Kennedy was assassinated before he completed his third year as president. Therefore, his achievements were limited. Nevertheless, his influence was worldwide, and his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis may have prevented war. Young people especially liked him. No other president was so popular. He brought to the presidency an awareness of the cultural and historical traditions of the United States. Because Kennedy expressed the values of 20th-century America, his presidency was important beyond its political achievements.

Kennedy announced his candidacy early in 1960. By the time the Democratic National Convention opened in July, he had won seven primary victories. His most important had been in West Virginia, where he proved that a Roman Catholic could win in a predominantly Protestant state.

When the convention opened, it appeared that Kennedy's only serious challenge for the nomination would come from the Senate majority leader, Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. However, Johnson w

On November 22, 1963, President and Mrs. Kennedy were in Dallas, Texas, trying to win support in a state that Kennedy had barely carried in 1960. As the motorcade approached an underpass, two shots were fired in rapid succession. One bullet passed through the president's neck and struck Governor Connally in the back. The other bullet struck the president in the head. Kennedy fell forward, and his car sped to Parkland Hospital. At 1:00 PM, he was pronounced dead. He had never regained consciousness.

Public opinion polls showed that Kennedy was losing popularity because of his advocacy of civil rights. Privately, he began to assume that the South would oppose him in the next election, but he continued to speak out against segregation, the practice of separating people of different races. To a group of students in Nashville, Tennessee, he said, 9 "No one can deny the complexity of the problem involved in assuring all of our citizens their full rights as Americans. But no one can gainsay the fact that the determination to secure those rights is in the highest tradition of American freedom."

In September 1962, Governor Ross R. Barnett of Mississippi ignored a court order and prevented James H. Meredith, a black man, from enrolling at the state university. On September 29, even as the president went on national television to appeal to the people of Mississippi to obey the law, rioting began on the campus. After 15 hours of rioting and two deaths, Kennedy sent in troops to restore order. Meredith was admitted to the university, and troops and federal marshals remained on the campus to insure his safety.

For seven days President Kennedy consulted secretly with advisers, discussing the possible responses while in public his administration carried on as though nothing was wrong. Finally, on October 22, Kennedy told the nation about the discovery of the missiles, demanded that the Soviet Union remove the weapons, and declared the waters around Cuba a quarantine zone. Kennedy called upon Khrushchev "to halt and eliminate this secret, reckless and provocative threat to world peace and to stable relations between our two nations" and warned that an attack from Cuba on any nation in the western hemisphere would be considered an attack by the USSR on the United States itself.

When Castro began to proclaim his belief in Communism, Cuba became part of the Cold War, or struggle between the United States and its allies and the nations led by the USSR that involved intense economic and diplomatic battles but not direct military conflict. Many Cubans fled to the United States. During the Eisenhower administration the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had begun to train Cuban exiles secretly for an invasion of Cuba. When Kennedy became president, he approved the invasion.

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Approximate Word count = 2764
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page double spaced)