The grace and vigorous youth of John Kennedy and his beautiful wife Jacqueline, coupled with his assassination in November 1963, have tended to obscure the actual directions of his presidential policies. The brilliant group of intellectuals and artists who surrounded the presidential couple began immediately to create a legend of his foreshortened administration, a legend based upon King Arthur’s Camelot, the legend of "one brief shining hour." The facts of the matter were much more complex, Kennedy entered his presidency with a set of rather liberal domestic goals and aggressive international aims. The congressional alliance between conservative Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans that had been forged in the 1930s was sufficient to frustrate his domestic policies, and, at the time of his assassination, the conflict between Congress and the president had reached the point where several governmental departments and programs were paralyzed for lack of funding.

Matters were quite different in the area of international policy. Some historians have characterized Kennedy as naturally impatient and aggressive. His administration began with the ill-fated CIA-directed invasion of Cuba that had been planned by the Eisenhower administration. It ended with American troops already involved in a Vietnamese civil war, an involvement that would eventually polarize the nation and increase public distrust of the country’s military and civil leaders.

John Kennedy’s Inaugural Address, following Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address by only three weeks, demonstrated that the former president’s apprehensions had scarcely affected his successor. Although couched in superb rhetoric, Kennedy’s intentions were quite clear. The United States would no longer concern itself only with regions of vital national interest, but would oppose the Soviet Union throughout the world. The United States would not tolerate Soviet influence in the Western hemisphere, and it would support with arms and aid any Third World nations that chose to side with the Western Bloc. Finally, and perhaps most important, Kennedy proposed to open competition with the Soviet Union in the extremely costly area of high technology. This proposition took shape shortly after, when he announced that the United States would summon its energies in a program to place a man on the moon before the end of the decade.

This program called into being new industries and absorbed an even greater share of the nation’s scientific and engineering talent in governmental projects. The military-industrial-scientific complex against which Eisenhower had warned the American people grew even greater and more influential in the councils of the nation. John Kennedy’s assassination altered the situation only slightly. His successor, Lyndon Johnson, was able to use his own political acumen and the aura that quickly sprang up around the memory of Kennedy to gain congressional passage of sweeping domestic reforms. But Johnson too was of an aggressive disposition, and he pursued a policy of greatly increased American political involvement in the Vietnamese conflict. The stakes and cost of the Cold War were raised once again.

What did John Kennedy believe to be the national goals of the United States? What did he promise the opponents of the United States? What did he promise its friends? How successful did he believe that a policy of negotiation between the United States and the Soviet Union might be? What did he ask of the American people?