Executive Order 10924: Peace Corps

About the Author

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, America's thirty-fifth president, seemed to be destined for politics from his birth in Brookline, Massachusetts, on May 29, 1917. His mother, Rose, was the daughter of the legendary Boston mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., served in the late 1930s as ambassador to the Court of St. James's—the royal court of Great Britain. Kennedy, reared in both Boston and New York City, attended various schools and graduated from the Choate School in 1935. As a Harvard College senior, Kennedy toured Europe from February to September 1939, gathering information for his thesis, which was later published as the book Why England Slept. In spring 1941, one year after his graduation, the navy overlooked Kennedy's history of bad health and recurring back problems and accepted him into the Reserve Officers Training Corps. In World War II, while commanding torpedo boat PT-109, Lieutenant Kennedy saw his ship rammed by a Japanese destroyer. He rescued his crewmates and earned the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, which cited his outstanding courage, endurance, and leadership that saved several lives.

Once he was home, Kennedy launched his political career in 1946 with election to the House of Representatives, where he served until 1953, when he was elected to the Senate. He remained in the Senate until 1960. On September 12, 1946, he married Jacqueline Bouvier. In 1956 Kennedy, still in his thirties, almost won the Democratic Party's nomination for vice president. The near miss indicated that the junior senator from Massachusetts had acquired the respect of his party. That same year, while recuperating from spinal surgery, he enhanced his recognition by writing Profiles in Courage, a series of eight short biographies of U.S. senators who had displayed that virtue. The best-selling book earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. As a senator, Kennedy manifested the disposition that would help change American foreign diplomacy and add the Peace Corps to its tools. He championed the cause of new relationships with emerging nations and told his colleagues, “Call it internationalism, call it anti-colonialism, call it what you will, the word is out and spreading like wild fire in nearly a thousand languages and dialects—that it is no longer necessary to remain forever in bondage” (Hoffman, p. 90).

In 1960 the senator won his party's nomination for the presidency in part by convincing voters that his Catholicism would not dictate his decisions as president. Kennedy then waged a vigorous battle for the presidency against Republican Vice President Richard Nixon. The campaign was marked by the first televised presidential debates, constituting a milestone in American history. Kennedy won the November presidential election by the narrowest of margins.

Kennedy, the youngest man ever elected to the presidency, asked the nation, especially its young people, to join him in facing the domestic and international challenges of the time. He spoke of Americans as pioneers facing a new frontier that would call on them for courage and sacrifice. On the home front, the country would renew efforts to eliminate poverty and racism. In the midst of a cold war that pitted democracy against Communism, Kennedy asked his countrymen to help ensure America's preeminence as a benign world power, one that would surpass the Soviet Union militarily while at the same time extending cooperation and assistance to all nations, especially to those struggling to find peace and security in a free world.

In addition to starting the Peace Corps, Kennedy's brief term in office was marked by the Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), a failed effort attempt to overthrow Cuba's dictator, Fidel Castro; the Cuban missile crisis (1962), which almost launched nuclear war against the Soviets; efforts to thwart Communist inroads in Latin America; and growing U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. On June 23, 1963, the president visited the Berlin Wall and cited it as an indication of the failure of Communism. With almost the entire Berlin population in the street, he delivered one of his most famous lines—“Ich bin ein Berliner” (“I am a Berliner”). Kennedy also pushed for and, in August 1963, signed with Britain and the Soviet Union the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

At home, Kennedy became progressively more supportive of the civil rights movement and more active in the expanding immigration opportunities, which he viewed as an extension of his civil rights policies. The president also urged a national commitment to space exploration and the goal of putting a man on the moon, as happened in 1969. Kennedy's charisma and his wife's glamour added a youthful vigor and elegance to the White House that was home to two very young children, Caroline and John. Then, on November 23, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Kennedy. He was pronounced dead at one o'clock in the afternoon. On March 14, 1967, his body was moved to a permanent resting place in Arlington National Cemetery and marked by an eternal flame.