Indiana Bicentennial 11.2: John F. Kennedy (Continued)

The Cold War dominated Kennedy’s foreign policy. The USSR erected the Berlin Wall. The Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in an effort to oust Fidel Castro was a debacle. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a game of chicken where the Soviets blinked first. They were attempting to put missiles in Cuba, and the U.S. regarded that as aggressive and put Cuba under naval quarantine, ultimately boarding a Soviet-flagged ship. The U.S. publicly agreed not to invade Cuba and privately agreed to remove missiles from Turkey. Kennedy began attempts to negotiate nuclear testing ban treaties.

Kennedy also created the Peace Corps and began providing support to the South Vietnamese.

In April 1963, Kennedy assessed the situation in Vietnam: “We don’t have a prayer of staying in Vietnam. Those people hate us. They are going to throw our asses out of there at any point. But I can’t give up that territory to the communists and get the American people to re-elect me.”

Kennedy is regarded as the founder of the special relationship between Israel and the U.S. “Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and the home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity nor demoralized by success. It carries the shield of democracy and it honors the sword of freedom.”

Domestically, JFK’s proposals were branded “The New Frontier.” He wanted to reduce the top income bracket from 90% down to 65% and the corporate tax from 52 to 47%. He also wanted to increase federal funding for education, medical care for the elderly, economic aid to rural regions, and government intervention to halt the recession. He also wanted to end racial discrimination.

He ended a period of fiscal conservatism, his budget was the first to top $1 billion and to run a peacetime deficit, and the economy boomed:

GDP expanded by an average of 5.5% from early 1961 to late 1963,while inflation remained steady at around 1% and unemployment eased. Industrial production rose by 15% and motor vehicle sales rose by 40%. This rate of growth in GDP and industry continued until around 1969, and has yet to be repeated for such a sustained period of time.

Kennedy was committed to the civil rights movement. However, he did not act immediately in 1961, and he moved more slowly than civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King would have liked. Southern Democrats had the upper hand in Congress, and Jim Crow was still the law of the land. He did, however, appoint Thurgood Marshall to the federal judiciary. Brown v. Board of Education had been decided in 1954, declaring that separate schools based on race was unconstitutional. However, southern whites continued to resist.

Kennedy had, as a Senator, been opposed to the manned space program. As President, out of consideration for Lyndon Johnson – who supported the space program, JFK did not dismantle the program. However, Kennedy changed his tune when the Soviets made Yuri Gagarin the first man in space. On May 25, 1961, Kennedy gave a speech, saying:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

In another speech, on September 12, 1962, Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Kennedy would not live to see Neil Armstrong step onto the Moon. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. At the time, my Dad served in the Old Guard in Washington D.C. and, in that capacity, was present at Kennedy’s funeral as well as Johnson’s inauguration. In this picture during Kennedy’s funeral, my Dad is the one in the top-left corner.