John F. Kennedy,
Book by Peter Schwab, J. Lee Shneidman; Twayne Publishers, 1974

CHAPTER 1 Biography

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born May 29, 1917, on the second floor of a three-story wooden house at 83 Beals Street, Brookline, Massachusetts. He was the second son born to Joseph Patrick and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. By 1917, Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy were wealthy members of Boston's Irish community, but that wealth did not make them acceptable to Boston's Protestant elite. To the Boston Brahmins, the Kennedys were still Irish immigrants.

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The bless'd "Em'rald Isle" was a dreary place. Since the Eighth Century, when pagan Vikings laid low the great Irish civilization, Ireland had been raped by its neighbors while the native Celtic population was callously driven from the eastern fringe. Each time the native Celts revolted, the yoke of oppression was pressed harder. When the English Tudor kings broke with Catholicism, the Irish remained loyal to the Church and a religious as well as a racial barrier arose between the Irish and their English overlords. Persecuted because of race and religion, the Catholic Irish slowly sank into poverty and despair, while the Anglo-Saxon Protestant Irish reaped whatever profit could be gained from the island.

In the summer of 1845, both England and Ireland suffered from severe rain. The English wheat crop was ruined, the Irish was not; but the Irish potato crop was ruined. Irish wheat, however, was shipped to England.

CHAPTER 2 The Shaping of a President--The Family Experience

It has been claimed that it is unfair to judge John Kennedy by his brief tenure in the White House because the bullet fired in Dallas prevented his work from being finished. It has also been claimed that, had Kennedy lived to win a substantial victory over Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, he would have changed certain of his policies. The first statement is true only insofar as his work remained unfinished; but death stops everyone and historians and political scientists have a responsibility to examine what was done in whatever time was available. As for the second statement, there is little concrete evidence to substantiate it.

The ideas, attitudes, policies and political philosophy of John Kennedy the President cannot be separated from John Kennedy the man. The President who went to the brink of war over Cuba is an extension of the college senior who saw the fall of Czechoslovakia in 1939. The President who spent billions to reach the moon first is an extension of the teenager who left a hospital bed to practice for a swim meet. The President who launched the Alliance For Progress and the Peace Corps is an extension of the boy who always felt, despite his millions, unaccepted by the Anglo-Saxon elite. The bold, forceful President who called for the country to "move forward" and show its "vigor" is an extension of the frail, shy

CHAPTER 3 The Shaping of a President-The Political Experience

On more than one occasion John Kennedy stated that he had no interest in politics and had little or no political philosophy. Most commentators have taken Kennedy's statements at face value. James MacGregor Burns, for example, states that during the "first two years at Harvard . . . sports still more excited him than studies." This may have been so on the surface. John Kennedy, however, did have political views, and strong political views, but for his own psychological reasons he wished to hide them from his family, friends, and perhaps even from himself. When, for example, he went to Europe in 1937, he sent his father letters full of political views. John Kennedy was inquisitive and perceptive. He commented that the Italian people seemed to like life under Fascism; at the same time he thought that the Spanish Republic was better suited for Spain than Franco.

At Harvard Kennedy had a heavy dose of political theory--from Plato through Machiavelli to Marx. With his window in the American embassies in London, Moscow, Warsaw, Paris, etc. John Kennedy was an eye witness to the start of World War II. Kennedy developed positions on all sorts of things, from foreign policy to labor relations. These ideas were formulated long before 1946 when he became a Congressman. While at Harvard, for example, he used his position on the Harvard Crimson to support curbing the power of

CHAPTER 4 The Campaign for the Presidency

The organized quest for the Presidency began in 1959. Although Kennedy had decided in 1956, after the defeat of Adlai Stevenson, to pursue the Presidency, serious nation-wide planning got underway only in early 1959. The delay between the Senator's previously expressed desire to be the Democratic nominee and the organizing of his campaign was caused by his need to secure a solid base in Massachusetts by being reelected senator in 1958 with the largest possible majority. According to Theodore Sorensen, the key difficulties in reaching for the Presidency "boiled down to the facts that the country had never elected a Catholic, that the country had never elected a 43-year old, that the country had only selected one senator to be President in this century." The root problem, therefore, was how to convince the leaders of the Democratic party and the convention delegates that despite these obstacles Kennedy had grass roots support throughout the nation. There was only one answer: Senator Kennedy had to go the primary route.

In October, 1959, a number of Kennedy advisors met with the Senator in the home of Robert Kennedy to work out the details of how best to achieve the Democratic nomination. Present at the meeting were the two Kennedy brothers, Robert and Edward; Kennedy's father; Sorensen; the Democratic State Chairman of Connecticut, John Bailey; two political organizers, Lawrence O'Brien and Kenneth O'Donnell; Stephen Smith, the Senator's brother-in-law; Louis Harris, a public

CHAPTER 5 President Kennedy: Foreign Affairs

At noon, on January 20, 1961, John Kennedy was inaugurated President of the United States. To many, Kennedy's election seemed to be a sorely needed step away from the complacency of the Eisenhower years. Kennedy's inaugural address supported this thesis and furthermore set the tone and direction of future American foreign policy. It was to be aggressive, non-compromising in terms of the cold war, militarily oriented, dynamic, and expensive. These themes reverberated throughout the address:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This much we pledge and more.

To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends.

To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. . . .

To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves. . . .

To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge--to convert our good words into good deed--in a new alliance for

CHAPTER 6 President Kennedy: Domestic Affairs

The campaign and election of John Kennedy were predicated on promises of bringing about sweeping changes in the American economy. With an inflation rate of some 6 percent and an unemployment rate of 7.2 percent, Kennedy promised the American people that he would provide the hungry with food, the unemployed with jobs, unskilled workers with skills, and the ill housed with decent housing. In tone and style reminiscent of the New Deal, Kennedy created the hope and expectation that things would improve markedly--and fast, declaring that the Democrats would increase the parity given to farmers, and that tax incentives to businessmen would be instituted to increase investment and thus create economic expansion. A program of Federal aid to education and health care for the aged was also described.

Throughout the whirlwind campaign for the Presidency, Kennedy had promised and promised. Liberals in the country were ecstatic as the Kennedy victory insured, they felt, that the new President would forcefully use the Presidency and the Federal government to attempt to eradicate the stigma that was still part of America in 1960--that almost one third of the nation remained ill housed, ill clothed and ill fed.

Blacks also expected that Kennedy would do what he could to better their economic position. Some 30 percent of blacks able to work were unemployed and they still remained the last hired and first fired. In his campaign Kennedy had promised that if elected he would immediately "with the stroke of a pen" issue an Executive Order declaring illegal discrimination

CHAPTER 7 Kennedy and the United States

John Kennedy, thirty-fifth President of the United States, was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald. The death of the President plunged the United States into mourning. Few could accept the fact that this vigorous, dynamic man was gone forever. The reaction was incredible. In streets all over the world people were crying, churches everywhere held special observances, television, radio, and newspapers portrayed the events following the assassination on a minute by minute basis. Though Kennedy's popularity shortly before his death was declining, his murder seemed to take from Americans a member of their own family. Overnight he was transformed into a God-like individual. His shortcomings were overlooked. All that was remembered was the dynamism, the promises, and the hope for an America which he represented. Americans who were alive on November 22 will always remember where they were and how they heard the news. No longer would Americans be able to watch their President gracefully and humorously deal with questions at his news conferences; no longer could they see him playing football or running to catch a plane with his hair tossed about by the wind; no longer would they see him without a hat or coat standing in the cold. His death and the reaction to it were strikingly caught by Alistair Cooke over the BBC:

I cannot remember a time certainly, in the last thirty years, when the people everywhere around you were so quiet, so tired-looking, and for