Episode 19: John F. Kennedy
Show Notes
Overview
Today’s episode is all about John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States—a vigorous president forever young in our memory because tragedy snatched him too early from our view. Kennedy stands near the top of public rankings of presidential greatness, though professional historians tend to rank him slightly lower, a distinction that captures the way the Kennedy mystique, the Camelot White House, the fashionable president with an even more glamorous wife, retains a hold on our national psyche far beyond what his 1000 days in office produced.
That dichotomy—what the public recalls, and what historians know—underlies today’s discussion of JFK and race. Several of the most momentous, and monstrous, events in modern Civil Rights history occurred on his watch. James Meredith tried to desegregate the University of Mississippi, whose governor unleashed what can only be described as a race riot in response. Freedom Riders promoting voting rights swarmed the South during his presidency, kicking up violent reactions throughout the old Confederacy, and it was while Kennedy was in office that the famed March of Washington led a quarter million Americans to the national mall in a call for equal justice. This was the moment Martin Luther King famously declared, “I have a dream,” reinforcing to Kennedy’s decision, his too slow a decision some might argue, to submit a new Civil Rights bill to Congress during the summer of 1963. The grandchildren of slaves freed by Lincoln, Kennedy told the nation, “are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice.”
So who was JFK? Here’s your primer. Born to wealth and privilege, Kennedy was the second born son of one of the few people to make money during the Great Depression, Joseph Kennedy, Sr. One of the richest men in America, the senior Kennedy wanted nothing more than to see his children—more accurately, his Irish-Catholic children—fully accepted into American society in a way discrimination had never allowed him or earlier generations of families who’d largely come to America fleeing famine in the mid-19th century.
Young John wasn’t destined to be a politician. Sickly and bookish, he expected to be an international lawyer, or more likely, he thought, an historian, but fate had other plans. He became a hero during World War II—and if you haven’t heard that story, please do look it up—and news of his heroics found their way to his older brother, Joseph Kennedy, Jr., stationed in England. Unwilling to be outdone by his younger sibling, Joe Kennedy, Jr., volunteered for a dangerous mission….and never came back, leaving John to bear the full weight of his father’s ambitions.
Elected to Congress in 1946 as part of the great wave of veteran freshmen, young John, or Jack as his friends called him, quickly rose to prominence as a smart, elegant, and handsome young man with a bright future. Marriage to the stunning and stylish Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953 brought even more celebrity and elegance, though not everything was fully rosy in Jack’s life. His health was terrible. Nearly crippled by debilitating back pain and suffering from Addison’s disease, he received last rights from a priest more than once during the 1950s. He rallied back every time; made a half-hearted bid for the vice-president’s slot on the Democratic ticket in 1956, set his eyes on the top prize in 1960, ultimately defeating Richard Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections in American history.
Kennedy entered office determined to revitalize America’s Cold War fight, one he argued had grown tired in Eisenhower’s last years. He supported increased military spending, new flexible means of countering communists around the world, and ultimately nearly lost all of humanity to nuclear holocaust when a crisis with the Soviets over Cuba threatened to spin out of control in 1962. It was the closest to extinction as we’ve ever come, and by 1963 a chastened Kennedy pushed less for competition, than for global cooperation and even disarmament.
Sadly, we will never know how that Kennedy might have turned out. He was struck down by an assassin’s bullet in November, 1963, only a few short miles from our own SMU campus in Dallas. Lyndon Johnson became president in his wake, bringing to power a president who arguably cared more for civil rights than did Kennedy, but also a president more than willing to exploit the memory of a martyred young hero to ensure passage of his own domestic and civil rights agenda. Looking at Kennedy and Civil Rights, one is quickly led to one of the great unknowable debates of American political history: was JFK or LBJ the real author of the rights revolution of the mid-1960s. In truth, it never would have happened without both, and we had a great time interrogating our historian experts this week and next on how they viewed this most elemental questions of American racial politics.
And what great experts we talked to. First, we spoke with our own Dr. Sharron Conrad, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Presidential History, and a voice you’ve been listening to for months now on this podcast. Then we spoke with Peniel Joseph, Professor of Public Affairs and the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values at the University of Texas, author of numerous influential works on African-American and American political history including his latest, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Together these two great conversations boiled down to two critical themes.
Kennedy’s reluctant but growing support for civil rights over the course of his presidency and the activists pushed that transformation
How decolonization in Africa shaped civil rights in Kennedy’s America, placing the Movement in a global, human rights context
Guests:
Dr. Sharron Wilkins Conrad joined the Center for Presidential History in September 2019. Her project examines how perceptions of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights leadership developed, hardened and continue to circulate within the black community. A key aspect of her scholarship focuses on the process by which Kennedy emerged as a civil rights hero for African Americans while Johnson—who fought for and signed into law historic civil rights legislation—has been viewed as being motivated solely by political self-interest.
Sharron received her PhD in Humanities from The University of Texas at Dallas in 2019. She holds a BA in History and Anthropology from Penn State University, and a MA in Public History from Howard University. Previously, she served as Director of Education and Public Programs at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, interpreting the life and legacy of President Kennedy. Her professional career has included appointments at history museums around the country.
Sharron has published articles on African American chefs in the White House, as well as an excerpt from her master’s research on the life and times of Thomas Dorsey, a black caterer in 19th century Philadelphia. Her research has been supported by a Theodore C. Sorensen Research Fellowship from The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, a Moody Research Grant from The Lyndon Johnson Foundation, and a UTD Dean of Graduate Education Dissertation Research Award. In 2017 she was awarded the UTD President’s Teaching Excellence Award.
Follow Dr. Conrad on Twitter.
Dr. Peniel Joseph holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School's Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD). His career focus has been on "Black Power Studies," which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women's and ethnic studies, and political science.
Prior to joining the UT faculty, Dr. Joseph was a professor at Tufts University, where he founded the school's Center for the Study of Race and Democracy to promote engaged research and scholarship focused on the ways issues of race and democracy affect people's lives.
In addition to being a frequent commentator on issues of race, democracy and civil rights, Dr. Joseph's most recent book is The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. He also wrote the award-winning books Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America and Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama. His book Stokely: A Life has been called the definitive biography of Stokely Carmichael, the man who popularized the phrase "black power." Included among Joseph's other book credits is the editing of The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era and Neighborhood Rebels: Black Power at the Local Level.
Follow Dr. Joseph on Twitter.