Titans of History

JFK

1917–1963

Democracy is a difficult kind of government. It requires the highest qualities of self-discipline, restraint, a willingness to make commitments and sacrifices for the general interest …

John F. Kennedy, speech in Dublin (June 28, 1963)

The 35th president of the United States was a gifted and charismatic man, the youngest—after Teddy Roosevelt—to reach the White House, and the only Roman Catholic to do so. In the three short years of his presidency he gave America and the world a vision of a peaceful and prosperous future. His assassination in 1963 was met with grief across the globe.

John F. Kennedy was the son of Joe Kennedy, a ruthless self-made business tycoon who had made fortunes in whiskey during the Prohibition era and in movies and real estate afterward. As President Roosevelt’s ambassador to London, he was discredited by becoming a shameless appeaser of Nazi Germany. But his children overcame this stain on the family’s reputation to become almost American royalty. His son John (Jack) Kennedy joined the US Navy in September 1941, shortly before the USA joined the war, and went on to serve in the Pacific theater. He was decorated with the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for saving the crew of his PT (patrol torpedo) boat after it was rammed by a Japanese destroyer off the Solomon Islands.

Not long after leaving the navy, Kennedy entered politics, serving as a Democratic Party congressman between 1946 and 1952, when he was elected to the Senate. In 1960 he defeated Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas to become the Democratic candidate for the presidency. Running with Johnson as his vice-presidential candidate, Kennedy beat the Republican Richard Nixon, partly as a result of his superior gift for public speaking and his ability to look good on TV. When he was inaugurated as president in 1961, he gave an inspirational speech: “Ask not what your country can do for you,” he told his fellow Americans. “Ask what you can do for your country.”

Kennedy’s presidency was a glamorous one, full of youthful idealism, in which the White House played host to many artists and cultural figures. Kennedy himself was an obsessional, indeed priapic, lothario, having affairs with the film star Marilyn Monroe, society women and Mafia molls: he told British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that if he did not have a woman every day, he suffered from headaches. None of this was known or revealed at the time; he and his elegant first lady Jackie created an American “court” such that it came to be known as Camelot. Politically Kennedy’s presidency was dominated by the Cold War, the global struggle for supremacy between the democratic free world, led by America, and the communist dictatorships of the Soviet Union and its allies. In 1961 Kennedy authorized the CIA-led invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, a fiasco in which Cuban exiles unsuccessfully tried to overthrow Fidel Castro.

Matters escalated in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which Kennedy became involved in a nuclear stand-off with the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, spelling acute danger not only for America but also for the world.

Since the 1959 revolution Cuba had been ruled by Fidel Castro, a Soviet ally. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, felt Russia was losing the arms race, so he recklessly bet his foreign policy on changing the balance of power. He had decided to place nuclear warheads in Cuba, which America traditionally considered part of its backyard.

On October 14, 1962 an American U-2 spy plane overflew Cuba, taking aerial photographs. The courage of a CIA spy in the Russian military, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who was later exposed and shot in 1963, enabled American analysts to identify medium-range ballistic missiles near San Cristóbal, only 90 miles (145km) from the coast of Florida.

President Kennedy was briefed on October 16. The next day American military units began to move southeast. Meanwhile, a second U-2 mission identified further construction sites and between sixteen and thirty-two missiles already on Cuba. On October 18, without revealing that he knew about the missiles, Kennedy warned the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, of the “gravest consequences” should the Soviet Union introduce significant offensive weapons to the island.

Four days later, having ruled out an air strike against the missile sites, Kennedy went on national television to reveal the discovery of the Soviet missiles and announce a naval “quarantine” (blockade) of Cuba, which was only to be lifted when the weapons were removed. On October 24 American ships moved into position. Though Khrushchev declared the blockade illegal, Soviet freighters heading for Cuba stopped dead in the water.

In an exchange of telegrams between Kennedy and Khrushchev that evening, neither side gave ground. But American military defenses were moved, for the only time in history, to DEFCON 2, a heightened state of readiness for imminent attack.

On October 25 the United Nations called for a cooling-off period between America and the Soviet Union. Kennedy firmly refused. The next day Khrushchev offered to remove the missiles in exchange for American assurances not to invade Cuba.

On October 27 Khrushchev made another offer: removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in exchange for the removal of American missiles from Turkey, which bordered the Soviet Union. Then, around noon, a U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet missile, and the pilot killed. At a meeting with his military advisers, Kennedy agreed to hold back from an immediate military response and to offer terms in accordance with Khrushchev’s initial suggestion. But there was no expectation that Khrushchev would now accept. Kennedy warned America’s NATO allies to expect war the next day.

However, when the next day dawned, Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would remove its weapons from Cuba. Kennedy had negotiated a deal whereby the US missiles in Turkey would be removed in secret. Though few in Moscow, Washington, Cuba or Turkey were entirely satisfied with the outcome, the crisis was over.

Kennedy emerged from the crisis with immense credit. He had been tough but not rash and had called Khrushchev’s bluff. The Soviet leader, by contrast, was criticized for his recklessness and lost face: in 1964 he was overthrown in a Kremlin coup by Leonid Brezhnev. The rest of the world was simply relieved that the greatest nuclear crisis in history had somehow been averted.

Khrushchev backed down over Cuba, but in 1963 there were still great tensions in Germany, where Western and Soviet forces faced each other on either side of the divided country. Kennedy gave one of the great speeches of modern times in Berlin, where the Soviets had recently built the infamous wall to prevent East Germans from escaping to the West. “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in,” he said. In the same speech, he used the famous phrase “Ich bin ein Berliner,” calling for solidarity across the Western world.

As well as being involved in a military stand-off, the USA and the Soviet Union were in competition in the space race. In 1961 Kennedy persuaded Congress to vote $22 billion to put an American on the moon before the end of the 1960s. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, it was testament to Kennedy’s far-sighted commitment to space exploration. Less far-sighted was his commitment to increasing amounts of military support for South Vietnam in its battle with the communist North, a policy that was to mire America in a decade-long conflict that in the end it had to abandon. However, there is some evidence that Kennedy, had he lived, planned to withdraw from Vietnam after the 1964 election.

On the home front, Kennedy was initially slow to give his complete backing to the civil rights movement. But in 1962 he sent 3000 troops to the University of Mississippi to allow a black student, James Meredith, to enroll for classes. By 1963 he had thrown his whole weight behind civil rights and gave a stirring speech on national television. After his death, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he had proposed, became law.

Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas, in 1963 was a moment that stopped the world in its tracks. He was gunned down while being driven through the city in an open-topped car, probably by Lee Harvey Oswald, who was himself murdered days later by Jack Ruby, a dubious nightclub operator. The wealth of conspiracy theories provoked by Kennedy’s death is testament to the glamorous and optimistic effect that this young and charismatic president had on the world he helped save from annihilation.