Kennedy, John (Administration)

WHEN JOHN FITZGERALD Kennedy was inaugurated as the country's 35th president, the United States was entangled in a struggle of epic proportions with the Soviet Union. Just three years before Kennedy took office the Soviets had taken the lead in the space race with the launch and orbit of satellite Sputnik. The early years of the Cold War gripped the world with concern as the two superpowers and their respective allies positioned themselves to confront the terror of nuclear holocaust and hopefully to avoid it. There is no question that Kennedy inherited a host of international problems when he took office. Indeed his presidency is noted primarily for the many international situations that occurred during his nearly three years in office. Among them were the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs debacle, and the successful nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets.

Despite the need for Kennedy to continually stay on top of international concerns, he was a president who spoke passionately about domestic issues and the rights of man, which he believed should come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God. In his inaugural address, he made it clear that his generation of Americans was “unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”

Kennedy made it clear in his inaugural address that his concern for freedom and an end to poverty was not just a domestic issue but global in reach: “To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required … because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”

Kennedy continued his address with an introduction to a planned initiative in Latin America “to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty… and to join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas.” This pronouncement was an overture to what eventually became the Alliance for Progress, a very successful joint effort involving the United States and the Latin American countries.

Although he did not mention the Soviets by name in his address, he did refer to “both sides” in his invitation to work together to eradicate disease, conquer the deserts, encourage the arts and commerce, and “heed in [Page 611]all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah—to ‘undo the heavy burden [and] let the oppressed go free.'” He called for a united struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war.

The most remembered statement in Kennedy's inaugural address is, of course, a call to Americans to ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country. Not as well remembered, perhaps, is his next sentence: “My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America can do for you but what together we can do for the freedom of man.”

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