John F. Kennedy

Joseph Kennedy Sr. had wanted his eldest son, Joe Jr., to be the first Catholic president of the United States. Joe Jr. died in a classified bombing mission over the English Channel in August 1944. The ambition transferred to the second son. Jack Kennedy had nearly died himself — from a Japanese destroyer that split his PT-109 patrol boat in half in the Solomon Islands in 1943. He towed a wounded crewman to shore by gripping the man's life-jacket strap in his teeth and swimming four hours through open water. He was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal. He never talked about it unless asked.

Kennedy entered Congress in 1947, the same year as Richard Nixon. They were friends before they were rivals — Nixon lent Kennedy a ride on his private plane during the 1960 campaign before the primaries turned serious. Kennedy won the Democratic nomination on the first ballot at the Los Angeles convention in July 1960. He chose Lyndon Johnson of Texas as his running mate, a decision that offended liberals and secured the South. It probably won him the election.

The first Kennedy-Nixon debate, broadcast on September 26, 1960, was watched by 70 million Americans. People who heard it on radio thought Nixon won. People who watched it on television thought Kennedy won. Nixon had refused makeup. Kennedy had spent the preceding days campaigning in California, tanned and rested. The visual contrast between the two men — one pale and sweating under hot studio lights, the other relaxed and direct — is often cited as the moment television became the decisive medium of American politics. It has not stopped being decisive since.

Kennedy's presidency was defined by the Cold War and by the permanent possibility of nuclear annihilation. In April 1961, a CIA-trained brigade of Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs and was destroyed within three days. Kennedy took public responsibility. In October 1962, U.S. reconnaissance aircraft photographed Soviet missile installations under construction in Cuba. For thirteen days, the world was closer to nuclear war than it has been before or since. Kennedy rejected his military advisors' recommendations for an immediate air strike. He chose a naval blockade instead. Soviet ships carrying additional missiles turned back on October 24. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba and the secret removal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The crisis ended without a shot fired. Kennedy never told the American public about the Jupiter missiles.

On May 25, 1961 — six weeks after the Bay of Pigs disaster — Kennedy stood before a joint session of Congress and committed the United States to landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade. NASA's total manned spaceflight experience at that moment consisted of Alan Shepard's 15-minute suborbital flight, completed three weeks earlier. The budget required was larger than NASA's entire cumulative appropriation to that point. Kennedy made the commitment anyway. He was killed before he could see it kept. Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface on July 20, 1969.

Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925 in March 1961, which required federal contractors to take "affirmative action" to ensure employees were treated without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin — the first use of that phrase in federal policy. He sent federal marshals to the University of Mississippi in September 1962 when James Meredith attempted to enroll as its first Black student; two people were killed in the riots that followed. On June 11, 1963, after Governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama, Kennedy went on national television that evening and called civil rights a moral issue "as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution." He sent a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress eight days later. He did not live to see it pass.

Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository at 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963. Kennedy was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital at 1:00 p.m. Lyndon Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One at 2:38 p.m., with Jacqueline Kennedy standing beside him in her pink suit, still stained with her husband's blood. She had refused to change. She wanted them to see what they had done, she said later.

Oswald was arrested that afternoon, charged with the murder of a Dallas police officer and then of the president. He was shot and killed two days later by nightclub owner Jack Ruby in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters, on live television, in front of seventy reporters. The Warren Commission, appointed by Johnson and chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded in September 1964 that Oswald acted alone. Sixty years of investigation, declassified documents, and competing theories have not produced definitive proof of a conspiracy — nor have they fully put one to rest.

John Kennedy has been dead for more than sixty years. He remains, in poll after poll, one of the most admired presidents in American history — rated above Lincoln by some surveys, which says more about memory than about history. What is not myth: he was the only president to win a Pulitzer Prize. He was the first president born in the twentieth century. He was the first Catholic president. He was the youngest person elected to the office. He read the inaugural address from memory at the podium, though the text was there. He asked the country a question that morning that 250 years of American history had been building toward. The country is still answering it.