John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), commonly known by his initials J.F.K., served as the American President from January 1961 until he was assassinated in November 1963. At age 43, he was the youngest man to have been elected U.S President and is feted to this day for his idealistic vision of what America and the world could at their best aspire to. His entry in the World Peace Adventure jigsaw perhaps seems like a niche inclusion, but after visiting his Presidential Library and Museum in Boston and his memorial at Arlington Cemetery, I was convinced that (from a western perspective at least) there have been few more inspirational figures than J.F.K. in terms of tilting at the world peace windmill over the past 100 years.
Notable events prior to J.F.K’s presidency include – and discovering this blew my mind – a 22-year-old JFK being present in the UK House of Commons on 3 September 1939, the day Britain entered World War 2. His father was US ambassador at the time. During World War 2 itself, JFK served as a torpedo boat commander and was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for heroic conduct for swimming his men to safety (while injured) after their boat was sunk by a Japanese destroyer in 1943. At the end of World War 2, he entered politics and became a congressman in 1946 and a senator in 1952. He married the glamorous Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953 and successfully ran for President in 1960.
Notable events during JFK’s short but eventful presidency include his famous 1961 inauguration speech (“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”); ongoing support for the African-American Civil Rights Movement; establishing the Peace Corps for Americans to volunteer in underdeveloped nations; various significant events in the ongoing ‘Cold War’ against Communism (the botched 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba; the 1961 building of the Berlin Wall to separate east and west Germany; initiating the ‘Space Race’ Project Apollo mission which would culminate in the 1969 moon landing; and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis which brought the world to the brink of Nuclear War – Kennedy’s willpower and resolve during this crisis was perceived to have won out over the Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev, making JFK immensely popular at home. He reluctantly increased US involvement in the Vietnam War in 1962, then made an acclaimed speech about world peace in 1963 (selected text below):
On June 10, 1963, Kennedy delivered the commencement address at American University in Washington, DC, “to discuss a topic on which too often ignorance abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived—yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace … I speak of peace because of the new face of war…in an age when a singular nuclear weapon contains ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied forces in the Second World War … an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and air and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn … I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men … world peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbour—it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance … our problems are man-made—therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants.”
Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. The official explanation is that the murder was the act of a lone gunman but there have been persistent claims he was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy and there was a subsequent cover-up. JFK is consistently regarded as one of the most popular and admired US Presidents of all time.
To learn more about one of the defining movements in 20th Century America, jump to Chapter 52: African American Civil Rights Movement – content to follow
To learn more about persistent allegations of high-level cover-ups and secrecy, jump to Chapter 53: Conspiracy Theories – content to follow
To learn more about JFK’s idealistic volunteer program, jump to Chapter 54: Peace Corps – content to follow
To learn more about one of the most significant (and pointless) conflicts of the 20th Century, jump to Chapter 55: Vietnam War – content to follow
