J.F.K. Administration

The Kennedy Cabinet
Office	Name	Term
President	John F. Kennedy	1961–1963
Vice President	Lyndon B. Johnson	1961–1963
Secretary of State	Dean Rusk	1961–1963
Secretary of Treasury	C. Douglas Dillon	1961–1963
Secretary of Defense	Robert McNamara	1961–1963
Attorney General	Robert F. Kennedy	1961–1963
Postmaster General	J. Edward Day	1961–1963
	John A. Gronouski	1963
Secretary of the Interior	Stewart Udall	1961–1963
Secretary of Agriculture	Orville Freeman	1961–1963
Secretary of Commerce	Luther H. Hodges	1961–1963
Secretary of Labor	Arthur Goldberg	1961–1962
	W. Willard Wirtz	1962–1963
Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare	Abraham A. Ribicoff	1961–1962
	Anthony J. Celebrezze	1962–1963

The presidency of John F. Kennedy began on January 20, 1961, when Kennedy was inaugurated as the 35th President of the United States, and ended on November 22, 1963, upon his assassination and death, a span of 1,036 days. A Democrat, he took office following the 1960 presidential election, in which he narrowly defeated Richard Nixon. He was succeeded by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Kennedy was the first person born in the 20th century to be elected president, and, at age 43, the youngest person elected to the office. He was also the first Roman Catholic elected to the presidency. Kennedy played an important role in bringing American politics into the modern communications age, as his use of television provided a campaign model that spoke to voters directly, and his media presidency greatly weakened the power of political machines in party politics.

Kennedy's time in office was marked by Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union and especially with Cuba. In Cuba, a failed attempt was made in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. Kennedy's administration subsequently rejected plans by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to orchestrate false-flag attacks on American soil in order to gain public approval for a war against Cuba. In October 1962, it was discovered that Soviet ballistic missiles had been deployed in Cuba; the resulting period of unease, termed the Cuban Missile Crisis, is seen by many historians as the closest the human race has ever come to nuclear war between nuclear-armed belligerents. To contain Communist expansion in Asia, Kennedy increased the number of American military advisers in South Vietnam by a factor of 18 over his predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower; a further escalation of the American role in the Vietnam War would take place after Kennedy's death.

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