John F. Kennedy on Principles & Values

Sub-sections under Principles & Values:
• 1940s-1950s Campaigns
• 1960 Campaign
• Personal Background
• Other issues under Principles & Values

Called on Nixon and Eisenhower for advice in crises

Contrast that with John F. Kennedy, who called on all 3 of his living predecessors to ask for their help during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A year and a half earlier, after the Bay of Pigs disaster, Kennedy had reached out to the man he'd just defeated, Richard Nixon, and to his Republican predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He knew he could not afford to be too proud to ask for help. "No one knows how rough this job is until after he has been in it a few months," Kennedy confessed to Eisenhower.

1963: Walter Cronkite announced assassination on live TV

"From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official." Cronkite removed his glasses and looked into the camera. "President Kennedy died at one P.M. Central Standard Time." For a few empty seconds, he didn't speak. The most trusted man in America blinked back tears.

For the next three days, my mother cried and smoked as she watched TV, devastated. My father was moved by Kennedy's death, too, but not enough to join her vigil. It was up to me to fill the empty space next to her.

No one close to our family had died during my short life, except Billy's dad, who had a heart attack. That was my first experience with death. Kennedy's assassination was my second, and I absorbed the tragedy through my mother, because when you're ten, your mother matters more than a president.

Legacy is aspiration, not legislative accomplishments

Camelot: romantic model of public service & inspiration

My actual vision of the presidency, to the extent that I turned it over in my mind, was more complex and less romantic. It was and remains a given that my brothers established a soaring standard for public service, and that their standards to a great extent has defined my life and my aims. I have always measured against that standard.

But my concept of myself as president had little or nothing to do with Camelot. It had nothing to do with that old preoccupation with "catching up" that I've mentioned. It wasn't about Jack, or Bobby, or my father. The eras that shaped them had passed. The present era was quite different in mood, in collective experience, and in the challenges the nation faced.

Insisted on low-security open convertible despite risks

[Two Secret Service agents were in the limousine], but neither could immediately leap to Kennedy's assistance, as would have been the case if agents had been allowed to ride at the rear of the car. The "kill shot" to the president's head came 4.9 seconds after the first shot that hit him. If agents had been allowed on the rear running boards, they would have pushed the president down and jumped on him to protect him before the fatal shot.

1961: Ask not what your country can do for you

Profile in Courage award to honor those with courage

Politics obscures courage; but there is political courage

Does this current rash of criticism and disrespect mean the quality of the Senate has declined? Certainly not. Does it mean, then, that the Senate can no longer boast of men of courage?

I am convinced that the complication of public business and the competition for the public's attention have obscured innumerable acts of political courage--large and small- -- performed almost daily in the Senate Chamber.

Compromise is essential for functioning government

It is compromise that prevents each set of reformers from crushing the group on the extreme opposite end of the political spectrum. The legislator has some responsibility to conciliate those opposing forces within his state and party and to represent them in the larger clash of interests on the national level; and he alone knows that there are few if any issues where all the truth and all the right and all the angels are on one side.

Some of my colleagues who are criticized today as compromising "politicians" are simply engaged in the fine art of conciliating, balancing and interpreting the forces and factions of public opinion, an art essential to keeping our nation united and enabling our Government to function

Senators must balance conscience with constituents' views

But this is no real problem, some will say. Always do what is right, regardless of whether is it popular. Ignore the pressures, the temptations, the false compromises.

That is an easy answer--but it is easy only for those who do not bear the responsibilities of elected office. Are we rightfully entitled to ignore the demands of our constituents even if we are able and willing to do so? The primary responsibility of a Senator is to represent the views of his state.

Senator's loyalties split among party, state, & nation

This book is not intended to suggest that party regularity and party responsibility are necessary evils which should at no time influence our decisions. It is not intended to suggest that the local interests of one's state or region have no legitimate right to consideration at any time. On the contrary, the loyalties of every Senator are distributed among his party, his state, his country and his conscience. On party issues, his party loyalties are normally controlling. In regional disputes, his regional responsibilities will likely guide his course. It is on national issues, on matters of conscience which challenge party and regional loyalties, that the test of courage is presented.

We all face tests of courage, with unions, friends, etc.

These problems do not even concern politics alone--for the same basic choice of courage or compliance continually faces us all, whether we fear the anger of constituents, friends, a board of directors or our union, whenever we stand against the flow of opinion on strongly contested issues. Politics merely furnishes one arena which imposes special tests of courage.

"Camelot" symbolizes longing for something beautiful & lost

Jacqueline imprinted: "At night before we'd go to sleep, we had an old Victrola. Jack liked to play some records. The song he loved most came at the very end of this record, the last side of Camelot: 'Don't let it be forgotten, That once there was a spot, For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.' Jack loved history so."

Freedom of worship is based on religious diversity

But the diversity of religious belief has made for religious toleration. In demanding freedom for itself, each sect had increasingly to permit freedom for others. The insistence of each successive wave of immigrants upon its right to practice its religion helped make freedom of worship a central part of the American creed. People who gambled their lives on the right to believe in their own God would not lightly surrender that right in a new society.

Rendezvous with destiny: get America moving again in 1960s

I don't believe that there is anything this country cannot do. I don't believe there's any burden, or any responsibility, that any American would not assume to protect his country, to advance the cause of freedom. And I believe it incumbent upon us now to do that. Franklin Roosevelt said in 1936 that that generation of Americans had a rendezvous with destiny. I believe in 1960 and 61 and 62 and 63 we have a rendezvous with destiny. And I believe it incumbent upon us to be the defenders of the United States and the defenders of freedom; and to do that, we must give this country leadership and we must get America moving again.

First elected to U.S. House in 1946; to Senate in 1952

Kennedy was a relatively ineffectual senator. During parts of 1954 and 1955 he was seriously ill with back ailments (compounded by Addison disease, for which he was treated from as early as 1953). Critics observed that he made no effort to oppose the anti-civil libertarian excesses of Joseph McCarthy. His friends later argued, not entirely persuasively, that he would have voted to censure McCarthy if he had not been hospitalized at the time.

1946: Campaigned for House door-to-door in Boston

They would watch as he headed out on the evening's campaign trail. "The guy was in agony," one of them came to realize. But "off we'd go again, until 11 or 12 at night, never wasting a minute." He would never admit that he felt the least bit tired or anything. He won the election.

1948: Rate of absenteeism was one of highest in the House

During his 1st year in Congress, he took an active role on the Housing Committee, giving a series of speeches on the postwar housing crisis, and opposed the Taft-Hartley Act. But that fall, he fell ill, and he was no longer active at all, and thereafter his rate of absenteeism was one of the highest in the House. "If you had to pick a member of that [1947] freshman class who would probably wind up as President, Kennedy was probably the LEAST likely." The House bored him.

In 1952, he ran for the Senate, against the widely respected incumbent from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

Favored when the campaign began, Lodge was overwhelmed by the Kennedy organization, directed for the 1st time by the candidate's younger brother Robert, and by Kennedy innovation.

Ambassador father pushed JFK into politics

OpEd: 1952: wins Senate seat with dazzle but not substance

Jack lacked the full measure of his father's ambition cruelty, and will to dominate. He was a more amiable, less focused man; his personality was not the almost carbon copy of the ambassador's that Bobby's was at the time. Still, Jack like his father and his brother, was without any guiding intellectual, philosophical, or moral vision in his pursuit of office. Politics, like life, was about winning, and little else.

1955: "Profiles in Courage" established political stature

The Kennedys, father and son, had great hopes for Profiles in Courage, regarding it as a tool for transforming a 1st-term New England senator into a figure of national prominence, a young politician into an emerging statesman, and an "author" at that. In Jan. 1956, Jack Kennedy hand-delivered copies to every member of the US Senate.

Ran for Vice Presidency at 1956 convention

The 1st ballot count was John F. Kennedy, 304 delegates; Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, 483; Sen. Albert Gore, also of Tennessee, 178. Senator Gore then threw his own dwindling number of delegates to his fellow Tennessean, Kefauver.

The defeat brought Kennedy to a sober reckoning. He now believed that whatever lip service they paid to tolerance, the main party leaders would simply not let him--young, independent, and Catholic--become their nominee.

1957: Won Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage

n May 1957, the Pulitzer Prize was awarded to "Profiles." The committee disregarded the judges' recommendation and presented Sen. Kennedy with the award for biography. Rose Kennedy frankly credited the triumph to her husband's "careful spade work." "Things don't happen; they are made to happen," she said.

By year's end, however, the authorship of the book & Kennedy's Pulitzer had BOTH become controversial. [Under allegations] that Profiles was "ghostwritten," Kennedy's willingness to accept the prize for the book constituted a public fraud. But Kennedy's knowledge of the subject matter convinced [critics] that he had been seriously involved in the project. While Kennedy may have lacked the requisite zeal for the lonely toil of drafting and redrafting manuscripts, he would prove adequate to the more public role of promoting the finished work.

1959: Big-city mayors recalled anti-Catholic 1928 campaign

1960: Today we stand on the edge of a New Frontier

On the following night, to great cheers, Jack introduced a thrilling new phrase as the descriptive term for his program. "Today our concern must be with the future," he called out. "For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do."

And then: "The problems [of the past] are not all solved and the battles are not all won. And we stand today on the edge of a New Frontier. The frontier of the 1960s. A frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats."

Won 1960 election over Nixon by only 0.1%

1960: Give direction to our traditional moral purpose

• How to end or alter the burdensome arms race, where Soviet gains already threaten our very existence.
• How to maintain freedom and order in the newly emerging nations.
• How to rebuild the stature of American science and education.
• How to prevent the collapse of our farm economy and the decay of our cities.
• How to achieve, without further inflation or unemployment, expanded economic growth benefiting all Americans.
• And how to give direction to our traditional moral purpose, awakening every American to the dangers and opportunities that confront us.

1953: Targeted Nixon as presidential rival for 1960

1960: primaries dominated for first time over backrooms

He would now have to win in heavily Protestant West Virginia. It didn't look good. An anti-Kennedy landslide loomed. The nomination would have to be brokered at the convention, a scenario that tallied with Lyndon Johnson's own game plan.

In West Virginia, Kennedy rewrote the game plan for Johnson and all future presidential campaigns. Henceforth, the battle would be in the primaries, not in Capitol offices. Having influenced Catholics in Wisconsin to back Kennedy out of religious solidarity, the new Kennedy spin was designed to convince West Virginia's Protestants that bigotry was the only reason a person could have for opposing him.

1960 slogan: Get the country moving again

There wasn't a word of his opening presentation that anyone could have argued with. No, the country was not meeting its potential. No, we were not the same nation of doers who had ended WWII. Yes, the country could do better. And, yes, we needed to "get the country moving again." Kennedy was playing a hawk on foreign policy, the activist at home, the same strategy he had used in the 1952 Senate race that sent Lodge packing. By going to his rival's right on foreign policy and to his left on domestic policy, Jack Kennedy would leave Nixon scrambling for turf.

Incredibly, Nixon was agreeing with his challenger. Nixon seemed intent on getting Kennedy himself to agree that when it came to goals, there really wasn't much difference between them.

1960: US is standing still & suffering lowered prestige

"Unemployment," he amplified elsewhere, capitalizing on a temporary increase during the month of October, "has doubled in this country since Mr. Eisenhower took office, while the number of jobs has grown only 15%."

He demanded that the US Information Agency release a public opinion poll which, he alleged, showed that our prestige abroad had reached a new low.

JFKs's Addison disease kept secret for decades

Yet it is impossible to conceal the sheer physical strain of the Presidency. The absence of peers and friends takes the greatest toll. Kennedy, who liked to compare his critics to hecklers at a bullfight, quoted a poem by the matador Domingo Ortega: "Only one is there who knows / And he's the man who fights the bull."

1960: separate Catholic identity from public life

In 2008, Mitt Romney's Mormon faith was likewise perceived as an issue by some voters. Some pundits and political advisors urged him to "do a JFK." Just give a speech, they told him, and reassure voters that your faith will have nothing to do with your presidency. Unlike JFK, Romney declared that our religious liberty is "fundamental to America's greatness."

Like Kennedy, Romney Mitt praised all Americans' freedom to worship as they choose. Like Kennedy, he also declared that "no authority of my church, or of any other church, for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions." But unlike Kennedy, he spoke out strongly for America's religious heritage, and how it continues to define us as a nation

The Catholic Question: I follow both my conscience & nation

Facing these conservative clerics who had regarded him as a likely agent of the Vatican whose loyalties were to the pope rather than the American people, my brother stood at ease behind the podium and delivered on of the pivotal speeches of his career. He was not the Catholic candidate for president, he told the stony faces before him; he was the Democratic Party's candidate for president who happened to be a Catholic. Speaking without a trace of defensiveness, Jack gradually disarmed the ministers. "If the time should ever come," he assured them, "When my office would require me to either violate my conscience, or violate the national interest, I would resign the office." He subtly peeled back the layer of righteousness regarding "the Catholic question: and exposed the bigotry that lay beneath. The ministers sent him offstage with a standing ovation

Double life as charismatic leader and cheating husband

1947: Diagnosed with Addison's Disease and given Last Rites

For Jack Kennedy, staying alive was a serious concern. He managed the sweet life of the young bachelor despite his bad back, which often had him on crutches, and Addison's disease, which cast doubt over his longer-run prospects.

Founded "Muckers Club" to fight high school elitism

What sealed the Kennedy gang's doom was a bold scheme to disrupt a major social event by dumping manure onto the school's dance floor, with the Muckers arriving, shovels in hand, to save the day.

1953: Married Jackie when she was 22-year-old college senior

"I gave everything a good deal of thought, so I am getting married this fall," he now wrote. Kennedy managed to keep secret his engagement to Miss Bouvier until after the Saturday Evening Post had run a long-planned feature: "Jack Kennedy: The Senate's Gay Young Bachelor." The Kennedy-Bouvier wedding, that September in Newport, engendered an even bigger publicity blitzkrieg.

Looking out over the Long Island Sound, the groom made an assessment that, coming from any other man of his age, might have seemed either presumptuous or fantastic. "That would be a helluva place to sail in the presidential yacht."