Sublime

And there was a speech by another young senator, forty-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who also sat in the back row, a speech explaining why he had now—at last—decided to support the amendment. His explanation was based in part on pragmatism—one reason to give the southerners what they want, he said, is to avoid a filibuster. “After observing the

JFK.

May 25, 1961. It was in this speech that Kennedy announced that he would be holding his first face-to-face meeting with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev later that spring. But the address will always be remembered for the astounding proposal he laid before the legislators. “I believe,” he declared, “this nation should commit itself to achieving the

within a year both Alan Shepard and Virgil Grissom were launched into space. Then, on February 20, 1962, came John Glenn’s historic 75,679-mile, three-orbital flight.

John F. Kennedy, the most seductive American public figure of modern times, was a walking paradox: an East Coast aristocrat with a love of the common man, an obviously masculine man—a war hero—with a vulnerability you could sense underneath, an intellectual who loved popular culture.

Corcoran had come to the ranch bearing the offer of a substantial gift—from a man who had the power to make one: Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. In a meeting in New York, the Ambassador instructed Corcoran to tell Johnson that if he would publicly enter the race for the nomination, and would privately promise that if he won, he would select Jack Kennedy as h

Kennedy’s inaugural stands with Franklin Roosevelt’s great first address as an exemplar of inspirational language and a call to civic duty. It began, as Thomas Jefferson’s had in 1801, during the first transfer of power from one party to another, with a reminder of shared national values rather than partisanship. “We are all Federalists. We are all