John F. Kennedy
To determine whether a past president was great or not, is a very difficult task. You have to weight the positives of his presidency, against the negatives. There has not been one president of the United States who did not make a mistake during their tenure as leader of this great nation. There are many characteristics and attributes that several of our great presidents have had. Some of them had very different styles in the way they ran the country and many of them had contrasting ideas on their approaches to improving the nation. A great president finds a way to better the country and make it stable in everyday life for the American people. John F. Kennedy had many of the attributes that go along with being a great president. He also was very young and good looking which probably boosted his approval rating with the ladies. So if you ask an older woman today, she might say that JFK was a great president because he was so handsome. I believe that he was a great president for other reasons. Although John F. Kennedy did make his fair share of mistakes as president, his exceptional handling's of some of the tensest situations in American history prove to me that he was a great American President.
From childhood on, Kennedy suffered from a vast array of health problems. While it was true that Kennedy was unconcerned about the importance of the civil rights movement early in his presidency, by 1963, Kennedy became the first president in the nation's history to declare that all Americans, black and white, deserved equal protection under the law. To become the first president to ever declare that all citizens of the United States are equal and have the same rights, takes a lot of courage and it also sends a positive message around the world that the United States is a fair country. He cared not only of our homeland, but also other nations across the world. This declaration of equality for all men definitely put a feather in John F. Kennedy was a great president, but he probably had no greater accomplishment than the way he handled the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy was great president or not is quite tricky. In the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy persuaded Khrushchev, America's allies, and the congress to adopt the atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty, putting an end to nuclear test explosions that would spread deadly radiation across the world and endanger the lives and health of the world's population. This act alone could label him as a great president because of its significance. Critics also cite his woeful performance when confronting Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the Vienna summit in later 1961. Kennedy possessed many great attributes that enabled him to be successful. In Robert Dallek's book called, "An Unfinished Life," Dallek states the following about the situation in Berlin, "But by November 1961, Kennedy could take great satisfaction from the fact that his successful handling of the Berlin problem had forced Khrushchev to retreat. He was a fantastic speaker who used a great rhetoric to captivate his audience and listeners. Not too many presidents would have gone in front of the nation and the world, and flat out said that they screwed up. I had always heard stories about him and how he was assassinated, but I never really understood that much about the man himself.
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Acceptance Essays
