Kennedy, John F.

RFK's continuing relevance and the meaning of his legacy since 1968.

Diplomatic History, 1993

2018

Medium, 2018

I am adding a collection of essays I wrote about the 35th President, John F. Kennedy. I started with Kennedy's rise to prominence as a World War II hero when the Japanese attacked his PT 109 boat, which launched his political career. Most of the articles focus on his presidential campaign and his presidency, his actions toward civil rights and the Soviet Union, and communism. I first wrote on this day in history about Kennedy's assassination for the History News Network in November 2010, the 47th anniversary. Then in 2013, I wrote for Examiner about the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's speech calling for Civil Rights legislation and an article that has gone through three incarnations.

International Journal: Canada's Journal of Global Policy Analysis

remains a vivid presence in the popular imagination almost 60 years after his assassination, yet we have had to wait until now for the first installment of a comprehensive biography, drawing on the rich holdings of the Kennedy Library in Boston, many of them only recently released. The first efforts at biography, by his aides Arthur Schlesinger Jr and Theodore Sorensen, were published within a few years of his death and cast his life in a roseate hue. But a reaction was inevitable, and 25 years later the revisionist tide crested in Thomas C. Reeves's 1991 A Question of Character, which depicted the thirty-fifth president as a pathological philanderer and monster of narcissism. With this volume, Fredrik Logevall goes beyond the sterile debate between keepers of the flame and debunkers, offering a dispassionate, thoroughly documented account of Kennedy's ascent to national prominence, set against the background of America's emergence as a world power and the tumult of the early Cold War. Logevall begins with a richly textured portrait of the wealthy, close-knit Boston Irish family that nurtured Kennedy-above all, his demanding father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr The elder Kennedy was a self-made and astute businessman who preserved his fortune by liquidating his assets on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash, and an ardent Democrat. Appointed by Franklin Roosevelt as Ambassador to the Court of Saint James, he proved an indefatigable isolationist and indeed an appeaser until the outbreak of the Second World War, and thereafter a standard-bearer for isolationist Democrats who hoped he would challenge FDR's renomination in 1940 and keep the United States out of the conflict.

Analysis of John F. Kennedy's leadership style through International Relations methodologies for Foreign Policy Analysis.

2019

This book is 480 pages proving that the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff plotted to kill JFK based on some 50 years of dedicated research by many authors and declassified files. It is about the continuation of CIA’s political warfare and the assassination operations and CIA working with the North American mafia. It is an edition as of Nov. 2019.

New England Journal of Public Policy, 1993

think that of all twentieth-century American presidents, John F. Kennedy is consideredby Europeans at leastto be the most Eurocentric in his sympathies and political orientation. In the days ahead we shall be reexamining the history of the Kennedy administration in relation to Europe, but before we do, I think it might help to know the true genesis of JFK's personal attitudes towards Europe, so that we may better understand his eventual role in the history of the early 1960s: culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis and his anti-Communist speech in Berlin in June 1963, as well as the Limited Test Ban treaty of the following month. As Mikhail Gorbachev recently remarked when addressing faculty and students at Harvard University, it was hard even for a Russian Communist in the early 1960s not to warm to the image of John F. Kennedy, to admire his social conscience, his idealism, and his youthful charisma. 1 That in itself is an extraordinary testimonial. Yet I wonder, candidly, whether there has ever been, in European history, a case quite like Kennedy's, where the fatherwho held the post of United States Ambassador to Britain at the time of Munichshould have become so universally detested as an appeaser, yet the son become so acclaimed as a crusading U.S. president, determined to defend Western European democracy at any price, only two decades later. JFK, in his brief life, never did outgrow some of the grotesque attitudes of his father (causing European secret services many a headache), but by and large JFK moved so far away from his father's notorious World War II isolationism that I am often amazed at the paucity of historical attention paid to JFK's early years, in particular the failure of biographers and historians to chart the painful journey JFK was required to make in order to free himself from the stigma and the attitudes of a parent whom Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., characterized as "one of the most evil and disgusting men I have ever known." 2 Yet without understanding the nature and direction of that early voyage, I do not think we can ever do justice to the achievement of

There are certain dates in history which are embedded in the hearts and minds of a particular nation-in the case of the United States of America, these include the bombing of Pearl Harbour on 7th December 1941; the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on 11th September 2001; and on Friday 22nd November 1963 when John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States of America was assassinated as he rode in his open-top dark blue Lincoln Continental convertible through the streets of downtown Dallas. As well as the shattering impact upon the President's family, the nation, and the world, the assassination of President Kennedy also heavily impacted the media coverage of the event, particularly television, which sort of came of age during those four tragic days in November 1963. Before discussing the media coverage of the assassination, a brief synopsis is necessary to explain just why President Kennedy had decided to travel to Texas, despite being warned against doing so by his ambassador to the United Nations, Aldai Stevenson and, among others, his press Secretary, Pierre Sallinger. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic and youngest elected president, was one of the most charismatic men to occupy the White House and together with his attractive wife, Jacqueline, brought more than just a touch of glamour to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. On the morning of Thursday 21st November 1963, the President and the First Lady departed the White House ahead of their planned fourday journey to the state of Texas, a trip which was more or less considered as the beginning of his campaign for re-election as president in the 1964 election. Flying from the White House by helicopter to Andrews Air Force Base, from where the glamorous couple would travel to San Antonio, they were joined by their son, John Jr, who would celebrate his third birthday the following Monday, 25th November, with Mrs Kennedy having planned a party of the youngest of the Kennedy clan. John loved flying and so his parents decided that he could come with him on the helicopter ride from the White House to Andrews, while his older sister, Caroline-who would herself celebrate her sixth birthday two days after her brother on 27th Novemberwent to school in the morning in the White House. When the helicopter landed at Andrews, and John realised that he would not be accompanying his parents on Air Force One, the presidential aircraft, he began to sob uncontrollably. Seeing his tearful son, just before he boarded the plane, President Kennedy turned to Secret Service agent, Bob Foster, who had full responsibility for the protection of the Kennedy children, asking him to take special care of John before his scheduled return to Washington on Sunday, this was the first time Agent Foster recalled the President ever making such a request. Accompanying the President and the First Lady abroad the presidential plane included the President's personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln; his de facto chief of staff, Kenneth O'Donnell; his appointments secretary (and court jester), David Powers; his principal political strategist, Lawrence F. O'Brien; along with several members of the First Lady's personal staff including Mary Gallagher, her private secretary, and Pamela Turnure, along with numerous Secret Service agents, including