John Kennedy had a brilliant insight. He recognized that television would change political campaigns forever. Once, all that mattered was what a candidate said. Now it mattered just as much how he looked while he was saying it. During the first debate, John Kennedy looked relaxed, fit, and charismatic. Richard Nixon looked uncomfortable, swarthy, and nervous as he sweated under the hot lights. Kennedy also looked much younger, even though Nixon was only four years older than he. In content, the debate was almost a draw. The performances of the candidates were evenly matched. In the end, it was not necessary for John Kennedy to win the debate on the issues. It was enough that he looked as though he belonged on the same stage with Richard Nixon. He did.
When Americans went to the polls on November 8, 1960, no great issues divided the candidates. Both men advocated strong missile defense against the Soviet threat. Kennedy was as anticommunist as Nixon; both opposed Communist expansion, including in Cuba, an island ninety miles off the coast of Florida, and both saw the Soviet Union as a dangerous rival. Neither candidate was then at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Voters chose between the personalities of the two men as much as they did between their stands on the issues. Kennedy presented himself as the voice of a new generation who would get the country “moving” again toward a “new frontier.” Nixon argued that he, not Kennedy, had the proven leadership experience to guide the nation in a dangerous world. Out of 68.3 million votes cast, John Kennedy received only about 119,450 more votes than Richard Nixon. Nixon had lost the presidency by just two tenths of 1 percent of the popular vote. It was one of the closest elections in history.
Late into the night, neither man knew who had won. Not until the morning after the election was Kennedy declared the winner. Nixon did not demand a recount and conceded victory to Kennedy. Without his father’s wealth, which funded much of his campaign, and without Lyndon Johnson as his vice presidential running mate delivering the electoral votes of Texas, Kennedy would not have won.
ON JANUARY 20, 1961, John Fitzgerald Kennedy stepped forward on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol to take the oath of office as the thirty-fifth president of the United States and to deliver his inaugural address. Half of America had voted against him, but on this day, he behaved and spoke with confidence. Although he knew he had not won by a large margin at the polls, he sought to win a mandate now with his words. He summoned the American people to stand up for freedom in the shadow of the Cold War.
“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
He cautioned other countries not to doubt his commitment to freedom in what he predicted would be a “long twilight struggle.”
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Then he suggested that nations pursue peaceful cooperation, not military confrontation.
“Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.”
He reminded his audience that this would take time.
“All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even, perhaps, in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.”
Kennedy suggested that his election coincided with a special moment in history. “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”
Perhaps the most quoted and famous line from the speech is Kennedy’s call to self-sacrifice: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” It was a patriotic call to the people of the United States to be civic-minded and politically active.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS and fighting the spread of Communism around the world dominated John Kennedy’s first two years in office. He was a Cold Warrior who had a personal fascination with counterinsurgency warfare, covert action, and special military forces, including the Green Berets, a small, elite unit of the U.S. Army. A fan of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, President Kennedy had an instinctive and enthusiastic appetite for secret operations. He also had an obsession with Cuba and with its leader, Fidel Castro.
A revolutionary who overthrew the Cuban government in 1959, Castro seemed at first that he might turn to America for inspiration and support. Instead he turned to the Communist Soviet Union for aid and set himself up as the repressive dictator of his nation.
During the administration of President Eisenhower, the Central Intelligence Agency had developed a secret plan to help anti-Castro Cuban exiles—living outside Cuba, trained and equipped by the United States—to invade their homeland, depose Castro, and overturn Communism. The CIA asked Kennedy to approve it.
Kennedy authorized what became known as the Bay of Pigs operation, named for the spot on the Cuban coastline where the armed exiles would land. The invasion, on April 17, 1961, was a catastrophe. The fourteen hundred freedom fighters, heavily outnumbered, found Castro’s troops waiting for them. Within two days, most had been captured, wounded, or killed. The CIA and the U.S. military had persuaded President Kennedy to support the plan by arguing that its success would not require him to send American troops or air support into battle against Castro’s forces. They predicted that the invasion would trigger a spontaneous uprising by the Cuban people against their leader.
That revolt never happened. The assurances by CIA officials and military generals had proven wildly optimistic—even deluded—and now they implored Kennedy to commit American forces to save the catastrophic operation. He refused. He feared that it might trigger a direct military conflict with the Soviet Union. The CIA plan had failed. It had been a humiliating disaster that would haunt his presidency. But Kennedy accepted responsibility for it and learned a valuable lesson: in the future he would be more skeptical of overconfident promises made by his military and intelligence advisers.
The Bay of Pigs episode did not stop the CIA from developing other secret plans—including one called Operation Mongoose—to overthrow or even assassinate Fidel Castro. Kennedy worried that Cuba might influence or contaminate Latin America with Communism.
Nor did the Cuban failure deter Kennedy from opposing the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. When Kennedy took office, there were several hundred American military advisers in Vietnam. He increased their number to seventeen thousand, believing that America should make a stand against Communism there to prevent the ideology from conquering not just Vietnam but also neighboring countries.
In 1961, to prepare for the challenges ahead, President Kennedy asked Congress to increase the size and budget of the U.S. military. To promote peace and international cooperation, he also inspired thousands of young Americans to join public service by establishing the Peace Corps, an organization to help developing countries improve their public health, education, and agriculture. He wanted America to look both merciful and mighty.
Eighteen months after the Bay of Pigs, the United States and the Soviet Union almost went to war over another confrontation in Cuba. In October 1962, American spy planes detected the presence of Russian missile bases under construction there. The short distance between the island n
ation and the United States meant that from these sites Cuba or Russia could launch nuclear missiles at major cities and military bases in the eastern United States. The Soviets sent missiles to Cuba to deter any future invasion of the island by the United States and because, beginning in 1961, the United States had deployed in Italy and Turkey nuclear missiles that could be launched to attack the Soviet Union.
Kennedy revealed the frightening discovery in Cuba in a televised address. He warned that he would not tolerate nuclear missiles in Cuba. The volatile Russian leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had assumed, after the Bay of Pigs affair and an unimpressive personal meeting with Kennedy two months later, that the young president was weak and would do nothing when the Soviets parked their missiles in Cuba. Over thirteen days—from October 16 to 28, 1962—the United States and the Soviet Union came close to nuclear war during what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Many of Kennedy’s advisers urged him to attack Cuba at once, first bombing the missile bases and then invading the island. Knowing that such a rash response might provoke war with Russia, Kennedy took his time, delaying his decision and hoping for a diplomatic solution. In the meantime, he declared a naval quarantine around Cuba and insisted that no Soviet ships carrying missiles or military supplies would be allowed to approach the island. At the last minute, to avoid a war, Khrushchev ordered his ships to turn back. But that alone did not end the crisis. Kennedy and Khrushchev negotiated a settlement: the United States agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey and promised not to invade Cuba, and in return the Russians agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba. President Kennedy had taken the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of a nuclear war in which millions might have perished, but he had solved the dispute in a responsible manner. The most dangerous crisis of his presidency was over.
The competition between democracy and communism—between the United States and the Soviet Union—was not limited to Cuba, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, or even to planet Earth. Each superpower believed it could tip the balance of influence in its own favor by placing satellites in space and men on the moon. National pride was at stake: Which country would be the first to launch a rocket into space and spin a satellite in orbit around Earth? This “space race” captured Kennedy’s imagination.
The Soviet Union had already beaten America into space when it launched the first satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957. Then, on April 12, 1961, the Russians launched the first man into space. These successes shocked the American people. For reasons of prestige, and also national security, President Kennedy decided that America must catch up.
On May 25, 1961, the president addressed both the House and the Senate—a joint session of Congress: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space.”
Later, in a speech on September 12, 1962, Kennedy emphasized the importance of the issue: “No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space. . . . We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Inspired and supported by President Kennedy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the agency in charge of America’s space program, recruited more astronauts, designed giant rockets, and planned the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs.
Domestic issues captivated John Kennedy less than foreign affairs, although he was keen to reduce individual federal income tax rates and also corporate taxes, which he believed were too high and stifled the economy. There was one domestic issue that, above all others, he wanted to avoid: the fight for civil rights for African Americans. Kennedy was not, of course, against civil rights. He was not one of the Southerners who had disagreed with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, the school desegregation case in which the Court declared it unconstitutional to ban black children from attending public schools with white children.
Nor did he want, as did many members of his own party in the South, to suppress other rights of citizenship, including voting, attending public universities, or patronizing restaurants, shops, and hotels. During the century since the Civil War and the end of slavery, African Americans had not enjoyed equal rights. Segregation and suppression were rampant. But Kennedy worried that becoming a civil rights champion was premature, and that doing so would stir up political opposition among Southern Democrats and endanger the programs and legislation that he wanted Congress to approve. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was, by contrast, a more enthusiastic advocate for civil rights; however, his authority was limited.
But a series of events made it impossible for John Kennedy to keep the civil rights movement at arm’s length anymore. Back in September 1962, he was forced to send federal troops to the University of Mississippi to suppress rioting that ensued when a black man, James Meredith, was threatened with death after he tried to enroll as a student there. In May 1963, Americans—including President Kennedy—watched on television as Eugene “Bull” Connor, commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, turned dogs and fire hoses on civil rights demonstrators. Then, Governor George Wallace refused to desegregate the University of Alabama, blocking the entrance with his own body.
John Kennedy decided he could not wait any longer. Ugly images of racist white mobs were broadcast all over the world, exposing the evil of racial discrimination in “the land of the free.” This played into Communist propaganda that the United States was the land of oppression of blacks and hypocrisy, not liberty. On June 11, 1963, Kennedy gave a televised address to the nation on civil rights.
“This is not a sectional issue,” he said, not wanting to single out and inflame the South. He knew that blacks also received poor treatment in the North. Indeed, Martin Luther King Jr. would say that when he led civil rights demonstrations in Chicago, the racism he encountered there was as vicious as anything he had seen in the Deep South. “This is not even a legal or legislative issue alone,” Kennedy continued. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.”
In 1963, Kennedy’s focus on foreign affairs gave him two of the greatest pleasures of his presidency, the first occurring in Berlin. In 1945, at the end of World War II, a treaty signed by the Allies divided all of Germany into zones of occupation. The zones controlled by the United States, Great Britain, and France became West Germany, and the zone controlled by the Soviet Union became East Germany. Berlin, the national capital, was within the Soviet zone, and the city was divided into four sectors, each occupied by a different Allied power.
President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson meet with civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr. on the afternoon of the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.
(Cecil Stoughton, courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)
In 1963, the Soviet Union still controlled East Germany. Indeed, in August 1961, during the first year of Kennedy’s presidency, the Soviets began to build a concrete-and-barbed-wire wall between East and West Berlin to prevent the population of the Soviet sector from fleeing Communism and escaping to the western zones. During the years that wall existed, Russian and Soviet-controlled East German soldiers shot to death several hundred men, women, and teenagers who tried to cross over it to freedom. On June 26, 1963, President Kennedy stood on the free side of the Berlin Wall and spoke to a throng of three hundred thousand people in the square.
President Kennedy addresses a crowd in Berlin, June 26, 1963.
(Robert Knudson, courtesy of the National Archives)
“Freedom has many difficulties,” he said, “and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in.”
He told the massive, cheering cr
owd that “all free men, wherever they live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words Ich bin ein Berliner.” He had touched the German people with his empathy. And he told people around the world that if they wanted to understand the difference between Communism and freedom, “let them come to Berlin.” The ecstatic crowd was the largest one that Kennedy had ever addressed. It was the high point of his worldwide popularity, and he said that he could not imagine enjoying a better day than this.
He would enjoy another foreign affairs triumph that fall.
LIKE JOHN Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald had always wanted to star in a historic moment. With every success that JFK had enjoyed, Oswald had matched it with failure. In the spring of 1963, John F. Kennedy was on an upward trajectory. Lee Oswald was not.
Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in October 1939, the youngest of three brothers. But it seemed as though a dark cloud had formed over him even before he entered the world. His father died two months before he was born, and during his unsettled childhood, his odd and unstable mother changed husbands, houses, jobs, and cities frequently—often turning over the care of Lee and his two brothers to orphanages or relatives.
When Lee was growing up, he lived, among other places, in New Orleans, Fort Worth, Manhattan and the Bronx in New York City, and then New Orleans and Fort Worth again. He had disciplinary problems at school, made few friends, threatened family members with knives, rebelled against any kind of authority, and missed so much school he was tracked down by truant officers and ordered to appear at court hearings.
As a teenager, Oswald became interested in the Soviet Union and the teachings of socialism, Marxism, and communism. These were strange pursuits for an American boy during the middle of the Cold War, an era in which the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an intense ideological battle. And, of course, proclaiming oneself a communist in America at that time could trigger a government investigation.
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