It was published and was well received by critics, becoming a bestseller under the title, Why England Slept. In August , as the sailors were sleeping without posting a watch in violation of naval regulations , a Japanese destroyer rammed his boat, PT 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. 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 , but not without a deep cost to the Kennedy family: the oldest son, Joseph Jr. Handsome and outgoing, Joseph had been the one tapped by his father to become president one day.
Upon his death, his father's aspirations fell on John. After being discharged from the Navy, John Kennedy worked briefly as a reporter for the Hearst newspapers, and in , the twenty-nine-year-old Kennedy won election to the US Congress representing a working-class Boston district. He served three terms in the US House of Representatives, earning a reputation as a somewhat conservative Democrat. He was re-elected in and again in 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 prevented him from lifting even his own small children. Ironically, though, Kennedy's public image was one of youth, health, and vigor. Kennedy put one period of enforced convalescence from back surgery to productive use by writing Profiles in Courage , a book about eight American senators who had taken unpopular but admirable moral stands.
Benefiting also from the handiwork of Senate staffer Theodore Sorensen, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 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 , he mounted a serious quest for the vice presidential spot alongside presidential hopeful Adlai Stevenson. He narrowly lost the bid to Estes Kefauver, a senator from Tennessee. Ultimately, though, this defeat proved a blessing. In the Democratic primaries, Kennedy outmaneuvered his main opponent, Hubert Humphrey, with superior organization and financial resources.
The election turned largely on a series of televised national debates in which Kennedy bested Nixon, an experienced and skilled debater, by appearing relaxed, healthy and vigorous in contrast to his pallid and tense opponent.
On November 8, , Kennedy defeated Nixon by a razor-thin margin to become the 35th president of the United States of America.
Kennedy's election was historic in several respects. At the age of 43, he was the second youngest American president in history, second only to Theodore Roosevelt , who assumed the office at He was also the first Catholic president and the first president born in the 20th century.
Delivering his legendary inaugural address on January 20, , Kennedy sought to inspire all Americans to more active citizenship. Kennedy's greatest accomplishments during his brief tenure as president came in the arena of foreign affairs. Capitalizing on the spirit of activism he had helped to ignite, Kennedy created the Peace Corps by executive order in By the end of the century, over , Peace Corps volunteers would serve in countries.
Also in , Kennedy created the Alliance for Progress to foster greater economic ties with Latin America, in hopes of alleviating poverty and thwarting the spread of communism in the region. Kennedy also presided over a series of international crises. Known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion , the mission proved an unmitigated failure, causing Kennedy great embarrassment.
In August , to stem massive waves of emigration from Soviet-dominated East Germany to American ally West Germany via the divided city of Berlin, Nikita Khrushchev ordered the construction of the Berlin Wall , which became the foremost symbol of the Cold War.
However, the greatest crisis of the Kennedy administration was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October Discovering that the Soviet Union had sent ballistic nuclear missiles to Cuba, Kennedy blockaded the island and vowed to defend the United States at any cost. After several of the tensest days in history, during which the world seemed on the brink of nuclear annihilation, the Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles in return for Kennedy's promise not to invade Cuba and to remove American missiles from Turkey.
It was one of his proudest accomplishments. President Kennedy's record on domestic policy was rather mixed. Taking office in the midst of a recession, he proposed sweeping income tax cuts, raising the minimum wage and instituting new social programs to improve education, health care and mass transit.
However, hampered by lukewarm relations with Congress, Kennedy only achieved part of his agenda: a modest increase in the minimum wage and watered down tax cuts. The most contentious domestic issue of Kennedy's presidency was civil rights.
Constrained by Southern Democrats in Congress who remained stridently opposed to civil rights for Black citizens, Kennedy offered only tepid support for civil rights reforms early in his term. Nevertheless, in September Kennedy sent his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to Mississippi to use the National Guard and federal marshals to escort and defend civil rights activist James Meredith as he became the first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi on October 1, One of the last acts of his presidency and his life, Kennedy's bill eventually passed as the landmark Civil Rights Act in The next day, November 22, Kennedy, along with his wife and Texas governor John Connally, rode through cheering crowds in downtown Dallas in a Lincoln Continental convertible.
From an upstairs window of the Texas School Book Depository building, a year-old warehouse worker named Lee Harvey Oswald , a former Marine with Soviet sympathies, fired upon the car, hitting the president twice.
Kennedy died at Parkland Memorial Hospital shortly thereafter, at age A Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby assassinated Oswald days later while he was being transferred between jails. The death of President Kennedy was an unspeakable national tragedy, and to this date many people remember with unsettling vividness the exact moment they learned of his death.
While conspiracy theories have swirled ever since Kennedy's assassination, the official version of events remains the most plausible: Oswald acted alone. For few former presidents is the dichotomy between public and scholarly opinion so vast. To the American public, as well as his first historians, Kennedy is a hero — a visionary politician who, if not for his untimely death, might have averted the political and social turmoil of the late s.
In public-opinion polls, Kennedy consistently ranks with Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln as among the most beloved American presidents of all time. Critiquing this outpouring of adoration, many more recent Kennedy scholars have derided Kennedy's womanizing and lack of personal morals and argued that as a leader he was more style than substance. In the end, no one can ever truly know what type of president Kennedy would have become, or the different course history might have taken had he lived into old age.
As historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. As his wife Jackie Kennedy said after his death, "There'll be great presidents again, and the Johnsons are wonderful, they've been wonderful to me — but there'll never be another Camelot again.
On October 26, , President Donald Trump ordered the release of 2, records related to the Kennedy assassination.
The move came at the expiration of a year waiting period signed into law in , which allowed the declassification of the documents provided that doing so would not hurt intelligence, military operations or foreign relations. Trump's release of the documents came on the final day he was legally allowed to do so. However, he did not release all of the documents, as officials from the FBI, CIA and other agencies had successfully lobbied for the chance to review particularly sensitive material for an additional days.
We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives.
The son of former U. President John F. He said, "No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space. President Kennedy had to deal with many serious problems here in the United States.
The biggest problem of all was racial discrimination. The US Supreme Court had ruled in that segregation in public schools would no longer be permitted. Black and white children, the decision mandated, should go to school together.
This was now the law of the land. However, there were many schools, especially in southern states, that did not obey this law. There was also racial segregation on buses, in restaurants, movie theaters, and other public places. Thousands of Americans joined together, people of all races and backgrounds, to protest peacefully this injustice. Martin Luther King Jr. The President believed that holding public protests would only anger many white people and make it even more difficult to convince the members of Congress who didn't agree with him to pass civil rights laws.
By June 11, , however, President Kennedy decided that the time had come to take stronger action to help the civil rights struggle. He proposed a new Civil Rights bill to the Congress, and he went on television asking Americans to end racism. On November 21, , President Kennedy flew to Texas to give several political speeches. The next day, as his car drove slowly past cheering crowds in Dallas, shots rang out.
Kennedy was seriously wounded and died a short time later. Within a few hours of the shooting, police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald and charged him with the murder. On November 24, another man, Jack Ruby, shot and killed Oswald, thus silencing the only person who could have offered more information about this tragic event.
The Warren Commission was organized to investigate the assassination and to clarify the many questions which remained. President Kennedy's death caused enormous sadness and grief among all Americans.
Most people still remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Washington for the President's funeral, and millions throughout the world watched it on television. As the years have gone by and other presidents have written their chapters in history, John Kennedy's brief time in office stands out in people's memories for his leadership, personality, and accomplishments.
Many respect his coolness when faced with difficult decisions--like what to do about Soviet missiles in Cuba in Others admire his ability to inspire people with his eloquent speeches. Still others think his compassion and his willingness to fight for new government programs to help the poor, the elderly and the ill were most important. Like all leaders, John Kennedy made mistakes, but he was always optimistic about the future.
He believed that people could solve their common problems if they put their country's interests first and worked together. Skip past main navigation. Life of John F. Kennedy Fast Facts: John F. Kennedy John F. Kennedy Quotations Life of Jacqueline B. Growing Up in the Kennedy Family Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was a very disciplined and organized woman, made the following entry on a notecard, when her second child was born: John Fitzgerald Kennedy Born Brookline, Mass.
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