BBC - History - World Wars: Audio: JFK and the Celebrity Presidency

'Ask not what your country can do for you' - inaugural address, 20 January 1961

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'...In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility - I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavour will light our country and all who serve it - and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man ...'

Kennedy had run for president on a pledge to get the United States 'moving again'. In his inaugural address, the new president spoke of defending freedom 'in its hour of maximum danger', and his call for national self-sacrifice produced positive results in such endeavours as the Peace Corps. Kennedy's Cold War rhetoric, however, while effective at the time, came to seem over-heated and dangerous later in the decade, when the policy of containing the Soviet Union led to ever-deepening American involvement in the Vietnam War.

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'The differences today are usually matters of degree' - Yale University Commencement, 11 June 1962

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'... The differences today are usually matters of degree. And we cannot understand and attack our contemporary problems in 1962 if we are bound by traditional labels and worn-out slogans of an earlier era. But the unfortunate fact of the matter is that our rhetoric has not kept pace with the speed of social and economic change. Our political debates, our public discourse - on current domestic and economic issues - too often bear little or no relation to the actual problems the United States faces.

What is at stake in our economic decisions today is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion, but the practical management of a modern economy. What we need is not labels and clichés, but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead ...'

Elected by a narrow margin in 1960, Kennedy faced an unsympathetic Congress and a strong Republican opposition. In a speech at Yale in June 1962, he sought to play down partisan differences on economic policy in favor of consensus and progress, and argued that budget deficits were not always a sign of economic weakness. A year later, the president proposed a tax cut that Republicans opposed at the time but have since praised as a rationale for their own tax-cutting programmes.

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'Our policy has been one of patience and restraint' - the Cuban Missile Crisis, 22 October 1962

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'... this sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside of Soviet soil - is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country, if our courage and our commitment are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe.

The 1930's taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war. This nation is opposed to war. We are also true to our word. Our unswerving objective, therefore, must be to prevent the use of these missiles against this or any other country, and to secure their withdrawal or elimination from the western hemisphere.

Our policy has been one of patience and restraint, as befits a peaceful and powerful nation, which leads a worldwide alliance. We have been determined not to be diverted from our central concerns by mere irritants and fanatics. But now further action is required - and it is under way; and these actions may only be the beginning. We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth - but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced ...'

The discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba in the autumn of 1962 led to the greatest foreign-policy crisis of Kennedy's presidency. His televised speech to the nation on 22 October 1962 provided an account of how the situation had developed and the measures the United States was taking. The quarantine on offensive weapons going to Cuba was the step, short of all-out confrontation, that helped to resolve the crisis. The release of tape recordings made during the deliberations about the missiles in Cuba have added a new dimension to understanding how Kennedy performed as president.

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'We are confronted primarily with a moral issue' - civil rights speech, 11 June 1963

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'... We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.

The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the colour of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free ...'

Despite the rising tide of civil rights protests from black Americans in the first years of the 1960s, Kennedy had been slow to move on the issue. By the summer of 1963, the resistance to change in the South caused the administration to propose a law establishing the right of all citizens to access to all public places. For the first time, Kennedy addressed the pressing problem in ethical terms. The Civil Rights Law of 1964, however, was not enacted until after his death.

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'A shaft of light into the darkness' - the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 26 July 1963

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'Yesterday a shaft of light cut into the darkness. Negotiations were concluded in Moscow on a treaty to ban all nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water. For the first time, an agreement has been reached on bringing the forces of nuclear destruction under international control - a goal first sought in 1946 when Bernard Baruch presented a comprehensive control plan to the United Nations.

That plan, and many subsequent disarmament plans, large and small, have all been blocked by those opposed to international inspection. A ban on nuclear tests, however, requires on-the-spot inspection only for underground tests. This nation now possesses a variety of techniques to detect the nuclear tests of other nations which are conducted in the air or under water, for such tests produce unmistakable signs which our modern instruments can pick up.

The treaty initialled yesterday, therefore, is a limited treaty, which permits continued underground testing and prohibits only those tests that we ourselves can police. It requires no control posts, no on-site inspection, no international body.

We should also understand that it has other limits as well. Any nation which signs the treaty will have an opportunity to withdraw if it finds that extraordinary events related to the subject matter of the treaty have jeopardised its supreme interests; and no nation's right of self-defence will in any way be impaired. Nor does this treaty mean an end to the threat of nuclear war. It will not reduce nuclear stockpiles; it will not halt the production of nuclear weapons; it will not restrict their use in time of war.

Nevertheless, this limited treaty will radically reduce the nuclear testing which would otherwise be conducted on both sides; it will prohibit the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and all others who sign it, from engaging in the atmospheric tests which have so alarmed mankind; and it offers to all the world a welcome sign of hope.'

The narrow escape from a nuclear confrontation over Cuba led to talks with the Soviet Union about a treaty to ban nuclear testing. Kennedy announced that an agreement had been reached to bar nuclear tests in the atmosphere. As Kennedy stressed in his remarks, this pact was a very modest step towards a less dangerous world. Underground testing could continue, and the number of nuclear weapons in fact increased in the years that followed. Nonetheless, Kennedy's remarks offered the United States a degree of hope for the future. This speech suggested that Kennedy was finding his way as president, a mood that vanished on 22 November 1963.

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