President Kennedy

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  American Statesmanship

  Principles and Practice of Leadership

  • Joseph Fornieri, Kenneth Deutsch, Sean Sutton, Joseph R. Fornieri, Kenneth L. Deutsch, Sean D. Sutton(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • University of Notre Dame Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 21 John F. Kennedy The Courage of His Convictions

  PATRICK J. GARRITY

  M ore than half a century since his death, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–1963) retains a profound hold on the American mind. The public has consistently rated him at the top of all post–World War II presidents. In a recent survey of professional historians covering all the presidents, Kennedy ranked eighth, one spot ahead of Ronald Reagan. Yet, on the surface, Kennedy at best had an incomplete career as chief executive, barely a thousand days. Outside of his resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, one might be hard pressed to list his signature accomplishments. So how do we account for this perception of his high qualities as a statesman?1

  Much of Kennedy’s high standing has to do with the fact that both political parties have attempted to lay claim to his legacy, and thus to his statecraft. Modern Republicans, at least of a certain stripe, praise his support for tax cuts, his anti-communism, and his advocacy of increased defense spending. They characterize JFK as one of the last of the moderate, Cold War Democrats—many of whose supporters would later vote for Reagan.2

  Modern Democrats have an entirely different view. Kennedy was a true liberal, or in contemporary parlance, progressive, who laid the groundwork for what became the Great Society, the civil rights revolution, and peaceful accommodation with the Soviet Union. He was denied entry into the promised land only by the hand of fate. His death went beyond personal tragedy—after his certain reelection over the extremist Barry Goldwater in 1964, Kennedy’s political skill and cachet with the American people would have allowed him to accomplish these historical milestones without the national turmoil that marked the next few decades. According to this line of argument, Kennedy would never have allowed the United States to become involved in the quagmire of Vietnam.3

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  The Times Great Lives

  • (Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Times Books

    (Publisher)

  President John F. Kennedy

  Courage and idealism at the White House 22 November 1963

  President John F. Kennedy , whose assassination at the age of 46 is reported on another page, has died in the fullness of his fame. Whatever qualifications there may be about some of his detailed policies – and no man could hold that awesome office without receiving his measure of criticism – he will take his place in the roll of strong Presidents. Throughout his time in office he had major difficulties with Congress, but he was the master of his own Administration, a man of decision and nerve. Had he lived he would have remained a forceful influence on international affairs for many years to come. In that sense he was still a man of promise.

  President Kennedy’s years in office will always be marked with distinction, above all for his handling of the Cuban crisis. It was then that he took the supreme risk, told the American people, and indeed the free world, what had to be faced, and firmly blocked the advancing convoy which was bringing medium-range rockets to sites in Cuba, from which they would profoundly have altered the strategic balance of power. The decisiveness of United States policy at this time not only won President Kennedy an abiding place among the great Presidents of the United States but leading, as it has done, to an easing of the cold war, and last July to the nuclear test ban treaty, may well be regarded as one of the real turning-points in history.

  Youngest Ever

  He was the youngest man ever to be elected to the White House. He was the first President to be born in the twentieth century; the first Roman Catholic, and the first of purely Irish descent. He was the first since Harding to come to the Presidency directly from the Senate. But for the most part these were mere accidents of history. He happened to be a signpost to new trends in American life and politics.

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  Hollywood Goes to Washington

  American Politics on Screen

  • Michael Coyne(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Reaktion Books

    (Publisher)

  John Kennedy has come to symbolize all myths to all men, but chief among these is his image as a latter-day Lincoln. The John F. Kennedy Library in Boston stocks a postcard titled ‘Lincoln and Kennedy – Coincidence or Fate?’, detailing sixteen common points of reference between the lives and deaths of the two men. Clearly, the curators of the Kennedy legend have consciously striven to exploit comparisons with Abraham Lincoln, and understandably so. Kennedy was ‘Lincolnized’ in the cruellest way possible.

  Assassination aside, nowhere is the ‘Kennedy as Lincoln redux’ imagery more potent than in the realm of Civil Rights. Several key supporters of JFK’s Civil Rights Bill openly referred to it as the ‘Second Emancipation Proclamation’. This obscures the fact that Civil Rights legislation had been relatively low on Kennedy’s list of priorities during the election of 1960. Yet popular mythology has recast Kennedy as the Great White Hope who would undoubtedly have reshaped America as a utopia of inter-racial harmony, while sidestepping the quagmire of Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson, by contrast, has been widely perceived as the vulgar, wily usurper who embroiled the United States in that tragically divisive, ultimately unwinnable war. No matter that Jack Kennedy was prone to slick foreign policy adventures. Also, no matter that Johnson had made great headway in Civil Rights, until he was catastrophically sidetracked in South-east Asia. The very names given to their administrations, Kennedy’s ‘New Frontier’ and Johnson’s ‘Great Society’, clearly indicate who nurtured an ambitious foreign policy and who wished to prioritize a domestic agenda. No matter. The shots in Dallas have sanctified the JFK legend forever.

  Kennedy revitalized the presidency and glamorized his profession in the popular consciousness. In the wake of the paternalistic Roosevelt, the combative Truman and the grandfatherly Eisenhower, Kennedy was a matinée idol – like his Rat Pack friends, the epitome of early 1960s ‘cool’. He made the presidency exciting, racy, sexy. He was the president as movie star, long before presidents began to posture as if life were merely a movie. His beautiful wife, his children, his extended family and his witty delivery at his press conferences all became part of the greatest global TV roadshow of the early 1960s.

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  Western Civilization: A Global and Comparative Approach

  Volume II: Since 1600

  • Kenneth L. Campbell(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  While the Cold War produced the greatest arms race in history and sparked the exploration of space, the most important changes of the period actually occurred in other realms. The civil rights movement in the United States led to sweeping changes in race relations there, while providing an inspiration for oppressed minorities around the world. Women made significant advances toward achieving greater equality with men. Young people with more independence and education than ever became a driving force behind cultural change. In 1967 a rock group called the Beatles released a stunningly creative album that symbolized an important shift in youth culture at the same time that it captured the spirit of its times. Young people inspired by the rock and folk movements denounced the Vietnam War. A wave of protests related to the war and other issues of discontent swept through the West in the late 1960s. The protest movement extended to Czechoslovakia in the communist bloc. Finally, Israel also helped to define the decade with a war that shaped the history of the Middle East, as well as the experiences and values of Jews at home and abroad.

  Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis

  John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) won the 1960 election for president of the United States by a slim margin over then Vice President Richard M. Nixon (1913–1994). Kennedy recognized the importance of the Cold War and the need to demonstrate his ability to serve as the main political leader of the noncommunist world. At first, he was at the mercy of experienced officials in the military and intelligence agencies who convinced him to authorize a planned invasion of Cuba and to take a hard line toward the Soviet Union. Kennedy did not need much convincing. He did not believe that the totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union could be mollified through negotiations without a strong military threat. A veteran of World War II, Kennedy had criticized the British policy of appeasement toward Hitler in his senior thesis at Harvard University, published under the title Why England Slept

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  America's Second Civil War

  Dispatches from the Political Center

  • Stanley A. Renshon(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  John F. Kennedy’s Contribution to Understanding Candor

  John F. Kennedy’s presidency was too short to reach any solid historical judgments. His presidency began with the disastrous set of decisions that culminated in the Bay of Pigs debacle. Nevertheless, as the recently released transcripts of the president and his advisors during the Cuban Missile crisis make clear (May and Zelikow 1997), the president learned from his early mistakes. His performance as a decision maker in that risk-permeated confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union was truly masterful.

  He was very smart, but “bored silly” by the details of government (Doyle 1999: 98). However, when he had to, he could ask questions about the smallest of details (cf., May and Zelikow 1997: 95). He was adverse to political risk, especially when he was up against determined opposition. Perhaps because of the small margin of his election victory, but more likely because of a disinclination to fight to expand his leadership capital, President Kennedy was by nature politically prudent. He told his staff (quoted in Doyle 1999: 97),

  If you’re going to have a fight, have a fight about something. Don’t have a fight about nothing.

  In a discussion with reporters, he said (quoted in Doyle 1999: 97),

  There is no sense in raising hell, and then not being successful. There is no sense of putting the office of the presidency on the line and then being defeated.

  Sentiments like these made President Kennedy reluctant to become involved. Sometimes, as with Vietnam, it is possible to see the virtues of such caution. Sometimes, in the case of his response to the Civil Rights movement, it is possible to see its costs. Paradoxically, President Kennedy appears to have shared with President Clinton a tendency toward policy caution, coupled with a substantial lack of it in his personal life.

  Kennedy’s presidency is now remembered for its youth, its charm, and its tragic promise. But in its short time, it produced something else as well—a president who was willing to say in public what he knew to be true, period. There are a number of examples sprinkled throughout his press conferences, but one is particularly striking.

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  Unto a Good Land

  A History of the American People, Volume 2: From 1865

  • David Edwin Harrell, Edwin S. Gaustad, John B. Boles, Sally Foreman Griffith(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Eerdmans

    (Publisher)

  The deathblow to the liberal political experiment of the 1960s came not from within but from without. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, like the Republican presidents who preceded and followed them, were Cold Warriors, veterans of World War II who believed they must stop aggression around the world—although Johnson, more than the others, was preeminently interested in domestic affairs. Under their leadership, the United States sank ever deeper into a war in Southeast Asia that lacked clear moral justification, appeared militarily unwinnable, and aroused a level of criticism at home that undermined public support. Furthermore, the war, combined with the vast budget expansions demanded by liberal domestic programs, undermined the prosperity that the United States had enjoyed since World War II.

  JOHN F. KENNEDY AND THE NEW FRONTIER

  In 1960 the American people elected as their president the young Bostonian John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Kennedy projected an image of energy, wit, and good looks. In fact, the young president’s health was frail, and he had to spend long hours in bed. Nonetheless, his glamorous public persona, and his articulation of a vision of expanding opportunities at home and competition with the Soviet Union abroad, presented the nation with a sharp contrast to the fatherly Dwight D. Eisenhower, revered by most Americans as the guardian of the values and achievements of the past.

  Kennedy was not a doctrinaire liberal. Above all he wanted to win the Cold War, and one of his foremost heroes was Winston Churchill. Domestically, he was a hardheaded, pragmatic politician who favored a moderate expansion of the New Deal–Fair Deal, without unbalancing the budget or interfering with the private sector. His initiatives on behalf of the underprivileged were ambitious, but they were only modestly successful because of his political inexperience. Kennedy might have been a bolder reformer in a second term had he been elected with a stronger mandate and had not his presidency been tragically cut short by his assassination.

  The Election of 1960

  Sensing Republican vulnerability because of the late-1950s recession and the Soviet Union’s apparent global gains, several United States Senators sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. John F. Kennedy swiftly came to the fore. None could match the lavishly funded Kennedy organization or the personal charisma of Kennedy himself. JFK also had liabilities—his youth, his early support of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and, most problematic, his Roman Catholic religion. After winning the Democratic primary in Wisconsin, Kennedy faced a major challenge in overwhelmingly Protestant West Virginia, where many felt that his Catholicism would present insurmountable problems. Kennedy boldly addressed the religious issue: “Nobody asked me if I was a Catholic when I joined the United States Navy. Nobody asked my brother if he was a Catholic or Protestant before he climbed into an American bomber to fly his last mission.” He won an impressive victory in West Virginia, and when the Democrats gathered at their convention in July, Kennedy swept to victory on the first ballot.

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  Studies in US Religion, Politics, and Law

  • Patrick Lacroix(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Kansas

    (Publisher)

  Yet, even amid the wealth of available firsthand resources from the early 1960 s, the matter of President Kennedy’s personal beliefs poses its own set of historical and methodological challenges. In a recent New York Times article, executive editor Jill Abramson depicted an “elusive” Kennedy, a president who, despite the thousands of works published on his life and administration, remains ill-defined. An “oddly polarized literature” has resulted in “a kind of void,” Abramson argues. Predictably, she does not address Kennedy’s faith. But here, too, scholars must confront an elusiveness complicated by a dearth of original material that would define the president’s Catholicism, his personal views, or even his moral sense. The present study is therefore far less definitive on this point. 12 To be sure, like all presidents, Kennedy frequently made religious claims in an official capacity. While in the White House, he perpetuated the Cold War rhetoric of Truman and Eisenhower: in the worldwide struggle against Communism, a “Judeo-Christian” national identity had become central to Americans’ self-definition. In 1961, at the annual National Prayer Breakfast, organized by the nondenominational International Christian Leadership Conference and held just three weeks after his inauguration, Kennedy insisted on the importance of the country’s religious ideals. In his view, those who had established the United States, irrespective of their religious denomination or their region, were united by two principles: “strong religious conviction” and commitment to “a system of freedom.” In the present “time of trial,” Americans ought to “call upon [their] great reservoir of spiritual resources” and place their trust in God. Through such ceremonial enactments, Kennedy provided symbolic political sanction to the religious fervor inherited from the 1950 s. His rhetoric was uncontroversial: he was fulfilling the “civil-religious” duties described by sociologist Robert N

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  How Did We Get Here?

  From TR to Donald Trump

  • Robert Dallek(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Harper

    (Publisher)

  The narrow victory persuaded Kennedy to appoint Republicans to high administration positions: Robert McNamara, the president of the Ford Motor Company, as secretary of defense; and McGeorge Bundy, Harvard’s dean of faculty, as national security adviser. Despite his small margin of votes over Nixon, Kennedy quickly enjoyed majority support in opinion polls and worked to expand that advantage in the first months of his presidency. Kennedy increased his appeal with idealistic proposals—a Peace Corps and an Alliance for Progress in Latin America—that resonated with the country’s better angels.

  But Kennedy put his popularity in jeopardy when he agreed to follow through on an Eisenhower plan to topple Fidel Castro in Cuba by unleashing Cuban exiles trained and armed by the CIA. Despite assurances from his intelligence agencies that an invasion at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, on the island’s southern coast, would touch off a rebellion overturning Castro, it was a miscalculation: Over a hundred invaders were killed and another 1,300 were captured and imprisoned. When Kennedy openly took responsibility for the failure, his approval rating jumped to 83 percent. He joked, “The worse I do, the more popular I get.”

  Yet whatever his standing, he did not back away from bold ideas. In May 1961, he proposed to land a man on the moon and return him to Earth by the end of the decade. It was aimed not only at restoring America’s international prestige as a world leader in technology, but also as a way to boost the economy with advances in weather forecasting and electronic communications. It would provide jobs in the South and the West, where much of the work would be done and the economy needed stimulating. The proposal triggered complaints about the billions that could be spent to improve conditions in America and around the world. But Kennedy took the longer view: When he labeled his administration the New Frontier, he intended to follow innovative paths that marked his presidency as continuing the country’s tradition of reaching beyond what had come before.

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  Presidential Leadership in Crisis

  Defining Moments of the Modern Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Donald Trump

  • Kenneth Walsh(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  HAPTER FIVE JOHN F. KENNEDY THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

  John F. Kennedy gave a televised address to the nation and the world from the Oval Office on October 22, 1962 to demonstrate his resolve in dealing with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy’s performance throughout this dangerous episode displayed his leadership skills in dramatic fashion. (Cecil Stoughton, White House Photographs, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

  The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 was one of the most dangerous international confrontations in history, and President John F. Kennedy handled it with skill and prescience, balancing caution and strength. Historians have used it as a case study for presidential leadership under emergency conditions ever since.

  The showdown took the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war, imperiling the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a Kennedy adviser and scholar, later said the Cuban Missile Crisis was “the most dangerous moment in human history.”1 Many other historians have concluded that it was the closest that the world has come to a nuclear conflagration.

  From the start, Kennedy took a pragmatic approach and was correctly skeptical of his military advisers’ bellicose and trigger-happy attitudes.2

  Kennedy wisely attempted to give Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev a face-saving exit from the confrontation even as his military advisers pushed for more confrontation.

  And in its peaceful resolution, the crisis showed that human beings can solve even the worst of their problems if they rely on the best that leadership can offer—namely the traits of understanding, good judgment, steadiness and strength. In the end, both Kennedy and Khrushchev showed enough of these characteristics to overcome the vast gulf of distrust between them and the deep ideological differences that separated their countries in order to extricate themselves from the doomsday scenario that faced them. For nearly two weeks, they held the fate of the world in their hands, and, despite some blunders and misjudgments, they performed admirably.3

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  American Government and Politics

  A Concise Introduction

  • Robert Singh(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Kennedy’s great achievement in the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 was significant, but averting a nuclear war whose advent he had partly precipitated hardly amounted to a positive resumé. Revered more after his death than during his life, the perception of the Kennedy presidency as one of great achievement is more about the ‘Camelot’ myth (invented by Jacqueline Kennedy and then deliberately popularized by sympathetic journalists after JFK’s assassination) than policy substance or positive achievements. Johnson. A landslide victory in 1964 helped Johnson to persuade a compliant (and overwhelmingly Democratic) Congress to enact major pieces of ‘Great Society’ legislation. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act were the great victories of the civil rights movement. But Johnson’s disastrous escalation of war in Vietnam not only contributed to America’s first military defeat, but also stoked fires of inflation and social disquiet at home. Beset by urban unrest, race riots and anti-war demonstrations, LBJ’s presidency ended in a shattered fashion when he announced in March 1968 that he would neither seek nor accept the Democratic Party’s (re)nomination for president. Nixon. For all of Nixon’s political skills and achievements, the two great scandals of modern American politics – Vietnam, and the disgrace of Watergate and the first and only presidential resignation – overshadowed all else that he achieved. Nixon was a pragmatic conservative who nevertheless signed into law a remarkable raft of liberal measures from health and safety laws to environmental protection and affirmative action programmes (albeit partly to divide his Democratic opponents). Recognition of China, the end of the Vietnam War, and détente with the Soviets amounted to a set of innovative foreign policy achievements

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