The Speeches of President John F. Kennedy

In 1960, America was crippled by a spreading recession, and John Kennedy campaigned on a vow “to get this country moving again.”

Once elected, he set out to do just that. Though he felt more expert regarding foreign affairs, the long hours that he invested in new or revamped economic, social, budgetary, and anti-inflationary policies helped produce this century’s longest and strongest period of American economic growth.

At the Yale University graduation exercises in New Haven Connecticut on June 11, 1962, President Kennedy received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree after which he remarked to the audience, “It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds, a Harvard education and a Yale degree.”

President Kennedy used the opportunity of his Yale commencement address to focus on the state of America’s economy.

He spoke of the myths perceived by the public. That government is big and bad, that federal fiscal integrity is measured by inaccurate administrative budgets, and that unfavorable turns in the economy are due to a lack of public confidence in the administration.

To attack contemporary problems, he declared, the nation cannot be bound by traditional labels, trite slogans of the past, but must keep pace with actual change.

“What is at stake in our economic decisions today,” President Kennedy said, “is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will sweep the country with passion but the practical management of a modern economy.”

President Kennedy's speech was the work of several staff including presidential assistant Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador to India.

Ted Sorensen, Special Counsel to the President and a longtime Kennedy speechwriter, put together a separate draft, which, with some excerpts from Schlesinger and Galbraith, became the basis of the final version.

Kennedy himself devoted hours to rewriting the speech, and he was still jotting away on the speaker's platform at Yale when the moment came for him to step forward.

Administration insiders billed the speech as an effort to conciliate business, and as a charter of economic policy. Its heart was an extended attack on what the President called "myths."

The President spoke at 11:30 am on the Old Campus after being awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. His opening words referred to A. Whitney Griswold, President of the University.

At an Independence Day celebration at historic Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 4, 1962, President Kennedy delivered an address on the importance of the Declaration of Independence to contemporary Americans.

“To read it today,” he said, “is to hear a trumpet call. For that Declaration unleashed not merely a revolution against the British, but a revolution in human affairs. Its authors were highly conscious of its worldwide implications.”

The President then challenged Americans to “be ready for a Declaration of Interdependence…to discuss with a united Europe the ways and means of forming a concrete Atlantic partnership…to throw off the yoke of poverty…balance our world-wide trade…and deter any aggression in order to achieve a world of law and free choice.”

In proposing a “Declaration of Interdependence,” President Kennedy reminded the nation that it could not remain aloof from Western Europe’s trend toward unity.

According to historian and presidential aide Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., President Kennedy’s “basic attitude toward Europe was to do what he could to strengthen the hand of modern-minded Europeans in their quest for unity – not to tell Europe what it ought to do, but (rather) to adjust American policy to the needs and tempo of rational European self-determination.”

“In Europe, where the speech made a deep impression, it was correctly read as an affirmation of the American desire for close relationship with whatever sort of united Europe the genius of its people might evolve,” Schlesinger said.

President Kennedy delivered the following speech before an audience that included 43 of the 54 state and territorial governors who were in Philadelphia for the 54th National Governors’ Conference.

Drafted by Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, 1776, the Declaration of Independence is at once the nation's most cherished symbol of liberty and Jefferson's most enduring monument. Here, in exalted and unforgettable phrases, Jefferson expressed the convictions in the minds and hearts of the American people. The political philosophy of the Declaration of Independence was not new; its ideals of individual liberty had already been expressed by John Locke and the Continental philosophers. What Jefferson did was to summarize this philosophy in "self-evident truths" and set forth a list of grievances against the King in order to justify before the world the breaking of ties between the colonies and the mother country.

In 1957, then-Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy was invited by New York City radio station WQXR to read the Declaration of Independence in full, which was broadcast on July 4, 1957 to accompany the New York Time’s printing of a full-page facsimile of the Declaration of Independence that same day.

Here is Senator John F. Kennedy reading the declaration of American Independence.

As 1961 drew to an end, the United States and the Soviet Union were at the height of the Cold War, and Cuba and Berlin were hot spots.

In April 1961, the United States Central Intelligence Agency had organized 1,400 armed Cuban exiles in a failed attempt to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

In July 1961, both the Soviet Union and the United States significantly increased defense spending.

On August 20, 1961, East Germany erected a five foot high concrete wall dividing East and West Berlin and on October 28, 1961, a tense, 16-hour face off occurred at the Berlin Wall between Soviet and American tanks.

On August 31, 1961, the Soviet Union began conducting aboveground nuclear tests, detonating perhaps 15 bombs during September 1961. The United States responded with its own underground nuclear tests. At the end of October, the Soviets detonated a 50-megaton H-bomb. Local newspapers advised Seattleites on how to construct and stock personal nuclear fallout shelters.

It was in this context that President John F. Kennedy arrived at Boeing Airport in Seattle, Washington on November 16, 1961 to deliver a major foreign policy speech at the University of Washington Centennial Convocation. He was also in Seattle to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington who was first elected to Congress in 1936.

President Kennedy, Senator Magnuson, and Washington Governor Albert Rosellini rode an open convertible in a 20-automobile presidential motorcade into Seattle. Spectators overflowed the streets and threw confetti from buildings. Twenty-six different bands serenaded the President.

After a brief stop at his hotel, President Kennedy proceeded to the University of Washington Edmundsen Pavilion to give his speech.

When President Kennedy entered the Pavilion, the audience of 11,000 greeted him with a “spontaneous burst of applause.” It was the President’s first talk in the Western United States since his inauguration.

President John F. Kennedy then delivered the following major foreign policy address concerning U.S. relations with the Soviet Union.

On the late Friday afternoon of July 15, 1960,John F. Kennedy appeared before a crowd of eighty thousand people in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to deliver his formal acceptance of the Democratic party’s nomination for President of the United States. Before what was at the time touted as “the largest crowd ever to hear a political speech” Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts delivered the following remarks as he accepted his party’s nomination for president of the United States.

In June 1963, President John F. Kennedy, America’s first Irish-Catholic president, journeyed to his ancestral homeland of Ireland, a homecoming he later described as “one of the most moving experiences” of his life. The President’s eight great-grandparents all migrated to Boston, Massachusetts during the devastating Potato Famine of the late 1840’s, seeking to take advantage of the economic opportunity offered in America. By the end of the century, both of President Kennedy’s grandfathers had become successful Boston politicians. On June 28, 1963 the President was invited to address a joint session of the Seanad and the Dail in Leinster House. In his opening words he referred to Patrick Hogan, Speaker of the Dail, and Prime Minister Sean Lemass. He later referred to Eamon de Valera, President of Ireland, who lived for a time in Brooklyn, N.Y. His Dáil speech was full of references to Irishmen who fought in the American War of Independence and he brought the house down by insisting on the important place for small nations in the pursuit of world peace. Kennedy’s speech to the combined houses of parliament, the first ceremony in the Dail’s legislative chamber ever seen on national television, was just the kind of talk that Ireland wanted to hear from the Irish Catholic President – flashes of easy wit, graceful literary quotations, moving praise of Ireland’s courageous history, and its contribution to culture, and to America.

President Kennedy arrived in Berlin on June 26, 1963, following appearances in Bonn, Cologne and Frankfurt. In Berlin, an immense crowd of 120,000 Berliners gathered in the Rudolph Wilde Platz near the Berlin Wall to listen to hear President Kennedy speak. They began gathering in the square long before he was due to arrive, and when President Kennedy finally appeared on the podium after having made a visit to Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall, they gave him an ovation of several minutes.

In a spirited and eloquent speech before an estimated crowd of 30,000 people in the stadium at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee on May 18, 1963, President Kennedy reminded his listeners that it falls to the educated man to assume the greater obligations of citizenship—for the pursuit of learning, to serve the public and to uphold the law.

Address of President-Elect John F. Kennedy Delivered to a Joint Convention of the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts at The State House, Boston, January 9, 1961. In the speech, which would later become known as “The City Upon a Hill” speech, Kennedy paid tribute to the early role Massachusetts played in creating a republic – he thanked the citizens of Massachusetts for a lifetime of friendship and trust -- and he laid out the four essential qualities that he hoped would characterize his government: courage, judgment, integrity and dedication.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy urged Congress and the nation to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” On September 12, 1962, President Kennedy delivered the following speech describing in greater detail his goals for the nation’s space effort before a crowd of 35,000 people in the football stadium at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

In this speech delivered on October 26, 1963, before an estimated crowd of 10,000 people at the groundbreaking ceremonies for the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College in Massachusetts, President John F. Kennedy made clear the need for a nation to represent itself not only through its strength but also through its art. The event was one of President Kennedy's last public appearances.

Address delivered by President John F. Kennedy to the United Nations General Assembly on September 25, 1961, one week after UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold had been killed in a plane crash in the Congo.

On July 25, 1963, the Unites States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom agreed to ban testing in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater. According to President Kennedy’s Special Counsel Ted Sorensen, “No other single accomplishment in the White House ever gave him greater satisfaction." On July 26, 1963, President Kennedy delivered the following radio and television address to the American people.

Address delivered by John F. Kennedy, 1960 Democratic Presidential nominee and Irish-Catholic American, to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on the subject of separation of church and state, Houston, Texas, September 12, 1960.

Radio and Television Report on the Soviet Arms Buildup in Cuba and the imposition of a Naval quarantine of Cuba delivered by President John F. Kennedy on October 22, 1962.

Televised address delivered by President John F. Kennedy on the integration of the University of Alabama and the moral crisis faced by the nation as black Americans struggled for equal rights, June 11, 1963.

Commencement address delivered by President John F. Kennedy at American University on June 10, 1963, frequently referred to as the Peace Speech.

The Inaugural Address of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy delivered on January 20, 1961 in Washington, DC.