To live as a president and to die as one: John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Born on May 29, 1917 in the Boston suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts, to Joseph P.
Kennedy Sr., a businessman and politician, and Rose Kennedy (née Fitzgerald), a
philanthropist and socialite, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, often referred to by his initials JFK, was
the 35th president of the United States from January 1961 until his assassination in
November 1963. Although his presidency was short because of his sudden death, he is one
of the best known president of the United States as he ranks highly in polls of U.S. presidents
with historians and the general public.

What is most remarkable about this period of American history is, obviously, the tragedy
that occured in the life of the Kennedys and how the assassination left the whole country
shocked and in mourning. According to CBS Washington correspondent Roger Mudd, the
event "was a death that touched everyone instantly and directly; rare was the person who
did not cry that long weekend. In our home, as my wife watched the television, her tears
caused our five-year-old son, Daniel, to go quietly and switch off of what he thought was the
cause of his mother's weeping.". Furthermore, in this essay, I would like to highlight his
childhood, his service years, his presidency and, finally, his assassination.

Born in a very wealthy political family, Kennedy had an elder brother, Joseph Jr., and
seven younger siblings. His father, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, had acquired a multimillion-
dollar fortune in banking, bootlegging, shipbuilding, and the film industry, and as a skilled
player of the stock market. The older brothers were often encouraged to follow the political
path, but Joseph Jr. was who their father had expected would be the first Kennedy to run for
office. In September 1931, Kennedy started attending Choate, a prestigious boarding school
in Wallingford, Connecticut, for 9th through 12th grade. His older brother Joe Jr. had already
been at Choate for two years and was a football player and leading student. Growing up in
the shadow of his brother, JFK tried to draw the attention on himself by acting rebellious.
However, he was a brilliant student when he was interested, it is stated that he excelled at
English and History. His father wrote to him by way of encouragement, "If I didn't really feel
you had the goods I would be most charitable in my attitude toward your failings ... I am not
expecting too much, and I will not be disappointed if you don't turn out to be a real genius,
but I think you can be a really worthwhile citizen with good judgment and understanding."
Kennedy was in fact very bookish in high school, reading ceaselessly but not the books his
teachers assigned. He was also chronically ill during his childhood and adolescence; he
suffered from severe colds, the flu, scarlet fever and even more severe, undiagnosed
diseases that forced him to miss months of school at a time and occasionally brought him to
the brink of death. After graduating highschool, JFK started going to Harvard willing to follow
his father’s steps. Like his brother Joe, Jack played football. He was not as good an athlete as
Joe but he had a lot of determination and perseverance. Unfortunately, one day while
playing he ruptured a disk in his spine. Jack never really recovered from this accident and his
back continued to bother him for the rest of his life.  He became very popular among his
other colleagues while remaining an average student and having excellent results only at
subjects he was interested in.

The year 1940 was the year Kennedy attempted to enter army's Officer Candidate School.
However, he had a hard time joining the service because of his health problems. In the fall of
1941 Kennedy joined the U.S. Navy with the help of his father. Both Joe and Jack joined the
Navy. Joe was a flyer and sent to Europe, while Jack was made Lieutenant (Lt.) and assigned
to the South Pacific as commander of a patrol torpedo boat, the PT-109. Lt. Kennedy had a
crew of twelve men whose mission was to stop Japanese ships from delivering supplies to
their soldiers. On the night of August 2, 1943, Lt. Kennedy’s crew patrolled the waters
looking for enemy ships to sink. That was when he saw a Japanese distroyer, travelling at full
speed towards them. His boat split in two, two of his sailors died and his back was badly
injured again. In that moment, Kennedy gathered the remaining of his crew members and
debated about surrending or fighting. He stated: "There's nothing in the book about a
situation like this. A lot of you men have families and some of you have children. What do
you want to do? I have nothing to lose.". They surrended and at 2 a.m on the night of 2
august the men swam towards an island 5.6 km southwest of the remains of PT-109. Despite
being severely injured, Kennedy towed a badly burned crewman through the water to the
island with a life jacket strap clenched between his teeth. They were rescued 6 days later.
The incident earned him the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for "extremely heroic conduct"
and a Purple Heart for the injuries he suffered. Unfortunately, his brother died when his
plane blew up in August 1944. Handsome, athletic, intelligent and ambitious, Joseph
Kennedy Jr. had been pegged by his father as the one among his children who would some
day become president of the United States. In the aftermath of Joe Jr.'s death, Kennedy took
his family's hopes and aspirations for his older brother upon himself, altough his intention
was to become a teacher or a writer after the war.

The beginning of Jack’s political career was when he ran for Congress in Massachusetts'
eleventh congressional district and won. He served six years in the House of Representatives
before he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1952. According to one of his aides, the decisive
factor in Kennedy's victory was his personality: "He was the new kind of political figure that
people were looking for that year, dignified and gentlemanly and well-educated and
intelligent, without the air of superior condescension."

After his election he met his future wife, Jacqueline Bouvier at a dinner party and asked
her on a date as he recalled "leaned across the asparagus and asked her for a date.". They
got married on September, the next year. Their first years of marriage faced major setbacks
as in late 1954, he underwent a near-fatal spinal operation, while Jacqueline suffered a
miscarriage in 1955 and in August 1956 gave birth to a stillborn daughter, Arabella. On the
other hand, they were really appreciated in the public eye. John F. Kennedy was becoming a
popular politician. In 1956 he was almost picked to run for vice president. Kennedy
nonetheless decided that he would run for president in the next election. Jacqueline gave
birth to daughter Caroline on November 27, 1957. In an attempt to narrow the geographical
gap between them that had persisted for the first five years of the marriage, Jackie started
travelling with Kennedy for his compaign. This contributed enormously to his public image as
he observed the crowd was twice as big when his wife accompanied him. Although she was
more shy and uncomfortable with too much attention, she was remembered as always
cheerful and oblinging. In November 1958, John Kennedy was reelected to a second term.
He credited Jacqueline's visibility in both ads and stumping as vital assets in securing his
victory, and he called her "simply invaluable". They were a perfect team.

On July 13 at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, the party
nominated John F. Kennedy for President of the United States. In his inaugural address, he
spoke of the need for all Americans to be active citizens, famously saying, "Ask not what
your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." He asked the nations of
the world to join together to fight what he called the "common enemies of man: tyranny,
poverty, disease, and war itself". Things were going great in Kennedy’s family too. Jacqueline
gave birth to their second child, John F. Kennedy, Jr. two weeks after JFK was pronounced
the 35th president of United States and she quickly became a trendsetter as her fashion
choices were regarded with admiration. She was frequently featured in women's magazines
alongside film stars and named as one of the 12 best-dressed women in the world. The
media portrayed Kennedy as the ideal woman as she "created an unrealistic media
expectation for first ladies that would challenge her successors". Nevertheless, the First Lady
attracted worldwide positive public attention and gained allies for the White House and
international support for the Kennedy administration and its Cold War policies. Although she
stated that her duties would only extend to taking care of her husband and children, she did
so much more. She also dedicated her time to the promotion of American arts and
preservation of its history and she is the one responsable for the White House restoration.
Her main goal was to make the residence suitable for a family to live in, but also to become a
symbol of American history and beauty. She stated that "I feel so strongly that the White
House should have as fine a collection of American pictures as possible. It's so important ...
the setting in which the presidency is presented to the world, to foreign visitors. The
American people should be proud of it. We have such a great civilization. So many foreigners
don't realize it. I think this house should be the place we see them best."

The president involved into creating a more peaceful society. He created the Peace Corps
by executive order in 1961. By the end of the century, over 170,000 Peace Corps volunteers
would serve in 135 countries. Also in 1961, Kennedy created the Alliance for Progress to
foster greater economic ties with Latin America, in hopes of alleviating poverty and
thwarting the spread of communism in the region.

What I admire about him is his work on civil rights, he was the first president concerned
about black people and their rights. Constrained by Southern Democrats in Congress who
remained stridently opposed to civil rights for black citizens, Kennedy offered only tepid
support for civil rights reforms early in his term. It is speculated that he was waiting for his
second election to address the issue. He continued to talk more and more about justice for
all, including the black culture which was not an accepted thing at that age because of the
party’s racism. “Our goal must be an educational system in the spirit of the declaration of
independence — a system in which all are created equal,” Kennedy said. “A system in which
every child, whether born a banker’s son in a Long Island mansion, or a Negro
sharecropper’s son in an Alabama cotton field, has every opportunity for an education that
his abilities and character deserve.”

One of the things he worried about most was the possibility of nuclear war between the
United States and the Soviet Union. He was afraid of millions of people dying . Since World
War II, there had been a lot of anger and suspicion between the two countries but never any
shooting between Soviet and American troops. This 'Cold War', which was unlike any other
war the world had seen, was really a struggle between the Soviet Union's communist system
of government and the United States' democratic system. Both countries invested enormous
amounts of money on nuclear weapons. Discovering that the Soviet Union had sent ballistic
nuclear missiles to Cuba, Kennedy blockaded the island and vowed to defend the United
States at any cost. After several of the tensest days in history, during which the world
seemed on the brink of nuclear annihilation, the Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles
in return for Kennedy's promise not to invade Cuba and to remove American missiles from
Turkey. Eight months later, in June 1963, Kennedy successfully negotiated the Nuclear Test-
Ban Treaty with Great Britain and the Soviet Union, helping to ease Cold War tensions. It was
one of his proudest accomplishments.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963 in Dallas, Texas, while
on a political trip to smooth over frictions in the Democratic Party. He was traveling with
Jacqueline in a presidential motorcade through downtown Dallas, when he was shot twice,
once in the back, the bullet exiting via his throat, and once in the head. Kennedy was taken
to Parkland Hospital for emergency medical treatment, where he was pronounced dead 30
minutes later. He was 46 years old. After Jacqueline's husband was pronounced dead, she
refused to remove her blood-stained clothing and reportedly regretted having washed the
blood off her face and hands, explaining to Lady Bird Johnson that she wanted "them to see
what they have done to Jack".

Lee Harvey Oswald, an order filler at the Texas School Book Depository from which the
shots were fired was charged with the assassinations of JFK, but he denied, claiming he was
a patsy because he had lived in Soviet Union. While being transferred from the city jail to
country jail, he was fatally shot by Dallas nightclub owner, Jack Ruby. He was immediately
charged with the murder of Oswald, but died of cancer. After a 10-month investigation, the
Warren Commission concluded that Oswald assassinated Kennedy, that Oswald had acted
entirely alone, and that Ruby had acted alone in killing Oswald. In 1979, the United States
House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that Kennedy was probably
assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. In 2002 historian Carl M. Brauer concluded that the
public's "fascination with the assassination may indicate a psychological denial of Kennedy's
death, a mass wish ... to undo it".

As far as I am concerned, John F. Kennedy tried to change America for the better, taking
into account that he also participated in World War II and was familiar with sorrow, despair,
death and fear. He addressed complicated subjects and tried to change the mentality of
Americans. The Kennedy administration approved a series of stimulus measures to combat
the recession, including the extension of social security and unemployment benefits, and a
twenty percent increase in military spending, measures that were very much needed in that
period of time.

In conclusion, although he was not considered the greatest president of United States
due to his cautious approach on certain things, he was a wake-up call to all the Americans
and has certainly improved the country’s political affairs. I would like to end this essay with
the famous words written by Jacqueline Kennedy after her husband’s assassination: „He was
charismatic, magnetic, electric and everybody knew it. When he walked it every woman’s
head turned, everybody stood up to talk to him. He was like this hybrid, this mix of a man
who couldn’t contain himslef. I always got the sense he became torn between being a good
person and missing out on all of the opportunities that life could offer a man as magnificent
as him.”
 Webografie

1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-F-Kennedy/Congressman-and-senator

2. https://www.biography.com/us-president/john-f-kennedy

3. https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/life-of-john-f-kennedy

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Kennedy_Onassis

6. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-jfk-holds-complex-place-in-black-history-
2013nov03-story.html

7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kennedy