Audio: John F Kennedy and the Celebrity Presidency

One of the keys to John F Kennedy's hold on the American people was his ability to deliver powerful speeches, especially in televised addresses to the nation. Drafted by accomplished speech writers such as Theodore 'Ted' Sorensen, these presidential remarks helped to set a mood of national optimism during the early 1960s.

Only after Kennedy's murder in 1963, and the full emergence of the problems of Vietnam and civil rights, did questions arise about whether Kennedy's language outpaced his accomplishments in the White House.

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

	Kennedy: '... 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 ...' Play audio: modem Read transcript
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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.

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

	Kennedy: '... The differences today are usually matters of degree ...' Play audio: modem Read transcript
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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.

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

	Kennedy: '... this sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside of Soviet soil ...' Play audio: modem Read transcript
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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.

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

	Kennedy: '...We are confronted primarily with a moral issue ...' Play audio: modem Read transcript
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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.

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

	Kennedy: 'Yesterday a shaft of light cut into the darkness ...' Play audio: modem Read transcript
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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.