Memorable Quotations from John Fitzgerald Kennedy

John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) was the 35th president of the United States from 1961 to 1963. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, he was the son of Joseph P. Kennedy and brother of Robert Francis Kennedy and Edward Moore Kennedy. After enlisting in the United States navy in World War II, he served with honor as commander of a PT boat in the Pacific. He was a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts from 1947 to 1953 and in 1952 won a seat in the Senate. The following year he married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier. Kennedy barely lost the Democratic vice presidential nomination in 1956 and in 1960 secured the party's presidential nomination. He beat Republican Richard M. Nixon, becoming at 43 the youngest man to be elected president. His domestic agenda, the New Frontier, called for tax reform, federal aid to education, medical care for the elderly under Social Security, and the expansion of civil rights. Several of his reforms, though, mired in Congress, and foreign-affairs emergencies occupied much of his time. He was widely derided for his support for the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion (1961) of Cuba. In October 1962 American reconnaissance planes found Soviet missile bases there. In the resulting Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy ordered a blockade of Cuba and demanded the removal of the missiles. After a short and strained interval, the USSR complied with his demands. The United States and the Soviet Union signed a limited treaty prohibiting nuclear tests the next year. Kennedy additionally increased the amount of American military advisers in South Vietnam to around 16,000. He launched the Alliance for Progress to give economic aid to Latin America and established the Peace Corps. He also pushed hard to accomplish racial integration in the South. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. Vice President Lyndon Johnson succeeded him as president. The Warren Commission, selected to examine the assassination, determined that it was the work of a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, depending in part on acoustical evidence, resolved that a conspiracy was "likely" and that it might have involved organized crime.