Kennedy, John F. Administration

John f. kennedy (1917–63), a democrat, was the 35th president of the United States. Elected in 1960 and assassinated three years later, Kennedy was succeeded by his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson. Kennedy was a glamorous and charismatic figure from a large and influential family in Boston, Massachusetts.

Kennedy narrowly won the 1960 presidential race, having defeated the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Kennedy's 1,000-day presidency was dominated by the threat of the Cold War and Communism. Kennedy was determined to advance the American national interest by combating Communism around the world. This led to an escalation of support for the government of South Vietnam and, ultimately, to the full-scale American war in Vietnam.

Kennedy presided during a period when environmental policy and issues were largely state and local level regulatory affairs and pollution controls [Page 981]were managed primarily through nuisance law. As a result, his administration has no direct environmental legacy in policy innovation. Nevertheless, the Gemini and Apollo programs, designed to put a man on the moon in less than a decade, radically reconfigured not only the relationship of science and engineering in the government but resulted in some of the most important transformations of human relationships with the planet.

The development of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), an interdisciplinary science and engineering effort, linked military flight engineering and experimentation. This innovative conglomeration of expertise, funded heavily from federal sources, not only propelled attention to the moon, but also resulted in countless ancillary benefits of innovation in environmental management, materials engineering, and computing. The legacy of the Apollo program in directing science and engineering research and inspiring young people to pursue education in physical and environmental sciences fundamentally changed America.

Less instrumentally, the Gemini and Apollo programs resulted in startling images of the earth as seen from space, images that would help to transform the imagination of people around the world towards seeing the planet not as a boundless and differentiated place, but as a unified and fragile one. This image and others that followed over the next decades are fundamental to the global imaginations of contemporary environmentalism, and are essential even to the founding of “Earth Day,” with its ubiquitous picture of the globe.