The choices we make, for good or ill, may well shape the state of the Union for generations yet to come.
John F. Kennedy
The Public Record
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, also known as JFK, was the 35th president of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. He was the youngest person elected president, at 43 years, and the first Catholic president. Kennedy served at the height of the Cold War, and the majority of his foreign policy concerned relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. A member of the Democratic Party, Kennedy represented Massachusetts in both houses of the United States Congress before his presidency.
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For you and I are privileged to serve the great Republic in what could be the most decisive decade in its long history.
And while no nation has ever faced such a challenge, no nation has ever been so ready to seize the burden and the glory of freedom.
For it is the fate of this generation--of you in the Congress and of me as President--to live with a struggle we did not start, in a world we did not make.
A year ago, in assuming the tasks of the Presidency, I said that few generations, in all history, had been granted the role of being the great defender of freedom in its hour of maximum danger.
But there is no comfort or security for us in evasion, no solution in abdication, no relief in irresponsibility.
But the quest is the greatest adventure of our century.
This is our guide for the present and our vision for the future--a free community of nations, independent but interdependent, uniting north and south, east and west, in one great family of man, outgrowing and transcending the hates and…
These various elements in our foreign policy lead, as I have said, to a single goal--the goal of a peaceful world of free and independent states.
For together we face a common challenge: to enlarge the prosperity of free men everywhere--to build in partnership a new trading community in which all free nations may gain from the productive energy of free competitive effort.
This Nation is the world's foremost manufacturer, farmer, banker, consumer, and exporter.
Members of the Congress: The United States did not rise to greatness by waiting for others to lead.