Kennedy and the Spark of Progress John F. Kennedy was the thirty-fifth President of the United States for two years, from 1961 to 1963. His term ended abruptly when he was shot in Dallas, Texas. Before starting, Kennedy realized that his Presidency was to be through a difficult and potentially divisive period, and made efforts to minimize this as much as possible. A prime example of this is in the speech that he gave at his inauguration. With it, he attempted to spur everyone in the US, and even the world, into uniting to form an alliance against our, “common enemies.” Although he seemingly didn’t accomplish much in the short term, in the long term, Kennedy was quite effective. When Kennedy gave his first speech as President in early 1961, it was at a very tense period in our country’s history. There were a lot of differing ideas on what should be done to deal with the problems currently being seen in the world. Not only were new issues appearing, but many old ones that the founding fathers had struggled with were still unsolved. Before Kennedy could even attempt to bring about solutions to anything, he needed to unify his …show more content…
With only two years as President, it would have been strange if he had been able to personally accomplish everything he wished to see, but Kennedy knew that even with four years, he wouldn’t have been able to accomplish everything: “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days[,] the first one thousand days[,] in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.” Admittedly, a lot of his efforts went unfulfilled as a result of his untimely death, but the spark of them was there due to Kennedy’s exceptional planning. For example, in this same speech, Kennedy called for the expansion of the United Nations, and since then the number of countries in the UN has doubled. Out of the 196 countries in the world, 193 are in the