DID YOU KNOW?
John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline wedding on September 12, 1953
country. Already his campaign for the 1960 nomination had begun. He made his 1958 race for reelection to the Senate a test of his popularity in Massachusetts. His margin of victory was 874,608 votes; the largest ever in Massachusetts politics, and the greatest of any senatorial candidate that year.
In January 1960 John F. Kennedy formally announced his presidential candidacy. Nominated on the first ballot, he balanced the Democratic ticket by choosing Johnson as his running mate. In his acceptance speech, Kennedy declared, “We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier.” Kennedy won the general election, narrowly defeating the Republican candidate, Vice Pres. Richard M. Nixon, by a margin of less than 120,000 out of some 70,000,000 votes cast. A major factor in the campaign was a unique series of four televised debates between the two men; an estimated 85–120 million Americans watched one or more of the debates. Both men showed a firm grasp of the issues, but Kennedy’s poise in front of the camera, with his Harvard accent, and his good looks (in contrast to Nixon’s “five o’clock shadow”) convinced many viewers that he had won the debate. His administration lasted 1,037 days.
In October 1962 a buildup of Soviet short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles were discovered in Cuba. Kennedy demanded that the missiles be dismantled; he ordered a “quarantine” of Cuba—in effect, a blockade that would stop Soviet ships from reaching that island. For 13 days nuclear war seemed near; then the Soviet premier announced
that the offensive weapons would be withdrawn.
Ten months later Kennedy scored his greatest foreign triumph when Khrushchev and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Great Britain joined him in signing the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. But his two most cherished projects, massive income tax cuts and a sweeping civil rights measure, were not passed until after his death.
In May 1961 Kennedy committed the United States to land a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, and, while he would not live to see this achievement either, his advocacy of the space program contributed to the successful launch of the first American manned spaceflights.
He was an immensely popular president, at home and abroad. His wife joined him as an advocate for American culture. Their two young children, Caroline Bouvier and John F., Jr. (John-John), were familiar throughout the country. Joseph Kennedy, meanwhile, had been incapacitated in Hyannis Port by a stroke, but the other Kennedys were in and out of Washington. Robert Kennedy, as John’s attorney general, was the second most powerful man in