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'''John Fitzgerald Kennedy''', often called '''JFK''', (May 29, 1917 - November 22, 1963) was the 35th [[President of the United States of America]], serving for 1036 days in 1961-63. He was the youngest person elected president ([[Theodore Roosevelt ]] being the youngest to assume the office) and one of the most glamorous and popular. His record of presidential accomplishments remains a subject of debate among historians and the public, but after his assassination he became a legendary figure in whom admirers saw the ideals of American mythology incarnated.
The [[Kennedy Family]] had long been leaders of the Irish Catholic wing of the [[Democratic Party]]; Kennedy was middle-of-the-road on domestic issues and conservative on foreign policy, sending military forces into Cuba and Vietnam. In Congress the [[Conservative Coalition]] blocked nearly all of his domestic programs, so there were few changes in domestic policy, even as the civil rights movement gained strength.
When Adlai Stevenson allowed the delegates to choose the vice-presidential nominee in 1956, Kennedy sought the position but was narrowly defeated by Stevenson's two-time primary rival, liberal Senator [[Estes Kefauver]] of [[Tennessee]].
By 1960, JFK Kennedy was the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination to face [[Richard M. Nixon]], with the biggest question mark whether his Catholic base of support would be outweighed by anti-Catholicism of the sort that hurt [[Al Smith]] in the 1928 race against [[Herbert Hoover]]. Prohibition was no longer an issue, and fear of Tammany-like bossism had faded away with the demise of most big city machines. The Kennedy juggernaut defeated rival [[Hubert Humphrey]], a fellow liberal, in the West Virginia primary, a state with so much poverty and so few Catholics that party leaders were convinced they had a winner. Kennedy won over the party’s intellectuals by his effective academic connections, while shaming doubters by a brilliant performance before the Protestant ministers of Houston. There he enunciated the position that he did not speak for the Catholic Church on matters of religion, and it did not speak for him on public affairs. He was able to take that position because there were no high intensity moral issue such as abortion at that time.
Although Kennedy’s religiosity consisted of nominal attendance at Sunday Mass, he excited tens of millions of Catholics who saw his election as president as confirmation of their full recognition as true Americans. With 8 of 10 Catholics voting for Kennedy, he ran up majorities in ethnic strongholds like Chicago that provided the narrow margin of victory against Richard Nixon. Apart from a few pockets of anti-popery among some Midwestern Lutherans and Southern Baptists, fears of Catholicism largely disappeared from the voting booth after 1960, and Kennedy gets credit for bringing Catholics into the American political mainstream.
*[[Gallery of American Heroes]]
*[[John F. Kennedy, Jr.]]
*[[JFK Assassination Records]]
== External links ==
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