It’s been 65 years since John F. Kennedy first spoke of America’s “New Frontier.” This was his rallying cry for the nation, urging citizens to be bold and courageous in their vision for solutions for not just the US but also the world’s most pressing problems. “It would be easier to shrink from that New Frontier, to look to the safe mediocrity of the past, to be lulled by good intentions and high rhetoric,” Kennedy declared in July of 1960.
The New Frontier, what would become the centerpiece of John F. Kennedy’s all-too-brief presidential administration, was a call to a higher purpose: an idealistic demand that the nation and its citizens use their creativity, courage and imagination to foster widespread domestic and global progress and uplift. Kennedy’s administrative vision promised a government that would aggressively work to address economic inequality, expand opportunity, explore new questions of “science and space,” offer peace while preventing war and address “unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice.”
Though Kennedy’s lofty agenda imagined America at the global forefront of progress in the 1960s, these ideas so changed the national landscape and imagination that they also continued to shape American social and political attitudes for generations. In December 1963, when an inconsolable Jackie Kennedy Onassis described her late husband’s presidential era as an “American Camelot,” she succinctly characterized a mood and a mythos that would come to define John F. Kennedy’s legacy.
Kennedy’s vision and agenda were not without flaws. The era was far from the utopian Camelot suggested by uncritical romanticized mythology. But that mythology has both resonated and persisted for so long because of the actual enduring accomplishments of President Kennedy’s administration. Kennedy made good on his audacious executive promise of collective effort and progress. He proposed and sometimes successfully instituted a flurry of transformative executive orders, programs and bills. In 1961, he established both the Peace Corps, a tangible embodiment of American service abroad, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as an institutionalized form of advancing diplomatic “soft power” in developing nations.
As president, Kennedy championed the “moonshot,” a daring scientific feat that captured the imagination of a nation and demonstrated the boundless potential of cooperative American innovation.
He argued that government should spend money on people, and advocated for the expansion of the federal social safety net, including an increase in the federal minimum wage, new federal subsidies in impoverished rural and urban areas, federal assistance in education, healthcare protections for the elderly and expanded federal funding for mental health initiatives.
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