The Alliance for Progress was a major foreign aid initiative by President John F. Kennedy. It aimed to promote economic development, social reform, and democratic stability in Latin America. Driven by Cold War anxieties and the desire to stop the spread of communism, the ten-year program sought to…
In Boston, Massachusetts, Kennedy gives his last formal address before assuming the presidency. He articulates the characteristics of leadership that he will try to model in his administration.
<p>The American system of choosing a President has not worked out badly, far as it may be from the Founding Fathers’ vision of a natural aristocracy </p>
<p>Eleanor Roosevelt thought the "young man from Massachusetts" was a fine senator, but <span class="body">too inexperienced to be President.</span></p>
<p>After a varied career as a soldier, statesman, diplomat, and presidential adviser, Taylor wants to known as someone who “always did his damndest.”</p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Here is the federal government’s own picture history of our times—and it tells us more than you might think</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> Was the murdered President one of our best, a man of “vigor, rationality, and noble vision” or was he “an optical illusion,” “an expensively programmed waxwork”? A noted historian examines the mottled evolution of his reputation.</span> </p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> A noted historian argues that television, a relative newcomer, has nearly destroyed old—and valuable—political traditions</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> If he’d been the closest companion of the president of IBM, you might happen across his name in a privately printed memoir. But LeMoyne Billings was John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s best friend from Choate to the White House—and that makes him part of history.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck"> <span class="typestyle"> Here is how political cartoonists have sized up the candidates over a tumultuous half-century.</span> </span></p>
<p><span class="deck">30 years after judging Eisenhower to be among our worst presidents, historians have now come around to the opinion most of their fellow Americans held right along.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Despite his feeling that “we are beginning to lose the memory of what a restrained and civil society can be like,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the senior senator from New York, and a lifelong student of history, remains an optimist about our system of government and our resilience as a people.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A routine chore for JFK’s official photographer became the most important assignment of his career. Much of his moving pictorial record appears here for the first time.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A year ago, we were in the midst of a presidential campaign most memorable for charges by both sides that the opponent was not hard enough, tough enough, masculine enough. That he was, in fact, a sissy. Both sides also admitted that this sort of rhetoric was deplorable. But it’s been going on since the beginning of the republic.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Jack Kennedy came into the White House determined to dismantle his Republican predecessor’s rigid, formal staff organization, in favor of a spontaneous, flexible, hands-on management style. Thirty years later, Bill Clinton seems determined to do the same thing. He would do well to remember that what it got JFK was the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam War.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The Johnsons and the Kennedys are popularly thought to have shared a strong mutual dislike, but stacks of letters and a remarkable tape of Jacqueline Kennedy reminiscing show something very different and more interesting.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Seen in its proper historical context, amid the height of the Cold War, the investigation into Kennedy’s assassination looks much more impressive and its shortcomings much more understandable.</span></p>
<p>Tough, nimble, and, pound for pound, the most heavily armed ships in the U.S. Navy, PT boats fought in the very front line of the greatest sea war in history. But even today, hardly anyone understands what they did.</p>
<p><span class="deck">Nikita Khrushchev’s son recalls a world in which the United States was the Evil Empire, and the Soviet superpower was a carefully maintained illusion.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">The least-understood branch of our military was born 60 years ago but today is coming into prominence as never before.</span></p>
<p>Incriminating new evidence has come to light in KGB files and the authors' interviews of former Cuban intelligence officers which indicates that Fidel Castro probably knew in advance of Oswald's intent to kill JFK.</p>
<p><span class="deck">Practical, rather than idealistic, reasons pushed President Kennedy to challenge America to land a man on the moon within the decade.</span></p>
<p>In 1962, the president wrote for <em>American Heritage</em> that the study of history is no mere pastime, but the means by which a nation establishes its sense of identity and purpose.</p>
<p>The Senate's inquiry into a Kennedy Administration defense contract is considered one of the longest and most extensive congressional investigations ever undertaken.</p>
<p>Sixty years ago, Jack Ruby shot Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. What was his motive? The Warren Commission lawyer who investigated Ruby reveals the killer’s state of mind.</p>
