Just five months into his presidency, he was reeling from two political blows: the first, on April 12, when the Soviets sent cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space — getting a human into orbit before the Americans — and the second, less than a week later, with the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba.
On the ropes, the Kennedy administration needed a win. So, the president stood and delivered a 46-minute, nearly 6,000-word speech that required 81 printed pages for him to read in a time before teleprompters.
Against the backdrop of the Cold War, the speech covered several topics, including…
