How Did JFK Burst onto the National Scene Exactly 70 Years Ago?

by Barbara A. Perry

Do you remember when young Barack Obama took the stage at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston to deliver the keynote address? If so, you will understand how a skilled public servant can launch his journey to the White House.

An Illinois state senator running for the U.S. Senate when he gave his electrifying speech four years before he ran for president, Obama arrived in Boston with an unusual African name, a best-selling book about his Kenyan father, and a stellar record at Harvard Law School, where he had been the first Black editor of its prestigious Law Review. Yet he was hardly a household name. By the time he had delivered his rousing oration, in which he told a nation polarized since the controversial 2000 Bush v. Gore election that we are not a red America or a blue American, but the United States of America, I remember thinking that his bumper sticker for a presidential run four years hence would read, “Obama ’08!” Why not make a plus out of his foreign-sounding surname?

Instead, his logo would be a shining sunrise to symbolize that, as John Kennedy had said in 1961, a torch was being passed to a new generation. “Yes we can!” “Hope and Change!” “Fired up; ready to go!” would be the catch phrases of his historic campaign to win the nomination over Hillary Clinton and defeat John McCain in 2008 to become the first Black U.S. president.

Campaign buttons pictured Obama and John F. Kennedy side by side, and, JFK’s brother Senator Edward Kennedy and daughter Caroline Kennedy bolstered the Barack’s chances of winning the nomination when they announced their support for him early in the contest with Senator Clinton. Caroline published in the New York Times an op-ed, “A President Like My Father,” that explained how people had always told how inspirational her father had been to them, and she always wanted to find her own inspiration. Now she had in Barack Obama, who had won his U.S. Senate seat in 2004. As president, he would name her the American ambassador to Japan, where she would meet the widow of a Japanese destroyer captain who nearly killed JKF when his ship sliced the future president’s PT boat in half, as it patrolled one August 1943 night in the South Pacific.

Like Obama, Jack Kennedy was not a household name when he appeared at the 1956 Democratic Convention in Chicago, but he had a head start on the Illinois senator. JFK’s two grandfathers were Boston politicians, with John F. (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald having served in the U.S. House of Representatives and as Boston’s mayor. Kennedy’s father, Joseph Sr., had served in the Franklin Roosevelt presidency, culminating in FDR’s appointment of him as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom just prior to World War II.

After Jack’s 1940 graduation from Harvard, he volunteered for combat duty in the Solomon Islands during the Second World War, and his heroic story of surviving the crash with a Japanese destroyer and saving his remaining crew made headlines. In 1946, he won a U.S. House seat, serving three terms, and then moving on to the Senate in 1953.

His father had been a Hollywood film producer before entering the FDR administration, and Jack was media savvy as television came on the scene. The Democratic Party asked him to narrate the 1956 convention’s PR film on the party’s history. His distinctive Boston brogue immediately differentiated him from most of the other politicians, along with his youthful appearance, shock of auburn hair, winning smile, and modern wardrobe. He delivered an inspiring nomination testimonial for the party’s presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson. Foreshadowing the pithy phrasing that would become the hallmark of Kennedy speeches, the senator asserted: “The time is ripe. The hour has struck. The man is here; and is ready. Let the word go forth that we fulfilled our responsibility to the nation.” He took pride in writing in his own hand the speech’s conclusion and signing a photograph of him delivering it.

The New York Times captured Kennedy’s charismatic essence: “Senator Kennedy came before the convention tonight as a photogenic movie star.”

Stevenson opened the choice of his vice-presidential running mate to the delegates, and, on the spur of the moment, JFK tossed his metaphorical hat into the ring. He made a respectable showing but recognized that Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver would best him in the vote count. Making his rise to prominence even more noteworthy, Kennedy earned the party’s respect by graciously returning to the stage to thank delegates who had supported him and then calling for unanimous approval of his senate colleague to join the Stevenson ticket.

Proof of JFK’s good fortune was that while the Stevenson ticket went down to a landslide defeat by incumbent president Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy emerged as a legitimate contender for the 1960 nomination. And, as his perceptive father noted, it was a blessing in disguise for Jack to avoid the doomed 1956 ticket. Its loss might have been blamed on Kennedy’s Catholicism, preventing him for contending four years hence and becoming the first Catholic president in 1961.

Dr. Barbara A. Perry is J. Wilson Newman Professor in Presidential Studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, where she co-directs the Presidential Oral History Program. She is a member of the Friends Board of the JFK National Historic Site. Her latest book is Reconcilable Differences: The Unlikely Political Alliance of John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt. She will speak on it at the JFK Presidential Library, in Boston, November 9, 2026, at 7 PM.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia