Kennedy
Election
Democratic candidate for 1960 elections. He was a senator from Massachusetts who had narrowly missed being the party's vice presidential candidate in 1956. His father was wealthy and a former American ambassador to Britain. He was a strong candidate who overcame doubts about his young age, and religion for he was catholic. He won the popularity barely with 49.9% and 303 to 219 electoral votes.
The New Frontier: Kennedy's plan, supports civil rights, pushes for a space program, wants to cut taxes, and increase spending for defense and military
Social program
steel management
tax cuts
control inflation
Civil rights
- poor
The Cold War
The Berlin Wall
- Kennedy met with the Soviet premier Khrushchev at Vienna in June 1961, only a few months after moving into the White House
- Khrushchev threatened to make a treaty with East Germany and not allow West Germany access to Berlin
- Kennedy did not step back from this, he refused to be pushed around
- The Soviets backed off from the threats, but suddenly began the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961
- It was designed stop the population runoff from East Germany to West Germany
- The wall symbolized the post-WW2 division of Europe into two hostile camps
Flexible Response
- US saw problems in foreign policy after WW2
- Laos, which was freed from its French colonial overlords in 1954, had been helped economically by the Eisenhower administration, but failed to fully purge the country of an aggressive communist element
- Many found Laos dangerous in communist influence
- Kennedy found that he had insufficient forces to send to Asia
- Kennedy found a diplomatic escape in the Geneva conference
- He pushed the strategy for "flexible response": developing an array of military options that could be matched to the intensity of the situation
- Kennedy increased spending on conventional military forces and bolstered Special Forces
Vietnam
- The "flexible response" logic was used for Vietnam
- The Diem
- The "flexible response" logic was used for Vietnam
- The Diem government, which was supported by the US, had ruled shakily since the partition of Vietnam in 1954
- Anti-Diem rebels threatened to take out the government
- Kennedy ordered a sharp increase in "military advisers" (US troops) in South Vietnam
- Kennedy made a deep political commitment to the war in Vietnam, and by the time of his death he had ordered more than 15,000 men to be stationed there
Cuba
- Kennedy inherited from the Eisenhower administration a scheme to remove Fidel Castro from power by invading Cuba with anticommunist exiles
- They were sent to trigger an uprising in Cuba that would sweep the country
- On April 17, 1961, twelve hundred exiles landed in Cuba
- No uprising occurred and the invaders were held in Cuban jails and ransomed to the US
- Castro was pushed further into the Soviet embrace
- In 1962, aerial photographs revealed Soviet nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba
- On October 22, 1962, Kennedy ordered a naval quarantine of Cuba and demanded the weapons to be removed
- The US learned that the Soviets had ground forces in Cuba that were ordered to launch missiles if attacked
- On October 28, Khrushchev agreed to terms and would pull the missiles out of Cuba
- This is known as the Cuban Missle Crisis
Kennedy and Civil Rights
- Kennedy's campaign concerned strong appeal to black voters
- He promised the end to racial discrimination with a "stroke of a pen"
- It took him almost two years to complete this task
- After anti-Freedom Riders caused violence in the South, the Kennedy administration joined hands with civil rights
- MLK and Kennedy shared a fruitful relationship
- a Voter Education Project was inaugurated to register the South's disfranchised blacks
- The integration of Southern universities provoked wholesale slaughter
- University of Mississippi was difficult to desegregate
- Kennedy was forced to send 400 federal marshals and 3,000 troops to enroll James Meredith, who encountered violent opposition, in his first class
- MLK launched a campaign against discrimination in 1963
- Kennedy delivered a nationally televised speech on June 11, 1963
- Kennedy called the situation a "moral issue"
- The violence still continued even with the help of Kennedy and MLK
Kennedy’s assassination
- John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963 at 12:30 pm in Dealey Plaza Dallas, Texas.
- The president was riding in a car with his wife, Jacqueline, the governor of Texas, and his wife Nellie.
- He was shot in the head and rushed to Parkland Hospital where many attempts were made to keep him alive
- His body was then flown back to Washington, D.C.
- Vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson was inaugurated on the plane back to Washington on the same day of Kennedy’s death.
- The suspect of his death was Lee Harvey Oswald