People Who Changed the World

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born at Brookline, Massachusetts in 1917. He was the son of Joseph Kennedy, a wealthy financier and former US ambassador to Britain. John F. Kennedy studied at Harvard and under Laski in London. He served for a time in the American Embassy in London in 1938, writing a thesis on Britain’s unprepared ness for war. His account of the rise of Fascism in Europe, published as Why England Slept, was a best-seller.
During the Second World War, Kennedy served as a torpedo boat commander. In September 1943 his boat was sunk under him and he managed to save his crew. He was awarded the Naval Medal and the Purple Heart. After the war, in 1946, Kennedy went straight into politics, the family’s chosen career, becoming an elected Democrat representative in 1947. He became senator for Massachusetts in 1952. In 1953 he married Jacqueline Bouvier, a photographer for the Washington times-Herald. She would later be criticized for he extravagance at the White House, but there were those who liked the way she transformed the First family of America into a kind of old-style European royalty.
In June 1956, Kennedy launched a campaign to win the vice presidential nomination. In 1960 came his opportunity to become president. In the run-up to this, he and Richard Nixon took part in the first television debate between candidates. Afterwards, voters said that the television debate made no difference to the way they voted, but it was clear that Kennedy looked better than Nixon, who appeared unshaven and shifty. From that moment, television took on a more significant role in world politics, and Kennedy in particular exploited the media. Kennedy narrowly won the election in 1960. He was the first Catholic and the youngest person to be elected President of the USA.
The conservatism of Congress blocked Kennedy’s programme, a ‘new frontier’ in social legislation. Kennedy supported federal desegregation policies in schools and universities, partly through his brother, Robert Kennedy. He prepared civil rights legislation.
In foreign policy, Kennedy was firm and intolerant. He took the view that Caribbean was America’s backyard, and that it was America’s right to police it. Along with a great many Americans, Kennedy hated the Marxist regime in Cuba, under Fidel Castro. In 1961 Kennedy’s ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba was a complete fiasco. Kennedy seemed to learn little from this mistake. In October 1962 he risked nuclear war with the Soviet Union by insisting that the Soviets withdraw missiles from Cuba. He was lucky – and so was the rest of the world – that the Soviet leader, Khrushchev, backed down. In 1963, he followed this by negotiating a partial nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union.

On 22 November 1963 President Kennedy was assassinated as he was driven in an open car through the streets of Dallas in Texas. A sniper, Lee Harvey Oswald, fired several shots from the window of a bookstore overlooking Dealey Plaza. He was an assassin with no particular purpose beyond grabbing a place in history, just like Herostratus long before.
John F. Kennedy’s reputation remained high partly because of his assassination. Had he lived, the inadequacy of some of his policies and strategies might have been seen and the reputation tarnished. Cut off in his prime, he seemed to have infinite promise. The foreign policy was disastrous and the Cuban missile crisis could have ended in a catastrophe of global proportions; no president should take such risks. He did much to support the cause of black civil rights, actually traveling to Alabama to show his personal support to Martin Luther King, and worked hard to end racial segregation in schools and colleges. He went so far as to intervene by taking over the Alabama state militia to ensure that racial integration went ahead at a high school.

By - Rodney Castleden