♪ [ Cheering ] ♪ >> In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course.

>> John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the 35th President of the United States.

He was the young, handsome leader who promised a new hope.

>> The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century.

>> A modern politician for a modern America.

>> Ask not what your country can do for you.

Ask what you can do for your country.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪ ♪ >> We know it is the president's car.

Another car directly behind the president -- Secret Service men, spread eagle over them.

We don't know... >> However, the life of JFK is so often defined by his death.

>> The President of the United States is dead.

>> His assassination in November 1963 came to be seen as a turning point for the US, a shift from an age of innocence to one of violence and change.

JFK himself was transformed from man into legend.

>> This young, handsome, intelligent, terrifically photogenic, but honest political leader was a breath of fresh air on the political scene.

>> I can't think of any other leader in a Western democratic context who developed such a fantastic image.

>> For a college boy to give his brand label to invent a new way of being a politician and a new kind of marketed politics, this was revolutionary.

>> This reading of history can disguise the fascinating and contradictory man behind the myth.

>> Jack Kennedy never performed very well at school.

He was clearly gifted, but he really scraped by in his final grades.

>> He was the walking textbook of illnesses.

It's astonishing he survived childhood.

>> People sometimes assume that it was almost accidental that JFK Happened to have been in Berlin in 1939, a few days before the declaration of war, that he'd been to Palestine, that he'd been to Indochina.

But it's clear from the diaries he kept that was what excited him about the study of politics.

>> There's this quality of hope and admiration and optimism that he projected that really inspired people, and something about his personality that continues to interest and engage people.

>> JFK was recognized by millions but known by few.

This program will explore the making of a president.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Born in Massachusetts on the 29th of May, 1917, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, known familiarly as Jack, was the second son of multimillionaire investor and politician Joe Kennedy.

>> Jack Kennedy was born into a Boston Irish family.

It was a middle class family without any particular political pretensions.

The father working in banking, and a mother who actually came from a political family, a Democratic family.

Her father had been the mayor of Boston.

>> Rose Kennedy's father, John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, was a real force in Massachusetts politics.

He was elected to Congress three times.

He was elected mayor of Boston.

And Edward Kennedy would say in later years one of the reasons the Kennedys were always so strong in Massachusetts politically was because of Honey Fitzgerald, the maternal grandfather.

>> They had a grand home in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod.

They had a home in Palm Beach, Florida.

>> It was a life of prep schools, of luxury, of tennis courts, of really living in a kind of bubble, very, very far removed from the mass of the American people.

It was kind of like being a European aristocrat, which is essentially what he was.

>> Having attended various local elementary schools, Jack Kennedy's secondary education formally started at a Catholic school, but it soon became apparent he was unhappy there.

It was decided that he switch and follow his brother to Choate Rosemary Hall, a private prep school in Connecticut.

Although the school is thought to be the inspiration for the famous, "Ask not what your country can do for you" speech, Jack was no happier here than he was at his previous school.

One thing Choate did have, though, was his brother Joe Kennedy Jr.

But where his brother seemingly excelled, Jack did not.

>> His older brother is already there at Choate, and he's kind of the golden boy.

He's doing fantastically well.

He's on all the sports teams.

He's a very diligent student.

Jack Kennedy isn't really a diligent student at this point.

He's a little bit badly behaved.

>> He was clearly very smart and very lazy.

And not only lazy, he didn't seem to want to excel.

>> He was bright, he was charming.

He had some interest in history and in biography, and he did read.

But he was a rather indolent student.

And at his prep school, he ended up graduating 65th out of 110.

So that's about mid-way.

In fact, below half way in the class.

If you look at his academic record, for example, it's far less impressive than, say, Richard Nixon's.

>> He chafes at the discipline of the Choate School, and he organizes a club among his friends called the Muckers Club, sort of essentially designed to break school rules.

>> He was, in fact, expelled to begin with.

But his father pleaded he should be kept at school.

But he was required to sit down with a psychologist.

And the psychologist said, "Jack, you seem to do very well in your classes, but you don't try very hard.

You know, what is going on?"

And he came up with a brilliant answer and he said, "Well, my brother does very well.

Why should I be doing the same?

He does it all for me."

>> Jack's childhood was in many ways a fortunate one.

But he was plagued by illness.

Long stretches of bed rest and prolonged courses of heavy medication began in childhood.

This would set the blueprint for the rest of his life.

>> As a young child, he'd had a very bad case of scarlet fever.

And there was a huge outbreak in Boston at the time.

His father and his grandfather, Honey Fitz, had to pull strings to get him into the best hospital in Boston.

>> He was continually ill, either in the school sanatorium or in hospital.

And worse still was the fact that very rarely were they able to diagnose what was wrong with him.

>> It meant that he had long periods of school and there was not only the scarlet fever, there was the pneumonia, there was the asthma.

>> He had major spinal problems.

He was born with one leg slightly shorter than the other.

And this created a long term problem with his back.

And it never leaves him that problem.

It's always there.

>> I think what's remarkable is that he wanted to enjoy the health that others had.

He developed a jokey sort of heroism, if you like, that he was coping with what for normal people would be considered life threatening diseases but just wouldn't take them seriously.

>> It's interesting to speculate on the impact of his very severe health problems on his mentality.

And I think what it left him with was a "live for the moment" mentality.

I think there was part of Kennedy that thought, "I'm not going to be around for long, so I may as well enjoy myself as much as I can while I can."

>> There were under appreciated depths to the younger Kennedy boy which many overlooked.

He used his frequent bouts of illness to read, developing his mind and imagination through the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Winston Churchill, and others.

Although academically, he was just getting by, his self education was invaluable.

As both Jack and his brother matured, their father would instill a rivalry within them both, which the businessman Joe Sr. evidently thrived off.

>> The Kennedys had to excel at everything.

They had to excel at sport, at academia, in debating, in writing, in literature.

This family, in other words, were being turned into a brand, groomed for success.

>> The father had such high expectations of them, and he put them under so much pressure.

But also there was a certain degree of sexual competition going on.

Both of the two older boys were extremely handsome.

They brought home lots of girlfriends.

And the father openly not only flirted with the girlfriends, but propositioned them.

>> It wasn't just that he was a philanderer of spectacular proportions, but that he was completely open about it.

His sons knew about it, and the advice which he apparently gave his sons was you need to get laid as often as possible.

But also with his affairs, he was open about it.

They knew about it.

And so obviously, that's something he passed on to the sons, including John Kennedy.

>> The good side is that Joe Kennedy took an acute interest in all his children.

In that sense, he was a good father because remember, in that generation, among the elite, both American and British, fathers would often neglect their children.

They'd maroon them in boarding schools for years.

They'd take no interest in them.

Whereas, of course, Joe Kennedy took an aggressive interest in the lives of his children.

>> Jack would complete his studies at Choate, and although his grades were nothing special, he still managed to gain entry into Harvard.

But it would be that summer where the real education of Jack Kennedy began, coinciding with his father's appointment to the ambassadorship to Britain, Jack would begin a number of trips to 1930 Europe.

The political tensions and shifting of power fascinated this young American.

He would witness some of the 20th century's most historic events first hand.

These visits would inform his future in ways he could never imagine.

♪ The first trip to Europe that Jack Kennedy took was in 1937.

He and a school friend, Lem Billings, sailed from the U.S., taking Jack's sports car with them, and spent 10 weeks driving around Europe.

The following year, in 1938, Joe Kennedy Sr. was appointed U.S.

Ambassador to the United Kingdom by President Roosevelt.

Jack again made a trip to Europe, but this time, it wasn't explicitly for pleasure.

He traveled to England to work in the embassy, where he would get his first taste of the inner workings of politics.

>> This showed him the international scene of global high politics and what could follow from them.

It was an extraordinary kind of education because his father, you see, had not only a front row seat, but his father had a unique position in relation to the government of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

So we're not just talking about any ambassador's son.

Joe Kennedy was at the vortex of European events in the late 1930s, and he was a major actor on that scene.

>> It was while Jack was there that he became fascinated by the rearmament that was going on in England and the growing rise of fascism on the continent.

>> This gave him extraordinary insight into the nature of Hitler, of Hitlerism, the nature of charisma.

It was an extraordinary kind of tutelage, if you like, into the power of propaganda, because he saw, unlike historians, that this whole regime was about propaganda.

The whole thing was driven by the most brilliant levels of propaganda history had ever seen.

>> The year after, he would travel to Europe for a third time.

This time, however, he did not stay in London.

He traveled to the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and the Balkans to research for his final year thesis.

He then went to Czechoslovakia and Germany.

What he witnessed was Europe on the brink of war.

He left Berlin on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland.

>> I think this trip had a lasting influence on him in the sense that he was someone who truly believed in being there.

>> He was very interested in political history.

That's what he wanted to study, and he wanted to see it firsthand.

>> He realized that Europe was on the verge of meltdown.

He wanted to educate himself on to the global scene.

And this was the best and most practical way of doing it.

>> Kennedy has a faith in his own judgment and his own perception.

And being there on the ground, traveling around becomes a motif of his political career.

>> Here was an opportunity where he could actually visit these countries simply with his passport and a letter from his father as the United States ambassador to Britain.

>> Jack returned home and started to write his dissertation.

Thanks to his father, it would be a work which would live beyond the realms of his Harvard studies.

>> The idea was to see how slow Britain had been to recognize the threat of Germany.

His professors were very laudatory, really, because, after all, it was unusual for a student to be able to have such first hand information.

It was shown to a friend of Jack's father who worked at The New York Times, Arthur Krock, and he said, "You know, this is an awfully good dissertation.

This would make a book."

>> In the summer of 1940, John Kennedy's first book, "Why England Slept", is published.

By the spring of '41, it sold something like 80,000 copies in America and Britain, although there was the rumor that his father bought up 30,000 copies and stored them at his home in Hyannis Port.

>> For the United States, which was still a neutral country but looking at what was happening in Europe, this seemed almost like a wake up call.

>> It establishes a key component of his image, which is that he is a man of letters.

This is someone who is an authentic intellectual, who publishes books.

It's also important because it furnishes the cornerstone of his foreign policy ideology.

If you want to understand what John Kennedy is saying about foreign policy during the Cold War, if you want to understand his foreign policy during his presidency, you can still learn a lot about it by reading "Why England Slept."

>> For Jack, the book seemed to be a turning point in his life.

Up until now, he had lived in the shadow of his more able older brother.

The attack on Pearl Harbor made the war a global concern, and like many families, the Kennedys were not immune to its effect.

The political life of Joe Sr. would be the first casualty.

>> As ambassador, he began to see himself more and more as the peacemaker of Europe, that he could do a deal.

He could get the British prime minister and the Fuhrer together around a table, and that somehow he would be able to make it all come right.

When it turned out that he had misunderstood Hitler, when it was obvious that Britain was standing alone, Joseph Kennedy lost faith in Britain.

>> He had very much the businessman's "fix it" mentality.

He really didn't understand all this blood and soil, mystical stuff.

He thought you could do deals.

He thought you could pay them.

That becomes a deeply controversial position and unpopular with the British people, and he becomes an embarrassment.

It's why often in JFK's later campaigns, although Joseph Kennedy is pulling the strings behind the scenes, he's often not out there in public.

So by 1941, his political career is over.

>> The President of the United States wasn't even using his ambassador to London because he didn't think Joseph Kennedy was right and he didn't think the Prime Minister of Britain, Neville Chamberlain, was right.

The president believed that Winston Churchill had the makings of the one person who could stand up to Hitler, and that left Joseph Kennedy out in the cold.

>> Despite his ongoing ill health, Jack was eager to sign up for the U.S. forces.

Securing a doctor's certificate, he managed to enroll in the Navy just before the Pearl Harbor attack.

Jack was thirsty for action, but his health meant he was stationed at a desk in Washington, working in naval Intelligence.

It would be during this time that he would meet the first and arguably the greatest love of his life, Inga Arvad.

>> He met this beautiful Danish woman who was seven years older than him.

Inga Arvad.

>> This is one of the few times in his life where he's very emotionally involved.

I think it's partly physical attraction.

She's very beautiful, and she's worldly.

>> She was a journalist in Washington, and pretty much everybody she interviewed fell in love with her, including Jack Kennedy.

But she was drawn to him.

He'd been to Europe, so he had a feeling for her as a European.

He was fascinated by politics, and the fact that she had interviewed Hitler and Goering before she left Europe, that made her very special in his eyes.

>> The trouble is that Adolf Hitler adored her.

The Fuhrer had said that she was the ideal Aryan woman.

She was really seen in Washington as a kind of Mata Hari, and she was feared.

>> Her ties to Hitler and the Nazi elite meant the FBI were observing her.

Private conversations and liaisons between her and Jack were recorded.

No one, it seemed, approved of the affair.

>> His family, she's not exactly wife material, in their view.

She's not Catholic.

She's twice divorced.

But also his superiors in Naval Intelligence are concerned about this young Naval Intelligence officer caught up in a passionate relationship with this beautiful woman who were not sure if she maybe is a spy.

>> He was crazily in love with this woman, told his father he was going to marry her.

The father said, "No, you can't."

And finally, the father spoke to Inga and said, "Listen, you are never going to marry my son.

Get that out of your mind.

This cannot be.

You will get locked up.

So back off."

That put an end to the relationship.

He admitted to somebody I interviewed that she was the love of his life, but it was not to be.

>> Although his father was against him entering naval combat, Joe Sr. did end up eventually facilitating his son's wish.

Jack became the pilot of a patrol torpedo boat.

These boats were small and ready for combat.

It's unclear if the guilt of ending the affair with Inga caused Joe Sr. to change his mind, but he made sure Jack's boat was always out of hostile waters.

However, an unexpected show of aggression from the Japanese around the Solomon Islands meant Jack would eventually come under attack.

The war would have bittersweet consequences for the Kennedy family.

Although tragedy would strike in Europe, honors would flow at home.

On the night of August 1, 1943, while performing routine patrols with two other P.T.

boats, Jack spotted an enemy ship.

Before he could react and attack, his boat was rammed and sliced in two by the Japanese destroyer.

>> It's in the middle of the night.

They don't have proper radar.

They don't have good physical sighting at that point.

And ultimately, his boat is actually stove in two.

Some of his crew members are killed instantly, but some of them survive and they're in the waters.

And Jack Kennedy is able to rescue some of them.

>> He performs heroically.

Using a belt in his mouth, he tows a crew member three and a half miles to an island.

>> This is a man who has extensive health problems, has extreme back problems.

He swims for five hours to get those men to safety.

>> Nine of the men survived.

They managed to swim to this literally desert island to stay there until Jack Kennedy arranged through a local native to get out a coconut with a message saying they were still alive, and they were finally rescued.

>> His older brother has always been better than him at school.

There was a competitive dynamic between these two brothers, and Joe Jr. maybe feels that he needs to prove himself even more.

He's already gone above and beyond.

And then maybe because of the heroics of his younger brother, maybe out of his own sense of duty and service, he actually volunteers for a very dangerous mission to bomb a German air base in Belgium.

>> No one is ever compelled to go on a mission where the probability is that he will lose his life.

Essentially, he became an American kamikaze.

They were wiring up bombers, filling them with explosives to attack the V-rocket emplacements in occupied Europe.

>> The mission failed.

The bombs exploded on board the plane before it reached its target.

Joe Kennedy Jr. was still on board and died instantly.

For the whole Kennedy family, this was a tragic loss.

Whilst Jack was still coming to terms with the death of his brother, word was beginning to spread about his heroic actions in the Pacific.

>> There's a writer for Life magazine called John Hersey, and he approaches Kennedy and says, "You know, I'd like to write an article on what you've done for The New Yorker magazine.

Now, Joseph Kennedy, working behind the scenes, gets it republished with Reader's Digest.

Well, a large number of people in 1944 read this vivid account of John Kennedy's bravery in World War II.

So 1940 is "Why England Slept", the idea of him as an intellectual, a man of letters, of cultural sophistication, that idea was established.

With the service in World War II, a second element in this image is established, which is that he's a war hero.

So what you have is the idea that he has brains and brawn.

>> People have speculated that it was just the death of the older brother that pushed JFK into politics.

That is nonsense.

The fact is, from the FBI records, JFK was talking about going into politics and even going as far as the presidency way back at the time of Pearl Harbor in his conversations with Inga Arvad.

To the extent that the brother might have been in the way, but the fact that he had been killed opened the way for JFK to accept the family mantle, if you like, and the father was willing to fund it.

>> After the P.T.

boat incident, Jack was left with chronic back issues, and he was honorably discharged from the Navy.

His brother was dead, and his father's political career over.

He found employment as a journalist, but the question about what he should do next lingered.

It was then decided that Jack would run for Congress in 1946.

Again, Joe Sr. would be instrumental in making this happen.

♪ >> He will run for Congress, and his father helps make that happen by inducing local Democratic congressman to vacate his seat and run for mayor of Boston instead.

It's not a shoo in for Jack Kennedy, though.

He doesn't necessarily have strong ties in the community.

So they have to start really building connections in Boston.

>> Behind the scenes, Joseph Sr. is spending huge amounts of money.

A typical amount of money for a congressional candidate in 1946 would have been something like $25,000.

Estimates are that Joe Kennedy spent at least 10 times that amount, at least a quarter of a million.

Maybe half a million.

>> What JFK understood was the imagery of politics would transform the business.

His father was an expert in that field, so between the two of them, were able to change the course of American politicking and campaigning.

>> Joseph Kennedy hired two advertising agencies to promote Kennedy's campaign, so these advertising agencies would contact the media.

They would polish his speeches.

He even hired a billboard specialist who put up 90 billboards around the city in Boston.

And so it's an incredibly slick campaign.

>> The fact that he was facing such ill health did make him aware that he could project an image that could cover that up.

He had a certain shyness, a certain modesty, which allowed him on camera to come across as youthful, handsome, thoughtful, compassionate.

And all those things were genuine.

>> The campaigning paid off.

And in November 1946, John F. Kennedy won the seat of the 11th District of Massachusetts.

But he soon realized that the life of a congressman might not be all that he'd expected.

>> Now, the truth was, as a congressman, he wasn't impressive.

He was quite lazy.

He used to party a lot.

He was also ill a lot, and he often wasn't there.

But he didn't have an outstanding reputation when he's in the House of Representatives.

>> Actually, he found it very boring to pursue the interests of working class Bostonians.

To defend their rights was an honorable activity, but ultimately, it was the world stage which interests him.

It was the great questions of war and peace.

It was the macro struggle between communism and democracy, because he saw things on a global template, not just the little workings of the internal parish.

>> Jack served six years as a congressman before turning his sights on the Senate.

>> His intent, I think, always was to go for a Senate seat.

But of course, he was very young.

In a state like Massachusetts, it was going to be a huge battle.

And many people said don't try.

>> They decide that this is the time to run for the US Senate, and he'll be running against Henry Cabot Lodge.

>> That campaign was run in a kind of modern, slick way.

And what's also important to note is that in the campaign against Lodge, Kennedy's views on foreign policy, on the Cold War were probably more hard line than Lodge's.

And probably a good many people, including some Republicans, voted for Kennedy in '52 because they thought he would be more hard line on the Cold War than Henry Cabot Lodge.

>> The family recognized that they had a star and that actually people would like to meet the star and shake hands.

It was very effective.

>> Like the '46 campaign, the 1952 campaign for the Senate highlighted Kennedy's appeal as a sex symbol.

There was a lot of talk of his physical attractiveness and also his appeal as a symbol of the family.

The 1952 Senate campaign is most famous for the teas held by his mother and his sisters for women.

I think it's estimated something like 70,000 women attended those teas, which coincidentally was his winning margin.

He defeated Lodge by 70,000 votes.

And this might seem an extravagant statement, but I think it's entirely defensible that more than any other politician in American history, Kennedy symbolized family life because he's seen as a representative of a dynasty.

♪ >> The image of John F. Kennedy was something that had been worked on and honed.

He was the academic, the war hero, the family man.

And thanks to the tea parties, older women wanted to mother him and younger women wanted to marry him.

Before his Senate victory, though, his reputation as a playboy was becoming problematic.

His father agreed that what Jack needed was a wife.

>> When John F. Kennedy runs for the US Senate, he's a bachelor.

He's obviously had a lot of relationships with women over the years, but he's never gotten married, and he enters the US Senate in 1953 as a single man.

There's an article in the Saturday Evening Post headlined "The Senate's Gay Young Bachelor."

And, you know, there's a lot made of his marital status.

Now, at that time, he'd actually already met Jackie Bouvier.

They had been introduced at a dinner party in Georgetown by a mutual friend.

>> There was certainly a strong element of mutual attraction.

There's an article in Life magazine in the summer of 1953 with the headline "Senator Kennedy Goes a Courting", and a picture of him and Jackie Kennedy on a sailboat.

And it's a very glamorous image.

So it's a private matter, but it also affects JFK's image.

>> Jackie Kennedy had unique gifts.

She was a remarkable woman, highly intelligent, highly insightful.

A very, very good foil to him.

Similarly, they'd both come from very troubled backgrounds.

Her father had been a chronic alcoholic.

Her parents divorced when she was 12.

So there was a kind of mutual sympathy, a mutual understanding.

>> It's unclear if Jack really wanted to get married, if he really saw himself as a marrying man.

Certainly he appreciated freedom in his romantic life.

But it's his father that basically, with a little bit of political calculation, says being the Senate's gay young bachelor isn't going to cut it for very long, and if you want to be president, you have to have a family and you have to have a wife, and the political image is important.

And Jackie Bouvier fits all of those criteria for being a political wife and a political wife to a prominent Catholic politician.

>> He had always built up the family as a brand.

Remember, in those days, most men were married at 22.

To be unmarried at 35 raised certain questions.

Were you a serial philanderer?

In this case, true.

So it kind of, if you like, "bourgeoisified" the Kennedy label.

They were anything but bourgeois.

They were very wealthy bohemians.

But this turned it into something much more palatable, much more acceptable.

You can't have a king without a queen.

You can't have a prince without a princess.

And here she came.

>> Jack and Jackie married on September 12, 1953, at Saint Mary's Church, Newport, Rhode Island.

The young senator was no longer a bachelor.

From the outset, the marriage was troubled, both parties conducting illicit affairs.

But the thing they both worked towards and understood was the image.

Projecting the notion of a happily married couple was paramount.

>> She was pretty perfect in terms of the senator's wife and the prospective presidential nominees wife.

But as to their actual relationship, I think the honest truth from all the people who were very close to them was that this was not a love relationship.

>> One of the interesting things about that relationship is that she was aware of his womanizing.

>> It was common knowledge within his close circle and increasingly known more widely what really happened is that people turned a blind eye to it.

They didn't want to know.

>> In terms of the marital drama, it was always on a knife edge.

And there is no doubt that Jackie was on the point of divorcing.

>> There's stories that she even approached Joe Kennedy and said that she was contemplating a divorce.

And it's Joe that patches that over and says, "You know, do what you need to do, spend what you need to do to some extent to make you happy and to stay in this marriage," because the the symbolism and the qualities that Jackie Kennedy brought to her public life were so valuable, and he saw that value.

And he knows that without her, Jack's political career is ruined.

>> Prior to his marriage, his sexual appeal was seen as an exciting attribute of his bachelor-hood.

After his marriage, it's seen as an attribute of this marriage to this glamorous, beautiful woman.

There were a lot of magazines in the mid and late '50s that have them on the cover long before he reaches the White House.

So she adds to his sexual appeal.

>> The Kennedy brand was set, and it was the 1956 Democratic Convention that threw it into the national consciousness.

>> I give you the next Democratic nominee and our next President of the United States, Adlai E. Stevenson.

>> Jack's televised speech gained so many supporters that he nearly found himself as the running mate of Adlai Stevenson.

Had he won, his future presidential hopes would most certainly have been dashed.

The Democrats lost heavily in the '56 elections, and Kennedy would continue working in the Senate.

The convention proved one thing, however -- John F. Kennedy connected.

Who he was, his image all resonated with an audience who eagerly consumed what was fed to them via televisual broadcast.

On January 2, 1960, Jack began his campaign for the Democratic nomination.

That November, he would face Vice President Richard Nixon for the White House in what was shaping up to be one of the tightest races in history.

But Kennedy's religion remained a potential issue for the American electorate.

>> In a way, the biggest issue that Kennedy has to deal with in 1960 is the religious issue of his own Catholic faith.

No Catholic had ever been elected president.

What some Americans felt was that a Catholic president might owe their allegiance to Rome, to the Pope, to the Catholic faith, rather than to the United States and the American Constitution.

So this is a major issue that Kennedy has to deal with.

And I think initially, he would rather not talk about it.

By the time they get to the West Virginia primary in the spring of 1960, he decides to tackle it head on.

>> He gives a speech before the Ministerial Association of Greater Houston.

So this is an organization of Protestant ministers.

And he gives a speech to say, I'm not a Catholic candidate for president.

I am the Democratic candidate for president who happens to be Catholic.

So he essentially challenges this longstanding concern that Catholics have dual loyalties in the political sphere.

And it's a watershed moment in terms of religious discussions in American political campaigns.

>> It adds another element to this multifaceted image that he'd been developing, and that is the idea of Kennedy as a man of faith.

The whole debate over Kennedy's religion in 1960 is based on the idea that his Catholic faith was important to him.

>> Still, no one in the Kennedy camp was certain his assurances were enough to defeat Nixon.

The decisive moment would come in late 1960 with a series of televised debates between the two candidates.

>> They have a televised presidential debate, and John F. Kennedy behind the scenes is not the healthiest of men at this point, projects health and vigor and vitality.

>> The candidates need no introduction.

The Republican candidate, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and the Democratic candidate, Senator John F. Kennedy.

>> He's tanned.

He's wearing makeup.

His father's work in Hollywood means that he knows the best television men.

And so they've all done everything they can to present him perfectly for the television age.

And Nixon, he's not been very well.

He's had a bit of a temperature.

He looks sort of older and crumpled, even though they're similar ages.

So, you know, just the images that are projected are so different.

And that association of Kennedy with youth, modernity, and the future, stays with him, and Nixon can never really identify with that.

>> Because they felt that the American society was moving again.

I want us to recapture that image.

>> That first television debate showed the importance of image.

The overwhelming majority of people who watched that debate on their television sets thought that Kennedy had won comprehensively.

People who listened on radio thought that it had been a tie, which says everything about the importance of the visual image.

Before that first debate, Kennedy was behind in the polls.

Narrowly, but he was behind in the polls.

After the first television debate with Nixon, Kennedy moved ahead in the polls and he stayed ahead.

♪ ♪ ♪ >> Jubilant parades and celebration marked the day JFK won the race to the White House.

But for the man they were cheering, this signaled the beginning of the end.

♪ For many, he was the perfect leader for a forward thinking America.

Yet his policies and political dogma were taken from his experience of the past.

His political maneuvering and independent manner seemed astute for such a young man.

But behind him was a father pulling the strings and making decisions.

What made this sickly prep school boy from New England stand out, however, was his image.

He was everything to everyone and became the blueprint for a new form of politics.

All these factors were carefully crafted together in the making of a truly modern president.

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