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 Southern racists–whether Republican or Democrat. They decided whether Kennedy’s foreign policy initiatives would be approved or opposed–especially 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 country. 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 (1957–59), he had interrogated about 800 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. The FBI had long steered clear of organized crime investigations, largely because its director, J. Edgar Hoover, feared corruption of his agents.

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 assured 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, Nikita Khrushchev, premier of the Soviet Union, had supplied Cuba with more than 40,000 soldiers, 1,300 field pieces, 700 anti-aircraft guns, 350 tanks and 150 jets.

The motive: To deter another invasion.

Khrushchev also began supplying Castro with nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.

Their discovery, in October, 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 on the previous day by a high-altitude U-2 spy plane.

Suddenly, the two most powerful nuclear countries—the United States and the Soviet Union—appeared on the brink of nuclear war.

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

The Kennedy administration never admitted that JFK had been waging a no-holds-barred campaign to overthrow the Cuban government and assassinate its leader.

Kennedy convened a group of his 12 most important advisers, which became known as Ex-Comm, for Executive Committee.

For seven days, Kennedy and his advisers intensely and privately debated their options. 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 by the use of military force if necessary.

Kennedy finally settled on a naval 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 nuclear 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 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 Soviet Union.

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

Privately, he also promised to remove obsolete 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.

The Right attacked Kennedy for refusing to destroy Castro, thus allowing Cuba to remain a Communist bastion only 90 miles from Florida.

The Left believed it was a needless confrontation that risked the destruction of humanity.

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

It also made him face the brutal truth that a miscalculation during a nuclear crisis could destroy all life on Earth.

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.

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 continue, but the amounts of deadly strontium-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 journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. My fellow Americans, let us take that first step.”

During the 1960 Presidential campaign, then-Senator John F. Kennedy promised to build a Peace Corps to train people in underdeveloped nations to help themselves.

John F. Kennedy

In March, 1961, the program went into effect, with the President’s brother-in-law, Sergent Shriver, as director.

Starvation, illiteracy and disease were the enemies of the Corps. Any nation wanting aid could request it. The first group of volunteers went to the Philippines, the second to Ecuador and the third to Tanganyika.

The problems of the underdeveloped world were too great for any single organization to solve. But the Corps lifted the spirits of many living in those countries. And it captured the imagination of millions of Americans—especially those of thousands of idealistic youths who entered its ranks.

To combat the growing Communist threat to Latin America, Kennedy established the Alliance for Progress. He defined the Alliance’s goal as providing “revolutionary progress through powerful, democratic means.”

Within two years he could report:

“Some 140,000 housing units have been constructed. Slum clearance projects have begun, and 3,000 classrooms have been built. More than 4,000,000 school books have been distributed.

“The Alliance has fired the imagination and kindled the hopes of millions of our good neighbors. Their drive toward modernization is gaining momentum as it unleashes the energies of these millions.

“The United States is becoming increasingly identified in the minds of the people with the goal they move toward: a better life with freedom,” said Kennedy.

Critics of the program, however, charged that the President was trying to “dress up the old policies” of Franklin D. Roosevelt in new rhetoric. Since FDR’s time, the United States has believed in giving economic aid to Latin America.

Much—if not most—of these billions of dollars has wound up in the pockets of various right-wing dictators, such as Anastasio Somoza and Rafael Trujillo.

Meanwhile, Kennedy was urging action on another front—that of outer space.

“This generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space,” declared the President.  He committed the United States to putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

As indeed it happened less than six years after his death—on July 20, 1969.

Kennedy’s idealistic rhetoric masked his real reason for going to the moon: To score a propaganda victory over the Soviet Union.

Another of his anti-Communist goals: To remove Fidel Castro from power in Cuba at almost any cost.

Fidel Castro

Immediately after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy appointed his brother, Robert–who was then the Attorney General—to oversee a CIA program to overthrow Castro.

The CIA and the Mafia entered into an unholy alliance to assassinate Castro—each for its own benefit:

• The CIA wanted to please Kennedy by overthrowing the Communist leader who had nationalized American corporate holdings.
• The Mafia wanted to regain its lucrative casino and brothel holdings that had made Cuba the playground of the rich in pre-Castro times.

The mobsters were authorized to offer $150,000 to anyone who would kill Castro and were promised any support the Agency could yield.

“We were hysterical about Castro at about the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter,” then-former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara testified before Congress about these efforts. “And there was pressure from JFK and RFK to do something about Castro.”

Nor was everyone in the CIA enthusiastic about the “get Castro” effort.

“Everyone at CIA was surprised at Kennedy’s obsession with Fidel,” recalled Sam Halpern, who was assigned to the Cuba Project. “They thought it was a waste of time. We all knew [Fidel] couldn’t hurt us. Most of us at CIA initially liked Kennedy, but why go after this little guy?

“One thing is for sure: Kennedy wasn’t doing it out of national security concerns. It was a personal thing. The Kennedy family felt personally burnt by the Bay of Pigs and sought revenge.”

It was all-out war. Among the tactics used:

• Hiring Cuban gangsters to murder Cuban police officials and Soviet technicians.
• Sabotaging mines.
• Paying up to $100,000 per “hit” for the murder or kidnapping of Cuban officials.
• Using biological and chemical warfare against the Cuban sugar industry.
• Planting colorful seashells rigged to explode at a site where Castro liked to go skindiving.
• Trying to arrange for his being presented with a wetsuit impregnated with noxious bacteria and mold spores, or with lethal chemical agents.
• Attempting to infect Castro’s scuba regulator with tuberculous bacilli.
• Trying to douse his handkerchiefs, cigars, tea and coffee with other lethal bacteria.

But all of these efforts failed to assassinate Castro–or overthrow the Cuban Revolution he was heading.

“Bobby (Kennedy) wanted boom and bang all over the island,” recalled Halpern. “It was stupid. The pressure from the White House was very great.”

Americans would rightly label such methods as ”terrorist” if another power used them against the United States today. And the Cuban government saw the situation exactly the same way.

So Castro appealed to Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, for assistance.

Khrushchev was quick to comply: “We must not allow the Communist infant to be strangled in its crib,” he told members of his inner circle.