John F. Kennedy became President when civil rights suddenly became a burning issue throughout the Nation.

At Kennedy’s request, dozen of law firms sent lawyers South, so civil rights demonstrators would not lack  counsel.

Prominent blacks such as Thurgood Marshall, Robert C. Weaver and George L.L. Weaver were appointed, respectively, to the Supreme Court, the Housing and House Finance Agency and the office of Assistant Secretary of Labor.

But Kennedy was highly reluctant to push for a civil rights bill addressing the overall issues of racial discrimination.

The reason: Most of the chairman of House and Senate committees were deeply conservative racists–whether Republican or Democrat.  They decided whether Kennedy’s foreign policy initiatives would be approved or opposed–especialy his bills for increased foreign aid.

Kennedy believed he could not offend such men without jeopardizing the legacy he wanted to achieve in foreign policy.

This timidity, in turn, led many prominent blacks–such as Martin Luther King and Malcom X–to believe they would see no innovative moves on Kennedy’s part.

But events forced Kennedy’s hand.

On September 30, 1962, the President sent deputy U.S. marshals and National Guardsmen into Mississippi to restore order.  Rioting had erupted when, by federal court order, James Meredith, a black, was enrolled  at the state university.

Kennedy’s problems in winning support for his civil rights program arose in the folkways of the Nation.  When laws run counter to a nation’s folkways, the laws lose.

In backing the admission of Meredith, the President chose an incident which would set off shockwaves for black rights.

Kennedy held mixed emotions about the demand for civil rights by blacks.  On one hand, as an Irish Catholic, he grew up with stories about longtime discrimination against his ancestors (such as the “No Irish Need Apply” signs posted by numerous employers).

On the other hand, he had been born into a world of power and wealth, and he had to grope his way toward understanding the problems of the oppressed.

Another major confrontation broke out between Kennedy and the forces of segregation on June 11, 1963.  Alabama Governor George C. Wallace personally blocked the entrance of two black pupils to the University of Tuscaloosa.

The President, watching on TV, federalized the Alabama National Guard, which Wallace had used to ring the school.  Wallace withdrew and the students were admitted and enrolled.

That same day, Kennedy addressed the nation on the need for genuine equality for all Americans: “The question is whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”

JFK addresses the nation on civil rights

And he called on Congress to pass his civil rights bill, which had been stalled by the legislators.

On August 28, 1963, 200,000 civil rights demonstrators flooded Washington, D.C., for a massive rally.

Fearing that violence would erupt–embarrassing his administration and setting back the cause of civil rights–Kennedy had sought to persuade Dr. Martin Luther King, the march’s chief figure, to cancel the proposed march..

But King and his fellow organizers were determined to go through with it.  They had, they said, waited too long for justice to be satisfied with anything less.

The dignity and peacefulness of the rally–and, most especially, King’s soaring “I Have a Dream” speech–won tremendous sympathy throughout the cuntry.  Kennedy met with civil rights leaders afterward to offer his support.

Martin Luther King during the March on Washington

But Kennedy’s civil rights bill remained stalled in Congress until 1964.   President Lyndon B. Johnson used the assassinated Kennedy’s new status as a martyr to gain enough support for its passage.

Meanwhile, on yet another front, the Kennedy administration was waging an unprecedented war against organized crime.

This was primarily the work of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.  As chief counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations during the late 1950s, he had interrogated hundreds of mobsters who had been summoned by subpoena.

And he had learned, firsthand, how ineffective the FBI and Justice Department were at bringing such powerful criminals to justice.

Upon taking office as Attorney General, he greatly expanded the number of attorneys assigned to the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Section.  And, more important, he used his status as brother to the President to jawbone FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover into attacking the Mob.

The FBI installed illegal microphones in Mob hangouts throughout the country and started building cases against such mobsters as Sam Giancana, Santos Trafficante and Carlos Marcello.

The administration’s attack on the Mob has led some historians to believe the assassination of President Kennedy was Mob-orchestrated.

The reasons:

• Joseph P. Kennedy, the family patriarch, solicited Mob money and influence for his son’s 1960 Presidential campaign.
• Through singer Frank Sinatra, the elder Kennedy assurred Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana that the mob would get a free ride if his son were elected President.
• The CIA, seeking any way to topple Fidel Castro, enlisted the Mafia to assassinate him.
• But Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, ignored the Mob’s “contributions” and pressed his war against the syndicates
• As a result, mobsters felt betrayed and lusted for vengeance.

By October, 1962, the Soviet Union had sent more than 40,000 soldiers, 1,300 field pieces, 700 anti-aircraft guns, 350 tanks and 150 jets to Cuba to deter another invasion.

Nikita Khrushchev, the premier of the Soviet Union, also began supplying Castro with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles–whose discovery, on October 15, 1962, ignited the single most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War.

John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis

On October 16, Kennedy was shown photographs of nuclear missile sites under construction on the island.  The pictures had been taken by a high-altitude U-2 spy plane.

Suddenly, the two most powerful nuclear countries–the United States and the Soviet Union–found themselves on the brink of nuclear war.

At the time, Kennedy officials claimed they couldn’t understand why Khrushchev had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. “Maybe Khrushchev’s gone mad” was a typical musing.

None of these officials admitted that JFK had been waging a no-holds-barred campaign to overthrow the Cuban government and assassinate its leader.

On October 16, the next day, President Kennedy was informed of the missile installations. He immediately convened a group of his 12 most important advisors, which became known as Ex-Comm, for Executive Committee.

Then followed seven days of guarded and intense debate by Kennedy and his advisors. Some of the participants-–such as Air Force General Curtis LeMay-–urged an all-out air strike against the missile sites.

Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General (and the President’s brother) opposed initial calls for an air strike.

It would be, he said, “a Pearl Harbor in reverse.”  And, he added: “I don’t want my brother to go down in history as the Tojo of the 1960s.”

Robert F. and John F. Kennedy

Others-–such as Adlai Stevenson, the United States delegate to the United Nations–urged a reliance on quiet diplomacy.

It was Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara who suggested a middle course: A naval blockade–-a “quarantine” in Kennedy’s softened term–around Cuba. This would hopefully prevent the arrival of more Soviet offensive weapons on the island.

The President insisted that the missiles had to go–by peaceful means, if possible, but through the use of military force if necessary.

Kennedy finally settled on a maval blockade of Cuba.  This would prevent additional missiles from coming in and give Khrushchev time to negotiate and save face.

On October 22, President Kennedy appeared on nationwide TV to denounce the presence of Russian nuclealr missiles in Cuba.

He demanded their withdrawal, and warned that any missile launched against any nation in the Western hemisphere would be answered with “a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

Kennedy ordered American military readiness raised to a level of Defcom-2–the step just short of total war.

The United States had about 27,000 nuclear weapons; the Soviets had about 3,000. In a first salvo of a nuclear exchange, the United States could have launched about 3,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviets about 250.

Nuclear missile in silo

On October 28, Khrushchev announced that the missile sites would be destroyed and the missiles crated and shipped back to the Soiet Union.

In return, Kennedy gave his promise–publicly–to lift the blockade and not invade Cuba

Privately, he also promised to remove obsolte Jupiter II nuclear missiles from Turkey, which bordered the Soviet Union.  Those missiles were, in effect, the American version of the Russian missiles that had been shipped to Cuba.

The world escaped nuclear disaster by a hair’s-breath.

Khrushchev didn’t know that Kennedy had intended to order a full-scale invasion of Cuba in just another 24 hours if an agreement couldn’t be reached.

And Kennedy and his military advisors didn’t know that Russian soldiers defending Cuba had been armed with tactical nuclear weapons.

If warfare of any type had broken out, the temptation to go nuclear would have been overwhelming.

The Cuban Missile Crisis marked the only time the world came to the brink of nuclear war.

To those on the Right, it was a sell-out: Kennedy had refused to “take out” Castro when he had the chance to do so.  Thus, he had allowed Cuba to remain a Communist bastion only 90 miles from Florida.

To those on the Left, it was a needless confrontation that risked the destruction of humanity.

For Kennedy, forcing the Soviets to remove their misssiles from Cuba re-won the confidence he had lost among so many Americans following the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

It also brought him face-to-face with the brutal truth that a miscalculation during a nuclear crisis could destroy all life on the planet.

He felt he could now move–cautiously–toward better relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Ironically, the crisis had the same effects on Khrushchev–who had witnessed the horrors of Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and the subsequent loss of at least 22 million Soviet citizens–most of them civilians.

Slowly and carefully, Kennedy and Khrushchev negotiated the details of what would become the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere.

Underground tests would still continue, but the amounts of deadly strontonium-90 radiation polluting the atmosphere would be vastly reduced.

The treaty was signed between the United States and the Soviet Union on July 25, 1963.

Kennedy considered it his greatest achievement as President, saying in a speech: “According to a Chinese proverb, a jouney of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  My fellow Americans, let us take that first step.”

November 22, 2013, will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

It’s one of those infamous dates that its eyewitnesses will never forget–in a class with

• December 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor),
• April 12, 1945 (the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and
• September 11, 2001 (Al Qaeda’s attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center).

Some have called the Kennedy adminsitration a golden era in American history.

A time when touch football, lively White House parties, stimulus to the arts and the antics of the President’s children became national obsessions.

Others have called the Kennedy Presidency a monument to the unchecked power of wealth and ambition.  An administration staffed by young novices playing at statesmen, riddled with nepotism, and whose legacy includes the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam war and the world’s first nuclear confrontation.

While Americans continue to disagree about the legacy of JFK, there is no disagreement that his Presidency came to a sudden and shocking end just two years, ten months and two days after it had all begun.

The opening days of the Kennedy Presidency raised hopes for a dramatic change in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

But detente was not possible then.  The Russians had not yet experienced their coming agricultural problems and the setback in Cuba during the Missile Crisis.  And the United States had not suffered reversals in Vietnam.

Kennedy’s first brush with international Communism came on April 17, 1961, with the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.  This operation had been planned and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency during the final months of the Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

About 1,400 Cuban exiles were to be landed on the island to overthrow the Communist government of Fidel Castro. They were supposed to head into the mountains–as Castro himself had done against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1956–and raise the cry of revolution.

The U.S. Navy would supply transport after an American air strike had knocked out the Cuban air force.  But the airstrike failed and Kennedy, under the pressure of world opinion, called off a second try.

Even so, the invasion went ahead.  When the invaders surged onto the beaches, they found Castro’s army waiting for them.  Many of the invaders were killed on the spot.  Others were captured–to be ransomed by the United States in December, 1962, in return for medical supplies.

It was a major public relations setback for the newly-installed Kennedy administration, which has raised hopes for a change in American-Soviet relations.

Kennedy, trying to abort widespread criticism, publicly took the blame for the setback:  “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.  Further statements, detailed discussions, are not to conceal responsibility because I’m the responsible officer of the Government.”

The Bay of Pigs convinced Kennedy that he had been misled by the CIA and the Joint Chieifs of Staff.  Out of this came his decision that, from now on, he would rely more heavily on the counsel of his brother, Robert, whom he had installed as Attorney General.

Another consequence of the failed Cuban invasion: It convinced Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev that Kennedy was weak.

Khrushchev told an associate that he could understand if Kennedy had not decided to invade Cuba.  But once he did, Kennedy should have gone all the way and wiped out Castro.

Khrushchev attributed this to Kennedy’s youth, inexperience and timidity–and believed he could bully the President.

On June 4, 1961, Kennedy met with Khrushchev in Vienna to discuss world tensions.  Khrushchev threatened to go to nuclear war over the American presence in West Berlin–the dividing line between Western Europe, protected by the United States, and Eastern Europe, controlled by the Soviet Union.

Kennedy, who prized rationality above all else, was shaken by Knhrushchev’s unexpected rage.  Emerging from the conference, he told an associate: “It’s going to be a cold winter.”

Meanwhile, East Berliners felt the door was about to slam on their access to West Berlin, and a flood of 3,000 refugees daily poured into West Germany.

Khrushchev was clearly embarrassed at this clear showing of the unpopularity of the Communist regime. In August, he orderd that a concrete wall–backed up by barbed wire, searchlights and armed guards–be erected to seal off East Berlin.

That same year, when tensions mounted and a Soviet invasion of West Berlin seemed likely, Kennedy sent additional troops to the city in a massive demonstration of American will.

Two years later, in June, 1963, during a 10-day tour of Europe, Kennedy visited Berlin to deliver his “I am a Berlinner” speech to a frenzied crowd of thousands.

JFK adddresses crowds at the Berlin Wall

Standing within gunshot of the Berlin wall, he lashed out at the Soviet Union and praised the citizens of West Berlin for being “on the front lines of freedom” for more than 20 years.

“All free men, wherever they may live,” said Kennedy, “are citizens of Berlin.  And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich ben ein Berlinner.'”