial could take place. The Warren Commission and the FBI both concluded that Oswald had acted alone; conspiracy theories about the event have persisted ever since. Congress moved quickly after Kennedy's death to enact much of his legislative program, passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Revenue Act of 1964, two measures that had stalled while he was alive. The Peace Corps, which Kennedy had established by signing Executive Order 10924 in one of his first presidential acts, grew to 5,000 members by March 1963 and 10,000 the following year. By the time the source was compiled, more than 200,000 Americans had joined the organization across 139 countries. In Vietnam, Kennedy had signed NSAM 263 on the 11th of October 1963, ordering the withdrawal of 1,000 military personnel by year's end; at the time of his death there were 16,000 American military personnel in South Vietnam, up from the 900 advisers Kennedy had inherited from Eisenhower. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said in the 2003 documentary The Fog of War that Kennedy had been strongly considering pulling out of Vietnam after the 1964 election. Kennedy's personal life, including his chronic health conditions and extramarital affairs, became subjects of public attention after revelations in the 1970s. The Kennedy who emerges from the record is a more complicated figure than either his admirers or his critics have always acknowledged: a man whose father bought him advantages at every turn, who charmed televisions cameras while often bored the legislators he needed, and who presided over thirteen days in October 1962 that brought the world as close to nuclear war as it has ever come.