Kennedy founded the Peace Corps as a volunteer program to assist people overseas. He also created the Alliance for Progress to increase economic ties with Latin America and stem the flow of communism in the region.
The invasion was considered a failure. Kennedy's greatest challenge came in with the Cuban Missile Crisis, which placed the world on the brink of nuclear war. Following this discovery, Kennedy ordered the island to be blockaded.
To some analysts at the time, nuclear war seemed imminent. The crisis was ended when the Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles in exchange for Kennedy's promise not to invade Cuba, and to remove American missiles from Turkey. Among Kennedy's domestic actions were proposed income tax cuts, minimum wage increases, and his announced goal of putting a man on the moon.
Civil rights was also a major issue during his presidency, and Kennedy sent a civil rights bill to Congress in , which would ultimately pass as the Civil Rights Act of He was succeeded by Vice President Lyndon B.
Kennedy was married to Jacqueline Kennedy from until his death in Together they had three children: Caroline, John F. Kennedy Jr.
Other candidates that appeared on the ballot received less than 0. Bracken Lee, C. Every year in office, the president of the United States addresses Congress on the present state of affairs as well as the administration's goals for the coming year. Ballotpedia features , encyclopedic articles written and curated by our professional staff of editors, writers, and researchers. Click here to contact our editorial staff, and click here to report an error. Click here to contact us for media inquiries, and please donate here to support our continued expansion.
Born soon after America's entry into the First World War, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the nation's first president born in the 20th century.
Both parents hailed from wealthy Boston families with long political histories. His maternal grandfather had been mayor of Boston.
Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had made a fortune in the stock market, entertainment, and other business, managing to take his money out of the stock market just before the crash of Kennedy later claimed that his only experience of the Great Depression came from what he read in books while attending Harvard University.
For John, this privileged childhood was interrupted repeatedly by chronic bouts of illness. Afflicted with an almost constant stream of ailments, several of which went undiagnosed, Kennedy spent much of his time recuperating. Roosevelt appointed Joseph P.
Kennedy, John's father, to the key post of ambassador to the United Kingdom. The new ambassador was unsympathetic to British preparedness policies and found a cool reception in London. While in England with his father, he wrote his senior essay for Harvard University on England's lack of readiness for the Second World War.
It was published and was well received by critics, becoming a bestseller under the title, Why England Slept. In August , as the sailors were sleeping without posting a watch in violation of naval regulations , a Japanese destroyer rammed his boat, PT Towing a badly burned crewmate by a life-jacket strap clenched in his teeth, Kennedy led the crew's ten survivors on a three-mile swim to refuge on a tiny island.
The crew hid on the island from the enemy for days until Kennedy managed to summon help. Nevertheless, he returned home to a naval inquiry on the sinking. Although a board found evidence of poor seamanship, the Navy needed heroes more than it needed scapegoats, and Kennedy was cast as the former to build public morale, and recruited to go on speaking tours.
Kennedy positioned himself as a national statesman. National Archives, PS Kennedy was also making his mark as the scholar senator.
His reputation as a scholar led Vice President Nixon to appoint Kennedy chair of a committee to select the five most outstanding senators to appear in a Senate Hall of Fame. The chairmanship was destined to produce considerable publicity, and his name also appeared each week on the bestseller list. Kennedy was a star at the August Democratic convention. Stevenson asked Kennedy to place his name in nomination. Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee was the favorite for the vice-presidential nomination, which Stevenson threw open to the convention.
Kefauver had led a special committee investigation into organized crime that was one of the first televised Senate hearings, and the publicity made him a well-known name. No candidate was selected on the first ballot, and Kennedy had the lead on the second ballot, but not enough votes to secure the nomination. When Kefauver ultimately won the nomination, Kennedy called on the convention to make the nomination unanimous. Even in defeat, his star rose.
According to John T. Shaw in JFK in the Senate: Pathway to the Presidency , Kennedy traveled more than 30, miles, gave more than speeches, and covered 24 states in the weeks leading up to the election. Stevenson and Kefauver lost the election, and by Thanksgiving, Kennedy had decided to run for President.
Kennedy negotiated the Senate Hall of Fame committee with political skill. Kennedy established rigorous evaluation criteria, consulted with noted historians, and recognized both the context of the Senate and the times in which the senators served. LaFollette, Sr. He used his position on the Senate Labor Committee to push for an increase in the minimum wage and to protect union rights in an environment where Congress was trying to strip unions of any power to bargain effectively.
Kennedy joined the Foreign Relations Committee in There he supported Algerian independence from France and sponsored an amendment that would provide aid to Russian satellite nations.
Kennedy also introduced an amendment to the National Defense Education Act to eliminate the requirement that aid recipients sign a loyalty oath and provide supporting affidavits. The McClellan Committee was established in to investigate labor management relations in the postwar environment of organized labor.
When the time came to write legislation, the committee turned to Kennedy, who drafted and managed the labor bill through the Senate and managed the conference committee with the House. McClellan had been investigating organized labor through his subcommittee in the Government Operations Committee.
The unions objected, arguing that the appropriate place for such investigations was in the Senate Labor Committee, where Kennedy chaired the Labor Subcommittee.
McClellan resisted transferring jurisdiction because he feared Kennedy was too pro-union. The growth of television in the s changed the political landscape in Congress. The broadcast of the McClellan Committee hearings provided an opportunity for senators to be seen by voters across the country.
Kennedy took full advantage of the hearings to be seen as a fair and intelligent senator. Earlier in the decade, gavel-to-gavel telecasts of the Army-McCarthy hearings were a significant factor in the decline of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican who had been riding an anticommunist wave since the beginning of the decade.
Corruption in the Teamsters Union was a continuing focus of the select committee. After repeatedly invoking the Fifth Amendment before the committee, Dave Beck was forced out as president of the union. That led to repeated clashes between Kennedy and James Hoffa, who succeeded Beck. While the committee repeatedly uncovered evidence of corruption in the Teamsters Union, it was unsuccessful in removing Hoffa.
Kennedy claimed during the campaign that he looked forward to meeting the challenges facing the strongest nation in the Free World. He did not have long to wait before those challenges were upon him. Kennedy appeared overwhelmed, first by the catastrophic failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, then by a blustering Nikita Khrushchev during a summit meeting in Europe, and finally by the construction of the Berlin Wall.
And there was also the deteriorating situation in Southeast Asia to consider. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Despite its wide margin of victory, the ballot measure never takes effect. In , California, the home of Presidents Adolf Hitler, president of the far-right Nazi Party, launches the Beer Hall Putsch, his first attempt at seizing control of the German government.
After World War I, the victorious allies demanded billions of dollars in war reparations from Germany. For the first time in 40 years, the Republican Party wins control of both the U.
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