How John F. Kennedy Became President
John Fitzgerald Kennedy wasn't supposed to be the President from the Kennedy Family. That honor was planned for his older brother, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr. John Kennedy was the second of nine children born to businessman and later Ambassador Joseph Patrick "Joe" Kennedy, Sr. and his wife Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald Kennedy. His maternal grandfather was John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, who had once been the Mayor of Boston. All four of his grandparents were the children of immigrants from Ireland.
JFK lived in Brookline, Massachusetts until 1927 when the Kennedy family moved to the Bronx, in New York City. The Kennedy family spent their summers at their home in Hyannisport, Massachusetts and Christmas and Easter holidays at their winter home in Palm Beach, Florida.
In September 1931, 14 year old John Kennedy was sent to the The Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut for 9th through 12th grade, the same school that his older brother Joe Jr. had attended. While attending Choate, Kennedy experienced a number of health problems that led to his emergency hospitalization in 1934. In June 1934, he was admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and diagnosed with colitis. Kennedy graduated from Choate in June of the following year.
In September 1935 at age 18, he made his first trip abroad with his parents and his sister Kathleen to London with the intent of studying under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, once again as his older brother Joe Jr. had done. Ill-health forced his return to America in October of that year, and he enrolled at Princeton University. He was hospitalized once again and convalesced at the Kennedy winter home in Palm Beach. He spent the spring of 1936 (along with his older brother Joe Jr.) working as a ranch hand at a cattle ranch outside Benson, Arizona.
In September 1936, Kennedy enrolled at Harvard College. He tried out for the football, golf, and swimming teams and earned a spot on the varsity swimming team. In July 1937, Kennedy sailed to France and spent ten weeks driving through Europe with his good friend LeMoyne Billings. In June 1938, Kennedy sailed overseas with his father and brother Joe Jr. to work with his father, who was then U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's at the American embassy in London. In 1939, Kennedy toured Europe, the Soviet Union, the Balkans, and the Middle East in preparation for his Harvard senior honors thesis. He then went to Czechoslovakia and Germany before returning to London on September 1, 1939. coincidentally the day Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, Kennedy and his father sat in the visitor's gallery at the House of Commons and listened to speeches supporting Great Britain's declaration of war on Germany. Ambassador Kennedy sent his son John as his father's representative to help with arrangements for American survivors of the SS Athenia before flying back to the U.S.
At Harvard, Kennedy became a more serious student. In 1940, Kennedy completed his thesis, entitled "Appeasement in Munich", about British participation in the Munich Agreement. The thesis was published as a book called "Why England Slept" and it became a bestseller. Kennedy graduated from Harvard College with a Bachelor of Science cum laude in international affairs in April of 1940. He enrolled in and audited classes at the Stanford Graduate School of Business that fall and in early 1941, he helped his father write a memoir of his father's three years as an American ambassador. He also traveled throughout South America.
In September 1941, Kennedy tried to join the US Army, but was disqualified for medical reasons due to his chronic lower back problems. Instead he joined the U.S. Navy, with influence from the former naval attaché to his father. Kennedy was serving as an ensign in the office of the Secretary of the Navy when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. He attended the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program and then entered the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Center. He was given his first command, of a boat known as PT-101, which he briefly commanded from December 7, 1942 until February 23, 1943. During the transit of his ship from Rhode Island t Florida, he was briefly hospitalized after diving in the cold water to unfoul a propeller. He was then was assigned duty in Panama and later in the Pacific theater, where Kennedy earned the rank of lieutenant.
On August 2, 1943, Kennedy's boat, the PT-109, was performing nighttime patrols with two other boars near New Georgia in the Solomon Islands. PT-109 was rammed by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri and split in two. Kennedy gathered his surviving crew members together in the water, and a consensus was reached that they would swim towards a small island. Kennedy hurt his back in the collision, but he was able to tow a badly burned crewman through the water with a life jacket strap clenched in his teeth. He towed the wounded man to the island, and later to a second island, from where his crew was subsequently rescued. Kennedy later received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his bravery.
In October 1943, Kennedy took command of a PT boat converted into a gunboat, PT-59, which took part in a Marine rescue on Choiseul Island that November. He returned to the United States in early January 1944. His brother Joe was killed in August of 1944 when an explosive prematurely detonated in a plane he was in.
After receiving treatment for his back injury, John Kennedy was released from active duty in late 1944. In January 1945, his back problems became worse and he spent three more months recovering from his back injury at Castle Hot Springs, a resort in Arizona. Kennedy was honorably discharged just prior to Japan's surrender in 1945.
In April 1945, publisher William Randolph Hearst, a friend of Joe Kennedy Sr., hired JFK as a special correspondent for Hearst Newspapers. In that role he covered the Potsdam Conference and other events. The next year, in 1946, U.S. Representative James Michael Curley vacated his seat in the strongly Democratic 11th Congressional district in Massachusetts to become mayor of Boston. John Kennedy ran for the seat and defeated his Republican opponent by a large margin in November 1946.
In the 1952 US Senate election, Kennedy defeated incumbent Republican Henry Cabot Lodge II for the U.S. Senate seat. The following year, on September 12, 1953, Kennedy married the former Jacqueline Bouvier at St. Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island. His back problems persisted and Kennedy underwent several spinal operations over the next two years. He was often absent from the Senate, and at one point he was so ill that he was given the Catholic sacrament of the last rites. During his recovery in 1956, he published another book entitled Profiles in Courage. It was a book about U.S. Senators who risked their careers for their personal beliefs. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1957 for the book. It was later discovered that the book was co-written by his close adviser and speechwriter, Ted Sorensen.
At the 1956 Democratic National Convention, Presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson let the convention select the Vice Presential nominee. Kennedy finished second in the balloting for the number two spot on the ticket, losing to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. The experience elevated Kennedy's profile.
As a senator, Kennedy was called upon to vote on President Dwight Eisenhower's bill for the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Kennedy cast a procedural vote which was seen by some as an appeasement of Southern Democratic opponents of the bill. He supported the final compromise bill, which passed in September 1957. In 1958, Kennedy was re-elected to a second term in the Senate, defeating his Republican opponent, Boston lawyer Vincent J. Celeste, by a wide margin.
Senator Joe McCarthy was a friend of the Kennedy family and JFK's brother Robert Kennedy worked for McCarthy's subcommittee. McCarthy also dated JFK's sister Pat. In 1954, when the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, Kennedy prepared a speech in support of the censure, but the speech was not delivered, because he was in the hospital. Kennedy's affiliation with McCarthy caused him a loss of support among members of the liberal community, including Eleanor Roosevelt.
Kennedy declared himself as a candidate for President in 1960. He ran as a candidate in a number of Democratic primaries. His opponents included former Minneapolis Mayor, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. Kennedy defeated Humphrey in Wisconsin and West Virginia. He also defeated Morse in Maryland and Oregon, and won primaries in New Hampshire, Indiana, and Nebraska.
Kennedy won a surprise victory in West Virginia. a predominantly conservative and Protestant state where Kennedy's Roman Catholicism became an issue.
At the Democratic Convention, Kennedy made his "New Frontier" speech, saying in which he famously said: "We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier. But the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises-it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them." Kennedy's main opponent at the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles was Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. On July 13 the convention nominated Kennedy as its candidate. Kennedy asked Johnson to be his vice presidential candidate, despite opposition from many liberal delegates and from Kennedy's own campaign team, including his brother Robert.
The 1960 US Presidential election's major issues included how to get the economy moving again, Kennedy's Roman Catholicism, Cuba, and whether the Soviet space and missile programs had surpassed those of the U.S. To address fears that his Catholicism would make him beholden to the Pope in Rome, he told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, "I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party candidate for president who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters - and the Church does not speak for me." He said that it was unfair for 25% of Americans to be relegated to second-class citizenship just because they were Catholic. He added "No one asked me my religion in the South Pacific", referring to his service in the second world war.
In September and October, Kennedy appeared with the Republican candidate, Vice-President Richard M. Nixon, in the first televised U.S. presidential debates in U.S. history. During these programs, Kennedy adapted more easily to the new technology of television, while Nixon, appeared with a "five o'clock shadow", perspiring and looking uncomfortable. Kennedy chose to avail himself of makeup services, and wore a dark suit, more flattering on black and white tv. Opinion polls taken of radio listeners either found that Nixon had won or that the debates were a draw. But television audiences polled saw Kennedy as the winner. The Kennedy-Nixon debates are considered a milestone in American political history.
Kennedy's campaign gained momentum after the first debate, but the polls still predicted a very close election. On November 8, Kennedy defeated Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections of the 20th century. In the national popular vote Kennedy led Nixon by the slim margin of 49.7% to 49.5%, while in the Electoral College he won 303 votes to Nixon's 219 (with 269 needed to win). Kennedy became the youngest man elected president. He the first person born in the 20th century to serve as president and the only Roman Catholic to serve as president.
Kennedy's three years in office were very eventful. Notable events included the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Space Race (including the promise to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade), the building of the Berlin Wall, the African-American Civil Rights Movement, and increased US involvement in the Vietnam War. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Controversy persists to this day as to whether his death was caused by a lone gunman or as the result of a conspiracy.
JFK lived in Brookline, Massachusetts until 1927 when the Kennedy family moved to the Bronx, in New York City. The Kennedy family spent their summers at their home in Hyannisport, Massachusetts and Christmas and Easter holidays at their winter home in Palm Beach, Florida.
In September 1931, 14 year old John Kennedy was sent to the The Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut for 9th through 12th grade, the same school that his older brother Joe Jr. had attended. While attending Choate, Kennedy experienced a number of health problems that led to his emergency hospitalization in 1934. In June 1934, he was admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and diagnosed with colitis. Kennedy graduated from Choate in June of the following year.
In September 1935 at age 18, he made his first trip abroad with his parents and his sister Kathleen to London with the intent of studying under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, once again as his older brother Joe Jr. had done. Ill-health forced his return to America in October of that year, and he enrolled at Princeton University. He was hospitalized once again and convalesced at the Kennedy winter home in Palm Beach. He spent the spring of 1936 (along with his older brother Joe Jr.) working as a ranch hand at a cattle ranch outside Benson, Arizona.
In September 1936, Kennedy enrolled at Harvard College. He tried out for the football, golf, and swimming teams and earned a spot on the varsity swimming team. In July 1937, Kennedy sailed to France and spent ten weeks driving through Europe with his good friend LeMoyne Billings. In June 1938, Kennedy sailed overseas with his father and brother Joe Jr. to work with his father, who was then U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's at the American embassy in London. In 1939, Kennedy toured Europe, the Soviet Union, the Balkans, and the Middle East in preparation for his Harvard senior honors thesis. He then went to Czechoslovakia and Germany before returning to London on September 1, 1939. coincidentally the day Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, Kennedy and his father sat in the visitor's gallery at the House of Commons and listened to speeches supporting Great Britain's declaration of war on Germany. Ambassador Kennedy sent his son John as his father's representative to help with arrangements for American survivors of the SS Athenia before flying back to the U.S.
At Harvard, Kennedy became a more serious student. In 1940, Kennedy completed his thesis, entitled "Appeasement in Munich", about British participation in the Munich Agreement. The thesis was published as a book called "Why England Slept" and it became a bestseller. Kennedy graduated from Harvard College with a Bachelor of Science cum laude in international affairs in April of 1940. He enrolled in and audited classes at the Stanford Graduate School of Business that fall and in early 1941, he helped his father write a memoir of his father's three years as an American ambassador. He also traveled throughout South America.
In September 1941, Kennedy tried to join the US Army, but was disqualified for medical reasons due to his chronic lower back problems. Instead he joined the U.S. Navy, with influence from the former naval attaché to his father. Kennedy was serving as an ensign in the office of the Secretary of the Navy when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. He attended the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program and then entered the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Training Center. He was given his first command, of a boat known as PT-101, which he briefly commanded from December 7, 1942 until February 23, 1943. During the transit of his ship from Rhode Island t Florida, he was briefly hospitalized after diving in the cold water to unfoul a propeller. He was then was assigned duty in Panama and later in the Pacific theater, where Kennedy earned the rank of lieutenant.
On August 2, 1943, Kennedy's boat, the PT-109, was performing nighttime patrols with two other boars near New Georgia in the Solomon Islands. PT-109 was rammed by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri and split in two. Kennedy gathered his surviving crew members together in the water, and a consensus was reached that they would swim towards a small island. Kennedy hurt his back in the collision, but he was able to tow a badly burned crewman through the water with a life jacket strap clenched in his teeth. He towed the wounded man to the island, and later to a second island, from where his crew was subsequently rescued. Kennedy later received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his bravery.
In October 1943, Kennedy took command of a PT boat converted into a gunboat, PT-59, which took part in a Marine rescue on Choiseul Island that November. He returned to the United States in early January 1944. His brother Joe was killed in August of 1944 when an explosive prematurely detonated in a plane he was in.
After receiving treatment for his back injury, John Kennedy was released from active duty in late 1944. In January 1945, his back problems became worse and he spent three more months recovering from his back injury at Castle Hot Springs, a resort in Arizona. Kennedy was honorably discharged just prior to Japan's surrender in 1945.
In April 1945, publisher William Randolph Hearst, a friend of Joe Kennedy Sr., hired JFK as a special correspondent for Hearst Newspapers. In that role he covered the Potsdam Conference and other events. The next year, in 1946, U.S. Representative James Michael Curley vacated his seat in the strongly Democratic 11th Congressional district in Massachusetts to become mayor of Boston. John Kennedy ran for the seat and defeated his Republican opponent by a large margin in November 1946.
In the 1952 US Senate election, Kennedy defeated incumbent Republican Henry Cabot Lodge II for the U.S. Senate seat. The following year, on September 12, 1953, Kennedy married the former Jacqueline Bouvier at St. Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island. His back problems persisted and Kennedy underwent several spinal operations over the next two years. He was often absent from the Senate, and at one point he was so ill that he was given the Catholic sacrament of the last rites. During his recovery in 1956, he published another book entitled Profiles in Courage. It was a book about U.S. Senators who risked their careers for their personal beliefs. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1957 for the book. It was later discovered that the book was co-written by his close adviser and speechwriter, Ted Sorensen.
At the 1956 Democratic National Convention, Presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson let the convention select the Vice Presential nominee. Kennedy finished second in the balloting for the number two spot on the ticket, losing to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. The experience elevated Kennedy's profile.
As a senator, Kennedy was called upon to vote on President Dwight Eisenhower's bill for the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Kennedy cast a procedural vote which was seen by some as an appeasement of Southern Democratic opponents of the bill. He supported the final compromise bill, which passed in September 1957. In 1958, Kennedy was re-elected to a second term in the Senate, defeating his Republican opponent, Boston lawyer Vincent J. Celeste, by a wide margin.
Senator Joe McCarthy was a friend of the Kennedy family and JFK's brother Robert Kennedy worked for McCarthy's subcommittee. McCarthy also dated JFK's sister Pat. In 1954, when the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, Kennedy prepared a speech in support of the censure, but the speech was not delivered, because he was in the hospital. Kennedy's affiliation with McCarthy caused him a loss of support among members of the liberal community, including Eleanor Roosevelt.
Kennedy declared himself as a candidate for President in 1960. He ran as a candidate in a number of Democratic primaries. His opponents included former Minneapolis Mayor, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. Kennedy defeated Humphrey in Wisconsin and West Virginia. He also defeated Morse in Maryland and Oregon, and won primaries in New Hampshire, Indiana, and Nebraska.
Kennedy won a surprise victory in West Virginia. a predominantly conservative and Protestant state where Kennedy's Roman Catholicism became an issue.
At the Democratic Convention, Kennedy made his "New Frontier" speech, saying in which he famously said: "We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier. But the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises-it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them." Kennedy's main opponent at the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles was Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. On July 13 the convention nominated Kennedy as its candidate. Kennedy asked Johnson to be his vice presidential candidate, despite opposition from many liberal delegates and from Kennedy's own campaign team, including his brother Robert.
The 1960 US Presidential election's major issues included how to get the economy moving again, Kennedy's Roman Catholicism, Cuba, and whether the Soviet space and missile programs had surpassed those of the U.S. To address fears that his Catholicism would make him beholden to the Pope in Rome, he told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12, 1960, "I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party candidate for president who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters - and the Church does not speak for me." He said that it was unfair for 25% of Americans to be relegated to second-class citizenship just because they were Catholic. He added "No one asked me my religion in the South Pacific", referring to his service in the second world war.
In September and October, Kennedy appeared with the Republican candidate, Vice-President Richard M. Nixon, in the first televised U.S. presidential debates in U.S. history. During these programs, Kennedy adapted more easily to the new technology of television, while Nixon, appeared with a "five o'clock shadow", perspiring and looking uncomfortable. Kennedy chose to avail himself of makeup services, and wore a dark suit, more flattering on black and white tv. Opinion polls taken of radio listeners either found that Nixon had won or that the debates were a draw. But television audiences polled saw Kennedy as the winner. The Kennedy-Nixon debates are considered a milestone in American political history.
Kennedy's campaign gained momentum after the first debate, but the polls still predicted a very close election. On November 8, Kennedy defeated Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections of the 20th century. In the national popular vote Kennedy led Nixon by the slim margin of 49.7% to 49.5%, while in the Electoral College he won 303 votes to Nixon's 219 (with 269 needed to win). Kennedy became the youngest man elected president. He the first person born in the 20th century to serve as president and the only Roman Catholic to serve as president.
Kennedy's three years in office were very eventful. Notable events included the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Space Race (including the promise to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade), the building of the Berlin Wall, the African-American Civil Rights Movement, and increased US involvement in the Vietnam War. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Controversy persists to this day as to whether his death was caused by a lone gunman or as the result of a conspiracy.