KENNEDY, JOHN F.

1917-1963, thirty-fifth president of the United States. Kennedy was born into an Irish-American family with aspirations resembling those of the British gentry. Overcoming limitations of health and doubts about his personal ambitions, he achieved the presidency by battling simultaneously on several fronts. Kennedy coasted to the inevitable first-ballot nomination at the Democratic party's Los Angeles convention in July 1960 and then pulled off what proved to be an essential political coup by selecting Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas as his running mate. Kennedy's electoral college margin of 303-219 was won with little more than a 100,000-vote plurality out of nearly 69 million cast. At the age of forty-three, he became the youngest man to reach the White House via the electoral college. Most significant was his ability to demonstrate that a Roman Catholic could win.

John F. Kennedy left two different legacies. The first was best communicated through his lofty, inspiring rhetoric, his youth and personal elegance, and his glamorous wife. He also appealed to the aspirations of ordinary people through such programs as the Peace Corps. His Alliance for Progress, despite its inability to bring democratic reforms to Latin America, helped further his association with human rights. Much more electrifying was his promise to send an American to the moon by the end of the decade. Kennedy's delicate carrot-and-stick maneuvering with the Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev overcame a crisis over the future of the divided city of Berlin and the potential of a nuclear holocaust during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, enabling him to conclude an agreement with the Soviet Union to ban nuclear tests in the atmosphere. His sudden martyrdom on November 22, 1963, by suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald quickly became the inspiration for President Johnson's Great Society program of social reforms, especially major civil rights legislation.

The second Kennedy legacy, more arguable and tentative, involved the contention that his objectives were myopic to begin with, and that he encouraged inflated expectations, both at home and abroad. His misguided effort to topple Fidel Castro's Cuban regime during the Bay of Pigs fiasco triggered a chain of events that helped lead to the later showdown over Russian missiles in Cuba. His continuation of the American commitment to the South Vietnamese government of President Ngo Dinh Diem intensified the escalation in Southeast Asia. That policy became virtually irreversible when Kennedy became an accomplice in Diem's subsequent overthrow. Those who had expected a more activist presidency found him too timid about pressuring the still-powerful congressional conservatives. Fear of political retribution inhibited requests for additional civil rights legislation until violent resistance to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, desegregation efforts removed his options.