 |
Born: 5/29/1917
Birthplace: Brookline, Mass.
Died: 11/22/1963
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born in Brookline, Mass., on May 29, 1917. His father, Joseph
P. Kennedy, was Ambassador to Great Britain from 1937 to 1940.
Kennedy was graduated from Harvard University in 1940 and joined the Navy the next year.
He became skipper of a PT boat that was sunk in the Pacific by a Japanese destroyer.
Although given up for lost, he swam to a safe island, towing an injured enlisted man.
After recovering from a war-aggravated spinal injury, Kennedy entered politics in 1946 and
was elected to Congress. In 1952, he ran against Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of
Massachusetts, and won.
Kennedy was married on Sept. 12, 1953, to Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, by whom he had three
children: Caroline, John Fitzgerald, Jr., and Patrick Bouvier (died in infancy).
In 1957 Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for a book he had written earlier, Profiles in
Courage.
After strenuous primary battles, Kennedy won the Democratic presidential nomination on the
first ballot at the 1960 Los Angeles convention. With a plurality of only 118,574 votes,
he carried the election over Vice President Richard M. Nixon and became the first Roman
Catholic president.
Kennedy brought to the White House the dynamic idea of a “New Frontier” approach
in dealing with problems at home, abroad, and in the dimensions of space. Out of his
leadership in his first few months in office came the 10-year Alliance for Progress to aid
Latin America, the Peace Corps, and accelerated programs that brought the first Americans
into orbit in the race in space.
Failure of the U.S.-supported Cuban invasion in April 1961 led to the entrenchment of the
Communist-backed Castro regime, only 90 miles from United States soil. When it became
known that Soviet offensive missiles were being installed in Cuba in 1962, Kennedy ordered
a naval “quarantine” of the island and moved troops into position to eliminate
this threat to U.S. security. The world seemed on the brink of a nuclear war until Soviet
Premier Khrushchev ordered the removal of the missiles.
A sudden “thaw,” or the appearance of one, in the cold war came with the
agreement with the Soviet Union on a limited test-ban treaty signed in Moscow on Aug. 6,
1963.
In his domestic policies, Kennedy's proposals for medical care for the aged, expanded area
redevelopment, and aid to education were defeated, but on minimum wage, trade legislation,
and other measures he won important victories.
Widespread racial disorders and demonstrations led to Kennedy's proposing sweeping civil
rights legislation. As his third year in office drew to a close, he also recommended an
$11-billion tax cut to bolster the economy. Both measures were pending in Congress when
Kennedy, looking forward to a second term, journeyed to Texas for a series of speeches.
While riding in a procession in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, he was shot to death by an
assassin firing from an upper floor of a building. The alleged assassin, Lee Harvey
Oswald, was killed two days later in the Dallas city jail by Jack Ruby, owner of a
strip-tease place.
At 46 years of age, Kennedy became the fourth president to be assassinated and the eighth
to die in office.
Copyright © ® 2000 by Izral Suhardy Ismail All Right Reserved