On this page
Power and the presidency
The Nixon-Kennedy debate
Kennedy and Khrushchev
Bay of Pigs incident
Cuban missile crisis
Presidential detail
The President
John F. Kennedy
On November 22, 1963, when he was hardly past his first thousand days in office, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by an assassin's bullets as his motorcade wound through Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was the youngest man elected President; he was the youngest to die. (source)
Timeline for Kennedy
Check out the various events, videos, audios from the life of JFK from this BBC link
(the ActiveX control on the webpage should be run to view the interactive)
Power and the presidency
For the past 50 years, the commander in chief has steadily expanded presidential power, particularly in foreign policy. Click this picture to read from the Smithsonian magazine what the American presidency is all about..
John F. Kennedy, right, with his brother Robert, during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
The Bay of Pigs incident
In early 1961 President John F. Kennedy concluded that Fidel Castro was a Soviet client working to subvert Latin America. After much debate in his administration Kennedy authorized a clandestine invasion of Cuba by a brigade of Cuban exiles. The brigade hit the beach at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, but the operation collapsed in spectacular failure within 2 days. Read from the State Historian's data
Cuban Missile Crisis
In the fall of 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union came as close as they ever would to global nuclear war. Hoping to correct what he saw as a strategic imbalance with the United States, Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev began secretly deploying medium range ballistic missiles (MRBM) and intermediate range ballistic missiles (IRBM) to Fidel Castro's Cuba. Once operational, these nuclear-armed weapons could have been used cities and military targets in most of the continental United States. How did American react?
Inaugural address as President
How the Nixon-Kennedy Debate Changed the World
Mini Bio of JFK - Video
A quick look at the life of John F. Kennedy in this mini-bio video.
Kennedy's legacy endures
Despite enormous changes since his presidency, the United States still reflects JFK's America.
Fifty years after the election that sent John Kennedy to the White House, the impact of his thousand days in the Oval Office continues to be seen in positive repercussions from the civil rights movement and problematic ones from the Vietnam War. He pioneered the media age that has shaped national politics ever since and expanded the role of the federal government in ways that continue to reverberate.
Read from this USA Today article
- 50 years after win, Kennedy's legacy endures - USA Today(Also read JFK's America from this link)
- JFK remains most popular past president : CNN Poll"Eighty-five percent of all Americans approve of the way Kennedy handled his job as president, ranking him first among all the presidents who have served in the White House in the last half-century,"
Kennedy and Khrushchev
Photograph from the U.S. State Department in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
IN his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy expressed in two eloquent sentences, often invoked by Barack Obama, a policy that turned out to be one of his presidency’s — indeed one of the cold war’s — most consequential: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” So how did the talks between the two world leaders go? Read from this New York Times article...