John F. Kennedy: Inaugural Address

Only rarely do speeches reverberate through the decades, remaining as fresh and hopeful as has John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address. The speech is as laden with quotable lines as Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill. Each year Kennedy’s address is included in more than twenty anthologies; it is one of the most quoted inaugural addresses. Since Kennedy’s inauguration as the nation’s thirty-fifth president, the speech has served as a comparative standard for subsequent inaugural speeches.