The 35th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, took the Office in 1961 and served for two years, just derailed when he was assassinated in 1963. Before entering the politics, Kennedy served in Navy. He was a military service commander of the boats PT-109 and PT-59 during World War II in South Pacific. One of the most decorated military commander during the second World War, Kennedy received awards including the World War II Victory Medal.
After two years in military service, in 1946, Kennedy ran for vacated the seat in the strong Democratic 10th Congressional district in Massachusetts. He beat his Republican opponent by a large margin; this, despite not having previously included politics in his career planning and served as a congressional representative for the next six years. After that, he became a U.S. senator for eight years and also ran as a vice-president.
In 1960, Kennedy initiated his campaign for President in the Democratic primary election, where he faced challenges from Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. Kennedy defeated Humphrey in Wisconsin and West Virginia, Morse in Maryland and Oregon, as well as token opposition (often write-in candidates) in New Hampshire, Indiana, and Nebraska. Another Kennedy’s opponent, Lyndon B. Johnson, was asked by Kennedy to ran for vice-president with him and Johnson agreed.
His last opponent was the Republican candidate Richard Nixon, who was a vice-president at that time. In a hard-fought campaign in 1960, Kennedy won the race by just a slight margin. John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th President on January 20, 1961. In his inaugural address he spoke of the need for all Americans to be active citizens, famously saying, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
As one of his first presidential acts, Kennedy asked Congress to create the Peace Corps. His brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver was the first director. Through this program, Americans volunteer to help underdeveloped nations in areas such as education, farming, health care, and construction. The authorization grew to 5,000 members by March 1963 and 10,000 the following year. Since 1961, over 200,000 Americans have joined the Peace Corps, serving in 139 countries.
One of President Kennedy’s heroic act happened during the Cold War. When U.S. failed to overthrow the Cuban regime, Cuban and Soviet governments began to secretly build bases of missiles in Cuba, with the ability to strike most of the continental United States. The confrontation ended on October 28, 1962, when President John F. Kennedy and United Nations Secretary-General U Thant reached a public and secret agreement with the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
Kennedy called his domestic program the "New Frontier". It ambitiously promised federal funding for education, medical care for the elderly, economic aid to rural regions, and government intervention to halt the recession. Kennedy also promised an end to racial discrimination.
In the birth of Space Race in the early 1960’s, U.S. and U.S.S.R. are battling for astronomy and space achievements. In 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space. Kennedy was eager for the U.S. to take the lead in the Space Race for strategic reasons. Kennedy first announced the goal for landing a man on the Moon in the speech to a Joint Session of Congress on May 25, 1961, stating:
"First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.
Kennedy later made a speech at Rice University on 1962, in which he said:
"No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space… We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
Kennedy died in 1963 after his assassination in Texas. Before the 1960’s ended, Apollo 11 astronauts and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed and took the first steps on the moon, being the first persons to land and walk on the surface of the moon.
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