John F. Kennedy: Civil Rights Address

About the Author

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born in Massachusetts in 1917, the second of nine children of Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. John Kennedy's maternal grandfather had served as mayor of Boston, while his father was a successful business person and had served President Franklin Roosevelt as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission and then as ambassador to Great Britain. Kennedy's childhood was shaped by his family's great wealth, his parents' aloofness, attendance at boarding schools beginning in the seventh grade, and frequent illnesses. Kennedy would contend with physical pain and a variety of illnesses throughout his life.

Rose Kennedy's focus on caring for her mentally retarded daughter, Rosemary, who was one year younger than John, led all the children to emulate their mother's example of caring. Kennedy graduated from Harvard College in 1940. Thanks to his father's prominence and the assistance of the New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, Kennedy succeeded in having his senior thesis published as a book, Why England Slept.

Kennedy and his older brother, Joseph Kennedy, Jr., both served in World War II, John as a PT boat commander; only John returned home safely. Their father had been grooming Joseph, Jr., for a political career that might culminate in the presidency. When John Kennedy decided to enter politics after a brief stint as a journalist, he received his father's financial and political backing. Kennedy was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1946 and served as a member of the Committee on Education and Labor. His principal interests were foreign and defense policies. He was strongly anti-Communist and critical of the Truman administration for being insufficiently aggressive. In 1952 he won election to the U.S. Senate.

Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953. The couple had three children, one of whom died in infancy. Kennedy had been promiscuous prior to his marriage, and this behavior continued during the marriage and during his presidency, but in this era the press customarily declined to focus on the private lives of officeholders.

Kennedy's stance on domestic economic issues was liberal, but he failed to join in the 1954 Senate vote to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy. In 1956 Kennedy gained national attention with his unsuccessful bid to win the Democratic nomination for vice president. Kennedy's second book, Profiles in Courage, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1957. The book highlights the careers of members of Congress who took principled stands, often in opposition to what was politically prudent. In the Senate, Kennedy served on a special committee on labor and on the Foreign Relations Committee. He was elected to a second term in the Senate in 1958, won the Democratic nomination for president in 1960, and claimed a narrow victory over the Republican candidate, Vice President Richard Nixon, in the general election later that year. Civil rights became a key issue in the campaign when Martin Luther King, Jr., was sentenced to four months of hard labor on a misdemeanor traffic charge, leading some civil rights leaders to fear that King would be killed in prison. Kennedy called Coretta King, King's wife, to express his sympathy, and his brother Robert called the judge and persuaded him to release King on bail. Kennedy won 70 percent of the black vote, 30 percent higher than the Democratic percentage in the 1956 election.

As president, Kennedy initially disappointed civil rights partisans by proceeding slowly with civil rights initiatives and appointing segregationist judges in the South. Kennedy had criticized the Eisenhower administration for failing to ban discrimination in federal housing via an executive order but then delayed the issuance of his own limited executive order addressing the matter until November 1962. Kennedy thought that an assertive approach to civil rights would hurt his chances for spurring legislative action on medical insurance, federal aid to education, and other initiatives, but he failed to achieve gains in these areas even with his go-slow approach to civil rights. His main focus was on an aggressive cold war foreign policy. The failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba (in an attempt to overthrow the Communist regime of Fidel Castro) in 1961 and the October 1962 crisis with the Soviet Union over the placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba were key events in his presidency. He was also involved in increasing the number of U.S. military advisers in South Vietnam, where the U.S.-backed government was increasingly unpopular.

In the third and last year of his presidency, Kennedy moved toward rethinking the cold war and affirmative leadership on civil rights. He negotiated the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union and Great Britain, spoke out forcefully for civil rights, and submitted a major civil rights proposal to Congress. Kennedy was a popular president, and his assassination on November 22, 1963, shocked the nation. President Lyndon B. Johnson was able to carry to fruition Kennedy's domestic civil rights program.