JFK Growth Under Fire

John F. Kennedy is a president often remembered for his charisma, his family, his poor health, his affairs, and his tragic assassination in 1963. Yet the 1,036 days he was president witnessed the most dramatic episodes of the Cold War: confrontations with Nikita Khrushchev over Berlin and Cuba. Kennedy's surprising decision to negotiate a settlement in the Cuban Missile Crisis was condemned by his own generals, but was a model of diplomacy admired globally. Kennedy controversially ramped up American military involvement in Vietnam, setting the stage for America's most humiliating military defeat. Why did he do it? He also battled Southern Democrats on segregation, and established the foundation for landmark voting rights legislation signed into law by the Johnson Administration. He established a dangerous precedent by investigating executives of Big Steel after they announced a price hike. Kennedy's approach, for better and worse, is important to study today-more than sixty years later. Research for Rethinking JFK includes data from the archives of the Kennedy Library, much of it classified until decades after Kennedy's death. Important new information was also made available after Russian Glasnost in the 1990s.