Kent Barker Collection / The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
January 2, 1960
JFK ENTERS THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE
Senator Kennedy announces his candidacy for President of the United States.
Listen to an excerpt from the oral history interview with Jacques Lowe, the Kennedys' personal photographer for many years, by clicking "Find out more."
Image: Kennedy's presidential campaign button features his face on a background of red, white and blue stripes.
Join The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza for a Conversation with Dr. Toni Glover. Dr. Glover will be in conversation with Curator Stephen Fagin about her eyewitness account of the Presidential motorcade as an eleven-year-old schoolgirl on November 22, 1963, and her research into how the assassination affected others of her generation.
Dr. Glover is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania. She has studied the impact of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on individuals’ lives – particularly 1960s school children – and is in the process of writing an autobiographical novel. Dr. Glover recorded oral histories with The Sixth Floor Museum in 1999 and 2012.
The Museum presents an evening with social psychologist Dr. James W. Pennebaker on the psychological impact of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As a social psychologist at SMU, in 1988 Dr. Pennebaker led a multi-part academic study to investigate the psychological and emotional impact of the Kennedy assassination on Dallas. The study monitored visitors touring the then-empty sixth floor of the former Texas School Book Depository Building and conducted a survey with hundreds of participants. Then in the 90s, he conducted a similar study centered on the newly opened Sixth Floor Museum and its impact on visitors and their views of Dallas and the assassination.
Ticketed guests are invited for a wine reception prior to the program. This event is part of a paired series that includes an event the following evening on Wednesday, November 20, A Child’s View of Dealey Plaza, an Evening with Dr. Toni Glover. Joint tickets for both programs are $40, individual programs are $25. Museum members receive discounted ticket pricing. Contact membership@jfk.org to learn more.
Dr. Pennebaker is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. His research studies the relationship between natural language use, health, and social behavior. In the 1980s and 1990s, he taught at Southern Methodist University and chaired the Psychology Department, and in 1997 he donated his Kennedy-related research materials to The Sixth Floor Museum and recorded an oral history in 2008. The author or editor of twelve books and more than 300 articles, Dr. Pennebaker has received numerous research and teaching awards and honors for his work. Dr. Pennebaker invented the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a computerized text analysis program that outputs the percentage of words in a given text that fall into one or more of over 80 linguistic, psychological, and topical categories. The software is considered the gold standard for analyzing word use. It can be used to study a single individual, groups of people over time, or all of social media. Pennebaker and his collaborators have used LIWC to analyze the language of Al Qaeda leaders and of political candidates, particularly in the 2008 United States presidential election.
Join The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza for an exclusive lunch and learn experience on Friday, November 22 (61st anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy) with presidential historian Marc Selverstone in conversation with fellow presidential scholar Jeffrey Engel as they discuss Selverstone’s book The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam.
In October 1963, the United States publicly proposed the removal of American troops from Vietnam, earning President John F. Kennedy an enduring reputation as a skeptic on the war. In fact, Kennedy was ambivalent about withdrawal and was largely detached from its planning. Its details were the handiwork of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who turned a loosely defined presidential aspiration into a systemic program for a U.S. troop withdrawal. Its announcement in October 1963 ultimately served Kennedy’s political needs, allowing him to limit American involvement while preserving the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam.
Program tickets include a copy of the book and a light lunch reception. Book signing to follow the program. Tickets do not include Museum admission.
Museum members receive discounted ticket pricing. Contact membership@jfk.org to learn more.
Marc J. Selverstone is Professor and Director of Presidential Studies and Co-Chair of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. He is the author of The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (Harvard, 2022) and Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945-1950 (Harvard, 2009), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is also the editor of A Companion to John F. Kennedy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), general editor of The Presidential Recordings Digital Edition (Virginia, 2014–), and co-editor of the Miller Center “Studies on the Presidency” series with the University of Virginia Press.
About Jeffrey A. Engel
Jeffrey A. Engel is the David Gergen Director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.
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