American History: Kennedy Becomes President
12 October 2011
President John F. Kennedy gives his inaugural address at the Capitol building
STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION – American history in VOA Special English. I’m Steve Ember
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We begin this week's story on January twentieth, nineteen sixty-one, the day John Fitzgerald Kennedy became president of the United States.
It had snowed heavily the night before. Few cars were in the streets of Washington.
The outgoing president, Dwight Eisenhower, was seventy years old. John Kennedy was just forty-three. He was the first American president born in the twentieth century.
Both Eisenhower and Kennedy served in World War Two. Eisenhower had been commander of allied forces in Europe. Kennedy had been a young Navy officer in the Pacific.
He came from a politically influential family from Boston, Massachusetts, but he was a fresh face in national politics. To millions of Americans, he represented a chance for a new beginning.
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Not everyone liked him, however. Many people thought he was too young to be president. Others did not like the idea of electing the nation's first Roman Catholic president.
Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, ran against Kennedy in the election of nineteen sixty. Many people believed Nixon was a stronger opponent of communism than Kennedy.
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