Kennedy, John Fitzgerald

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(b. May 29, 1917; d. November 22, 1963) Member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate; thirty-fifth president of the United States (1961–1963).

Born less than two months after the United States entered World War I, John F. Kennedy came of age as the European postwar peace that had been precariously held together by the Versailles Treaty (1919) disintegrated in the late 1930s. Drawing upon a network of contacts developed by his father, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., then serving as the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, John Kennedy published his Harvard senior thesis on the failure of British leaders to prepare for the threat posed by Adolf Hitler's Germany as Why England Slept.

Despite a long history of serious health problems, Kennedy enlisted in the Navy during World War II and served in the Pacific campaign as commander of a torpedo boat. During one ill-fated mission, his boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer and two crew members were lost, but the rest reached some nearby islands and were eventually rescued. Kennedy's role in that episode, particularly in swimming an injured crew member to safety, seized the popular imagination when it was related in a series of magazine articles and news reports. The episode cemented his reputation as a war hero.

As a senator from 1953 to 1961, Kennedy earned a reputation as a hawkish anticommunist, calling for greater military spending, particularly on conventional forces, and for strong measures to contain the spread of Soviet power. During his 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy criticized the Eisenhower administration for putting undue emphasis on nuclear forces in its defense strategy at the expense of conventional forces, at the same time as allowing the Soviet Union to develop an advantage in the production of nuclear missile forces. Known at the time as the missile gap, this supposed Soviet superiority was later shown not to exist. Kennedy pledged to build up U.S. military capabilities to the point where they could be deployed with flexibility to meet a wide range of potential threats.

The Cold War conflict with communism, and particularly with the Soviet Union and China, provided a constant undercurrent to President Kennedy's foreign and domestic policymaking. From arms races and political and economic competition with the Soviet Union in the established Cold War battlegrounds of Europe, to new theaters in Southeast Asia and Latin America, the

anticommunist struggle consumed much of the attention of the administration's foreign policy establishment.

During Kennedy's presidency, the prospect of war was ever present and some incidents had the potential to spark open conflict in a number of hotspots, but ultimately few Americans died in combat. Despite Pentagon contingency plans for a host of potential military actions, Kennedy demonstrated a reluctance to commit American troops to combat, often applying the principles he had long adopted in the political arena: pragmatism and a willingness to hedge his bets until forced to commit to one course or another. In June 1961, when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev renewed his threat to force a resolution of the long-contested Berlin problem, Kennedy responded with a massive buildup of American conventional forces in Western Europe, a move that ultimately failed to deter Khrushchev from sealing the border between East and West Berlin with a wall. Faced with the option of using U.S. forces to secure a pro-Western government in Laos, Kennedy instead chose a diplomatic option. During the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, despite repeated recommendations from advisers to launch military action against the Soviet missile bases in Cuba, Kennedy relied on the interim measure of a naval blockade of the island underpinned by the threat of imminent military action, moves that ultimately proved successful in compelling the Soviet leader to back down.

Seeking to prevent the spread of Soviet power, particularly in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, the Kennedy administration actively pursued a mix of policies from traditional military strength (Western Europe) to progressive cooperative programs with a distinctly modernist flavor (the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps) to covert counterinsurgency (Brazil, Cuba, South Vietnam).

Kennedy demonstrated a clear predilection for covert assistance and counterinsurgency. In the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, an early foreign policy and political disaster for his young presidency, Kennedy authorized a modified form of an Eisenhower-era plan to use CIA-trained Cuban rebels to invade Cuba and spark an insurgency to overthrow Fidel Castro's government. Its failure did not discourage the Pentagon from building up the special forces in the U.S. military—troops specially trained and outfitted to undertake covert, short-notice missions.

Events and policies in the final six months of Kennedy's presidency provided an important, but ultimately mixed, legacy. His call for a Cold War détente in June 1963 and the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in August 1963 appeared to offer hope that the Cold War might thaw. But Kennedy's late-1963 policies toward Vietnam provided his administration's most contentious legacy. He committed the United States to supporting the South Vietnamese regime against an increasingly intense communist insurgency but he stopped short of authorizing overt combat operations (some direct air support was secretly authorized). During Kennedy's watch, the number of U.S. military advisers rose from 685 to almost 17,000. Many observers, with some justification, hold the Kennedy administration at least partially responsible for the October–November 1963 military coup in Saigon that included the brutal murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother. Many observers have identified the coup against Diem as the moment at which U.S. military escalation in Vietnam became inevitable. At the time of his own assassination, in November 1963, Kennedy's intentions with respect to U.S. involvement in Vietnam remained unclear. Within the next two years his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, committed the United States to a massive escalation of force in Vietnam.

Arms Control Debate; Berlin as Symbol; Communism and Anticommunism; Cuban Missile Crisis; Eisenhower, Dwight D.; Johnson, Lyndon Baines; Nixon, Richard M.; Politics and Elections.

Dallek, Robert. An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963. Boston: Little, Brown, 2003.

Freedman, Lawrence. Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Reeves, Thomas C. A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy. New York: Free Press, 1991.

Schlesinger, Arthur F., Jr. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

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