A poll of historians in ranked him 13th out of the 36 presidents included in the survey. Thirteen such polls from to put him, on average, 12th. Richard Neustadt, the prominent presidential scholar, revered Kennedy during his lifetime and was revered by Kennedy in turn. His allure—the romantic, almost mystic, associations his name evokes—not only survives but flourishes. And thus a lyric became the lasting image of his presidency.
White, in his memoirs, recalled the reverence Kennedy had inspired among his friends:. Friends were not the only ones enchanted by the Kennedy mystique. He was becoming a magnetic figure even during his presidency. By the middle of , 59 percent of Americans surveyed claimed that they had voted for him in , although only After his death, his landslide grew to 65 percent. After the assassination, even Robert F.
To this day, about 60 percent of Americans believe that Kennedy fell victim to a conspiracy. Johnson was involved. For many Americans, it stretches credulity to accept that an event so epochal can be explained as the act of a still-mysterious loner. Like all presidents, Kennedy had successes and failures. His administration was dominated by a remarkable number of problems and crises—in Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam; and in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Some of these, he managed adroitly and, at times, courageously. Many, he could not resolve. He was a reserved, pragmatic man who almost never revealed passion. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Bush Bill Clinton George W.
Help inform the discussion Support the Miller Center. University of Virginia Miller Center. Kennedy: Impact and Legacy.
Breadcrumb U. Presidents John F. Kennedy John F. Marc J. More Resources John F. Kennedy Presidency Page. Kennedy Essays Life in Brief. Lyndon Johnson carried Republican Nassau County in that election. That is, I think, one of the oddest ticket-splitting incidents you can come up with. It was the vote for Bobby Kennedy that was tribal, that was their grief, that was their Irishness. What I mean …. He was very young, the two of them. They were of an age, and somehow we just don't think of him that way.
Weren't they? But he didn't have the positive energy. Look, it drove Richard Nixon crazy …. People saw Richard Nixon as a continuation of Eisenhower and if you were going to vote for Richard Nixon, I believe you were voting for him because you liked the direction that Eisenhower was taking the country.
I don't think you were voting for Richard Nixon because he was a young man, even though he was about Kennedy's age. Kennedy came across as the young person, the change agent, the Obama of the time, even though Obama wasn't yet born. Kennedy wasn't. He was a minor figure in the Senate, in many ways.
So I think this whole idea of youth, of change was very much at the center of the public's attraction to him. Republicans and had supported Eisenhower, and Eisenhower appointed most of the judges in the South that gave us favorable decisions in the '54 Supreme Court. This all gets into the question of Kennedy was for change, people saw that. Change to what? And this is tricky, because it's very hard to understand today because of everything that's happened over 50 years, that the Kennedy family and John F.
Kennedy in particular in were not all about liberalism as we understand it today. Nor was the Democratic Party necessarily, which included the South as an irremovable part of its coalition. Let me share an unpleasant story, but one that's strong in my memory.
I grew up in New Orleans. When President Kennedy was killed, we were in gym class. So we were little kids, I was in 4 th grade. The point I'm making is -- no adult filter yet -- we were in the locker room and we heard the news, and everybody cheered.
I'm not kidding. The reason they cheered was that he had recently proposed the Civil Rights Act, which in my world of a segregated white school in the South, people knew as an existential threat to everything about our way of life. President Kennedy had to be kind of pulled into this by the movement, by events, by aides. Harris Wofford, who was mentioned earlier, I remember interviewing him years ago and he told me this sort of surreal story.
He's standing on a corner on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington — Washington was simpler then — between election day and inauguration day and JFK sort of glides by in a convertible and pulls over and says, "Harris, get in the car.
Just give me the things I have to do. So it's an interesting story, which Wofford told me with admiration, but it's not like Kennedy said, "Okay, I've been elected.
I'm having a summit meeting with all the TV cameras blazing just to plan how this is going to be the centerpiece of my administration. Robert Kennedy sketches out for the New York Times what the domestic agenda would be for for the Kennedy administration. He doesn't mention civil rights. It's the street that changes it.
It's a fantastic story. And the beauty of Kennedy's leadership is his response. But in , after the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil rights was not on his agenda for the domestic policy of the next year.
This is the civil rights movement. Freedom Riders are going South and this is about the bus burning. Let's watch it. Ambassador, how did you feel about John Kennedy in that period?
You were very young then. By that time, I guess, my third child had been born. So the SCLC group was 30 to These were 18 to 25, and we frankly thought it was an unnecessary and unreasonable risk. King had not yet recovered from the trauma of his jailing, and the students turned on him because he refused to go. Now, a couple of years later, we did go to Birmingham, which was just as bad, if not worse.
I think the students had a different strategy. They were trying to come off the college campuses and get into the rural South. They saw this as a perfect opportunity to get into Mississippi.
I was already in Mississippi training people to register to vote. We had a literacy program, training leaders to teach their neighbors to register to vote. But our nonviolent confrontation was to send these local people to see their sheriff and explain to their sheriff what they were doing, show him the literature, to invite him to come to the meetings.
And we were not into confrontation for confrontation's sake and that was not true of the students at that time. King got on the phone with Robert Kennedy, and they spent a lot of time talking to each other.
There was a trust, but I think Dr. King understood the President's political situation, so he was not making demands or threats. But we knew that President Kennedy was born and raised in Boston.
He hardly knew any black people, so this was a completely new experience for him. He used to say that politics can unseat you, but foreign policy can kill you. However, his greatest strength -- getting back to Tim's point -- was change and was the fact that when he came to the office, he did not know where he was going to go exactly. I love the anecdote that Arthur Schlesinger told me. Bobby Kennedy, after the election, said to him, "Arthur, how would you like to be an ambassador?
What will I be doing there? Now, on civil rights, he moved, he came. In '63, when he went before the Congress, or went before the country to put that civil rights bill before the Congress, he was taking — he and Bobby believed this — a huge risk of not being reelected. They had won that election by a very narrow margin, , votes.
They needed those Southern votes. But they felt this was something that had to be done. It was time. Because he spoke to some people and said, "These Southerners say they'll change, they'll do things. They never will and we have to act. When federal troops were sent by President U. Grant to essentially stop the South from misbehaving in some of the ways we've been discussing, there was a meeting at Faneuil Hall in Boston where all the leading liberals of the day who had been abolitionists got up to condemn this unpardonable use of federal power.
In , the federal government removed troops from the South. Everybody of Kennedy's generation, and even some of our generation, was raised on the idea that Reconstruction — meaning federal troops in the South to enforce the 14 th and 15 th Amendments — had been an utter failure. One chapter in Profiles in Courage , by John F. Kennedy, was lionizing one of the people who helped overthrow Reconstruction, Senator L. So everybody who was actively in politics and trying to get elected who was white, including Republicans, thought that's where you can never, ever go; it's impossible.
We don't get how impossible it felt to all of them, including Franklin Roosevelt, by the way. And that has to be in your head as you're trying to understand how this unfolds in real time.
I spent a long afternoon with him in Chicago and he said, "You know why the kids got the fire hoses? Because we staged that, we knew that would change the nation's mind.
It was a tough decision, because we knew if we put the kids there, they'd get attacked but we did it anyway. Bevel did …. But the hoses came out when Dr. King was arrested. And they were not organized students that we had brought down there. It just happened to be the people … It was on Good Friday, so it was a holiday and there were lots of people in the park.
Now, as bad as that looked, I don't think anybody got hurt but Fred Shuttlesworth, because he stood directly in front of the six fire hoses, they rolled him down the street. I got behind a tree, and I got wet, but we got back into the church.
It was an awful public display, but it really wasn't nearly in the category of the kind of thing that happened on the Freedom Rides. But now, in the President's favor, he was working behind the scenes the whole while we were in Birmingham. My job was to go to the Episcopal Church and meet with the business leaders. He had regular meetings with business leaders of the national chains, trying to get them to lean on their local people.
The amazing thing is that we settled that in that church. They took down all the signs, they stopped segregation at the lunch counters. They said they didn't have black people qualified to work as salespersons and we said, "Look, the maids you've got in the department stores know more about the shops than the clerks do. Ask your wives who they ask for when they want to find something in the shop.
But it was the combination of what was going on in the street. But there was a continuous wave of private pressure that the White House then was very, very good at. There was some fear that the summer would be very violent in some cities. And the sense was -- and even Dr. King felt this -- that you could keep making the argument of nonviolence if you showed progress.
But when people started to get frustrated and they weren't seeing progress, at some point Dr. King's message was going to be less powerful and there was a real fear that the summer of '63, if you didn't show some progress in Washington, it might be a very violent one.
I mean, obviously, the great speech of '63 is the "I Have a Dream" speech, but I remember listening to Kennedy's speech. Actually, I remember it more than listening to Dr. King's speech, when he talks about "This is a question as old as the Scriptures. It's a speech about denial, because he says something in that speech, and I can't quote the exact words, but it would catch the imagination of somebody who was 11 years old.
He says, "Until you're willing to change your racial identity, until you're willing to exchange the color of your skin with black citizens in the country, you have to admit that we have a problem. You're denying the truth unless you're willing to do that. This was President Kennedy's bill, you have to do this, and he identified himself with the issue with words. Goldbugs were screaming about inflation for years. Most Popular. Black Republicans who share strongly conservative views can paradoxically appeal to white racists as exceptions that prove their so-called rules.
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