Topic 10

John F. Kennedy

A. Life before the presidency

1. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the nation’s first President born in the 20th century (1917). Both parents (Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald) were from Boston families with long political histories. His maternal grandfather had been mayor of Boston. Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had made a fortune in the stock market, entertainment, and other business, managing to take his money out of the stock market just before the crash of 1929. Though the ensuing Great Depression gripped the nation, “Jack” and his eight siblings enjoyed a privileged childhood of elite private schools, sailboats, servants, and summer homes. Kennedy later claimed that the only experience he had of the Great Depression was what he read in books while attending Harvard University. In short, the members of the Kennedy family, thanks to Joseph P. Kennedy’s vast wealth, were among the fortunate who were untouched by the Great Depression.

2. For John, this privileged childhood was interrupted repeatedly by chronic bouts of illness. First, scarlet fever at age 3, followed by frequent bouts of colitis as he grew older. Doctors beginning to experiment with the treatment of this illness with steroids (placed under the skin). Side-effect: degeneration in the vertebra in the lower part of his back and was afflicted with a bad back for the remainder of his life. (All of these ailments, however, did nothing, however, to stifle his libido!)

In 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Joseph P. Kennedy, John’s father, to the key post of ambassador to the United Kingdom. The new ambassador was unsympathetic to British preparedness policies and found a cool reception in London. While in England with his father, John wrote his senior essay for Harvard University on England's lack of readiness for the Second World War. It was published and was well received by critics, becoming a bestseller under the title Why England Slept.

3. World War II Military Service

After Kennedy graduated from Harvard, the United States entered World War II. Efforts to join the Army rebuffed because of his medical record. His efforts to join the U.S. Navy were initially thwarted by his ill-health, but through the intervention of his father he was accepted and assigned to work in Naval Intelligence in Washington.

Naval career almost ended through his relationship with Inga Arvad. Transferred to Charleston, but continued the relationship.

4. He was eventually admitted and assigned to serve in the South Pacific, commanding a small motor-torpedo boat, or “PT boat.” Kennedy and his crew participated in the campaign to wrest thousands of islands from Japanese control. In August 1943, as the sailors were sleeping without posting a watch (in violation of naval regulations), his boat, PT 109, was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. Towing a badly burned crewmate by a life-jacket strap clenched in his teeth, Kennedy led the crew's ten survivors on a three-mile swim to refuge on a tiny island. The crew hid on the island from the enemy for days until Kennedy managed to summon help. Widely credited with the rescue of his crew, Kennedy received the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Medal for Valor, and a Purple Heart for injuries he sustained. Nevertheless, he returned home to a naval inquiry on the sinking. Although a board found evidence of poor seamanship, the Navy needed heroes more than it needed scapegoats, and Kennedy was cast as the former to build public morale, and recruited to go on speaking tours.

The war ended in 1945, but not without a deep cost to the Kennedy family: the oldest son, Joseph Jr., a pilot, was killed on a bombing mission in Europe. Handsome and outgoing, Joseph had been the one tabbed by his father to become President one day. Upon his death, his father's aspirations fell on John, but it took John some time to make this decision to enter politics.

5. The Political Climb

After being discharged from the Navy, John Kennedy worked briefly as a reporter for the Hearst newspapers, considered the idea of going to law school, but in 1946, at the age of twenty-nine, Kennedy won election to the U.S. Congress representing a working-class Boston district. He served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, earning a reputation as a somewhat conservative Democrat (and ladies’ man). He was re-elected in 1948 and again in 1950, and to be honest his career in the House was not particularly impressive. Nonetheless, in 1952, he ran for the U.S. Senate and defeated the Republican incumbent from another Massachusetts family with a long political history, Henry Cabot Lodge.

That same year, he met Jacqueline Bouvier at a dinner party, and, as he later put it, “leaned across the asparagus and asked her for a date.” The two were married a year later and while the public image was one of a happy couple, there were strains in part because of his continued womanizing. Eventually they had three children, Caroline, John, Jr. and Patrick Bouvier who died shortly after his birth in August 1963.

Kennedy continued to be dogged by poor health. Left thin and sallow by malaria brought home from the war in the Pacific, he also suffered from Addison’s disease, which many doctors considered terminal. He relied on a steady stream of painkillers and steroids to treat the symptoms of his many ailments. Constant back pain would prevent him from lifting even his own small children. Ironically, though, Kennedy’s public image was one of youth, health, and vigor. And while recovering from back surgery in 1954, Kennedy put his convalescence from to productive use by writing (with the help of Theodore Sorensen) Profiles in Courage, a book about U.S. Senators who had taken unpopular but admirable moral stands. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957. Who wrote it? Probably written by committee!

Due to his continuing poor health, Kennedy had one of the worst attendance records in Congress. His real achievements in the Senate were few, but almost immediately after election he began angling for even higher office. In 1956, he mounted a serious quest for the vice presidential spot alongside presidential hopeful Adlai Stevenson. He narrowly lost the spot to Estes Kefauver, a better-known senator from Tennessee. Ultimately, though, this defeat proved a blessing. The Republican incumbents, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Vice President Richard M. Nixon, soundly defeated Stevenson and Kefauver that fall; neither Democrat would ever be a real contender for the office again. Kennedy remained, however, untarnished by Stevenson's defeat and the exposure he got at the 1956 national Democratic convention made him a serious contender for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. (Sometimes, when you lose, you really win.)

Reelected to the Senate in 1958, Kennedy became a member of its influential Foreign Relations Committee, which he used as a platform to attack President Eisenhower's diplomatic and military policies, claiming that the United States was on the wrong side of a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union. Kennedy continued to press these themes as he began maneuvering to get the Democratic nomination for the 1960 presidential election.

6. Nomination and election: the great question at that time was can a Roman Catholic be elected president? Outcome of the election indicated that the answer was “yes”, though at that time, just barely.

B. Domestic Affairs: The New Frontier

1. New Frontier Proposals

– Tax cuts as a way of encouraging economic growth (provided the federal budget remained balanced or at least nearly balanced)

– A Medicare program for the elderly

– Increased federal spending on education, including federal loans to parochial schools

– A federal program to rebuild the inner cities

– Increase in the minimum wage - $1/1.25 hour

– Increased support for the space program with the goal of placing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

2. Did not have a great deal of success and his legislative accomplishments as president were meager. His proposals were mostly blocked by coalition of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats.

3. Were exceptions

– Minimum wage increased $1.00 up to $1.25/hour – Sam Rayburn’s last legislative accomplishment. Rayburn played a major role in pushing the legislation through Congress. Shortly after that, suffering from cancer, Rayburn returned home to Texas and died in November 1961 in Bonham.

– Peace Corps – 1961 – Sent volunteers to developing countries to help in fields such as education, farming, health care etc. JFK insisted that the CIA not to recruit volunteers when they returned! He did this in order to convince third world countries that our people were there to help them, not to spy and gather information to be used by the CIA.

– The space program. To millions of Americans leadership in the space race was a way of promoting the nation’s image as the world’s leader in science. Consequently, NASA (established in 1958) got virtually everything it wanted during the decade, and after approximately $25 billion had been spent on the program, Americans landed on the moon in July 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first Americans on the moon.

C. Civil Rights: JFK’s gradual conversion to a cause that was not at first a part of the New Frontier

1. January 1957 MLK, Jr. and supporters organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference – Had the effect of refocusing the civil rights movement. NAACP attorneys had led the fight to this point in the courts. That fight would continue but now large numbers of ordinary black people would take to the streets, to the buses, and the lunch counters in support of equal rights for all Americans.

2. The demands of black Americans for equal rights led to freedom rides, sit-ins, and the Ole Miss crisis in the fall of 1963.

3. But, he did not become an outspoken supporter of civil rights at first. Had much the same fear that Woodrow Wilson had earlier in the century; conservative whites would refuse to support him.

4. For a long time he refused to speak in support of the civil rights movement, but one of the things that helped get him “off the fence” so to speak were the events in Birmingham, AL in April, 1963. Police Chief Bull Connor and his men responded with police dogs, cattle prods, and fire hoses, among other things.

5. Moved both of the Kennedy brothers. June 11, 1963 delivered a nationwide speech in support of civil rights, and a civil rights bill sent to Congress shortly thereafter. Would give the Attorney-General authority to originate desegregation suits in field of public education and would withhold federal funds from programs that practiced racial segregation. Stalled in Congress at the time of JFK’s death.

6. August 1963 – Dr. King and his supporters held a march on Washington in support of civil rights. JFK at first opposed, fearing a white backlash, but when he was unable to stop the march, he expressed lukewarm support for it and met with leaders of the march that day, but did not attend the march himself. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech the highlight of the march.

7. A few personal experiences….

D. Foreign Affairs: A mixture of failure, success, and uncertainty:

1. Worst hour was the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961.

– Plans for the invasion started under Eisenhower.

– Reluctantly JFK let them continue. Invasion force trained by the CIA but it was hoped that it would appear that the entire operation was carried out by anti-Castro Cubans.

– April 17 – Invasion began and everything went wrong; landing craft got stuck on coral reefs and ship carrying radio equipment and ammunition reserves sunk the first day by Cuban Air Force.