Page 112 – LIFE

JFK: Portraits of a Political Superstar, 1947-1963

December 30, 2019May 8, 2014 by

Not many public figures from the middle part of the 20th century are as closely identified with LIFE magazine as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. From his days as a decorated war hero in the late 1940s, through his years as a senator, into the White House and up until the very moment of his assassination, LIFE photographers spent an enormous amount of time (and film) on the ambitious Democrat from Massachusetts.

That he married a woman as magnetic and stylish as the former Jacqueline Bouvier essentially guaranteed that the two young cultural and political icons would never be absent from the weekly’s pages for long.

Here, LIFE.com features a series of photographs some classics, some rare, that were made during the decade and a half when John Kennedy was on his way to becoming, for a time, the most powerful person on earth.

Buy the LIFE book, The Day Kennedy Died

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Rep. John F. Kennedy, 1947

Al Fenn/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Senatorial candidate John F. Kennedy attended a tea party given by female supporters, 1952.

Yale Joel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sen. John Kennedy in Cape Cod with his fiancee, Jacqueline Bouvier, 1953.

Hy Peskin Collection

John and Jackie Kennedy at their wedding reception, September 1953.

Lisa Larsen/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Senator John F. Kennedy, 1957.

Hank Walker/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John and Robert Kennedy at a hearing of a Senate select committee on labor racketeering, 1957.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sen. John Kennedy played football with his nephew, Bobby Jr., at his brother Robert’s Hickory Hill, Va., home, 1957.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John and Jackie Kennedy with their baby daughter, Caroline, in their Georgetown home, 1958.

Nina Leen/ Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John Kennedy with his daughter Caroline in 1958.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

In a picture that he later called his favorite photo of himself, Senator John F. Kennedy walked the dunes near Hyannis Port, Mass., 1959.

Mark Shaw/mptvimages.com

JFK Campaigning, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy gave a speech while standing on a kitchen chair in West Virginia’s coal country, 1960.

Hank Walker/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Kennedy campaigned in West Virginia, 1960.

Hank Walker/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles, 1960

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John and Robert Kennedy conferred in a Los Angeles hotel suite during the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

Hank Walker/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy rode in a car with his wife Jackie upon his return home from Democratic National Convention in 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sen. John Kennedy with his young daughter Caroline at home after he was named the Democratic Party presidential candidate in 1960.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sen. John F. Kennedy on a private plane during his presidential campaign, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Young female supporters of Sen. John F. Kennedy awaited his arrival at a campaign appearance in Michigan, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Senator John F. Kennedy checked over a speech at a stop during his presidential campaign, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon at the time of their famous television debates, 1960.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John Kennedy on the campaign trail, 1960.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President-elect John F. Kenned, his wife Jackie and others walked to JFK’s inauguration, January 1961.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Marian Anderson sang at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, 1961.

George Silk/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President Harry Truman signed President John Kennedy’s program at a luncheon after JFK’s inauguration, 1961.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jaqueline in their box at his Inaugural Ball, January 1961.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office, 1961.

Cornell Capa Magnum

Boyd Leedom (a member of the National Labor Relations Board), President John F. Kennedy, Senator Frank W. Carlson, the Rev. Billy Graham and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1961.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President John Kennedy tossed out the first ball of the season at a baseball game, 1961.

Joe Scherschel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President John Kennedy pinned NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal on Alan Shepard’s chest, 1961.

Joe Scherschel/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President John F. Kennedy met with former President Dwight Eisenhower at Camp David in the midst of the Bay of Pigs crisis, 1961.

Ed Clark/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John F. Kennedy in the White House, 1961.

Paul Schutzer/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

People in a department store watched as President John Kennedy announced a blockade of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962.

Ralph Crane/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

During a visit to West Germany President John F. Kennedy looked over a section of the Berlin Wall, June 1963.

John Dominis Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President John Kennedy signed autographs during his landmark visit to Ireland in June 1963.

John Dominis/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy (standing at window) in the Oval Office, 1962.

Art Rickerby/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Vintage Vegas: Scenes From a Desert Boomtown

December 30, 2019May 8, 2014 by

Of all the major destination towns in the U.S., Las Vegas might be the most perfectly, unashamedly transparent. No other city in North America, after all has for so long been so identified with one pursuit: namely, the heart-pounding, more-often-than-not-futile hunt for the improbable, near-mythic Big Score.

And the fact that Las Vegas resembles a gaudy neon mirage in the desert? Well, surely no more apt an image could apply to a place where dreams of riches, and occasionally of romance go to die.

But Las Vegas is also a place where dreams, large and small, are just as frequently born. Hotel and casino owners dream of founding (or furthering) their financial empires. Singers, dancers, comedians and magicians dream of performing night after night before rapt crowds. The unemployed from all over the U.S. dream of finding work.

In 1955, 50 years after Las Vegas was founded, LIFE magazine took a rather skeptical look at the boomtown and its prospects for growth in a cover story titled “Gambling Town Pushes Its Luck.” The Loomis Dean pictures in this gallery, meanwhile (many of which were never published) provide some wonderful visual reminders of how raw a place Las Vegas was in the mid-’50s, before the Rat Pack made the city its home away from home and decades before it would begin to reinvent itself as a family-friendly mecca.

Some of the pictures appeared in the June 20, 1955, issue of LIFE, in an article that described the city as “set for its biggest boom,” with some caveats:

In Las Vegas last week the temperature was up to a torrid 110 degrees and the townsfolk who operate the only large gambling center in the country welcomed the seasonable weather. With it they expected the usual bountiful summer crop of tourists trying out their luck and leaving their money behind. The sign of good times seemed everywhere. . . . But with all this a shadow of doubt fell across Las Vegas, a worry that the bloom it was set for has started to wilt.

In the past month, two new top-notch hotels opened. One was the $5 million Dunes, which lugged 120 slot machines in anticipation of the rush. The other was the Moulin Rouge, the first interracial hotel in Las Vegas, which welcomed whites and Negroes to its accommodations and gambling tables. It had Joe Louis as part-owner and host, and a lively, lovely chorus in its floor show.

Like a gambler on a prolonged winning streak, Las Vegas had the feeling its run of luck couldn’t end. For more than a decade, it had parlayed one prosperous year into a more prosperous next year and went into the expansion more in the spirit of hunch than of calculated economics. The opening of the new hotels and of what Las Vegas hoped would be a new era of money-making was opulent and promising. . . . But when the excitement of the opening died down, the town looked at its new places—where customers were scarce and the betting was light—and wondered: Has Vegas pushed its luck too far?

That question, of course, has come up repeatedly over the years, as the desert city has steadily grown from a 100-acre (40 hectare) railroad town in 1905 to a sprawling metropolis today. But no matter the odds, Las Vegas has thus far always seemed to have one more ace in the hole, one more trick up its sleeve to keep the lights on, the casino floors humming and the dreamers, the players and the suckers coming back over and over again.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Las Vegas, Nevada 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, Nevada 1955

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, 1955. A little-used pool at one of the city’s newest hotels.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A billboard for the under-construction El Morocco Hotel, Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A billboard for the under-construction Tropicana, Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A prop slot machine backstage at the Royal Nevada Hotel and Casino.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis DeanThe LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Idling croupiers (in shirtsleeves) dawdled behind their roulette tables because few customers were placing bets in The Dunes two weeks after opening night.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The crap tables at the Dunes were tried by Jake Freedman (center), the owner of the rival Sands club. He lost $10,000 before deciding his luck was off that night.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, Nevada 1955

Loomis Dean Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas casino, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Las Vegas, 1955.

Loomis Dean/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

New York Groovy: City Fashions from the Summer of 1969

August 12, 2021May 6, 2014 by

Summertime in pretty much any city is a different experience than any other season, but summer in New York is another world. Many of the people who can afford to escape Gotham in July and August usually do so, and even if their numbers are relatively small among the city’s eight million souls, the extra elbow room that their absence provides the rest of us on the streets, at the museums and in the parks, bars and restaurants lends the metropolis a far less frenetic vibe.

It’s not that the city’s unique energy vanishes; instead, it’s directed toward the pursuit of leisure—street fairs, picnics and plays in the parks, free concerts, people-watching rather than New Yorkers’ customary quests for money, power, fame, an apartment with two bathrooms. . .

In the summer, despite baking in the sweltering heat, encountering undefinable and often jarring aromas around every street corner and dealing with the constant prospect of citywide blackouts, New Yorkers give themselves license to slow down. To cease striving. To breathe.

In August 1969, meanwhile, LIFE magazine was busy celebrating not the season itself, but the eye-popping fashions that the “young people” which, judging by these pictures, meant anyone under the age of 40 were sporting during the summer months. In a cover story shot by photographer Vernon Merritt III, LIFE lauded “That New York Look” with an almost poetic zeal:

New York City is a costume party for the young this summer, a party taking place outdoors, on the streets and in the parks. Long hair, long legs. The party is not always elegant, but it is completely alive.

It isn’t really hard to tell the boys from the girls, even when they are both in bell-bottoms, and of course most boys don’t put shoe polish on their eyes. All are wearing what they want to to wear, from the shortest skirts to the longest skins.

How they look depends partly on where they go. The ferry is different from a Seventh Avenue lunch stand and very different from Central Park.

The look is not what New York calls sophisticated, but even so, it catches the eye. Many of the girls seem to get their kicks with makeup. They wear it anywhere absolutely anywhere.

The important thing is to express yourself. Depending on your talents you can do it with a 25-key soprano Melodica or a long, cool stare. You choose. The New York look is a celebration of the self.

Here, in recognition of the singular look and feel of that long-ago New York summer, LIFE.com presents a number of the photographs that ran in the “New York Look” article, as well as some other, atmospheric shots that did not run in LIFE.

Young couple with a balloon in Central Park, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Young couple on the Staten Island Ferry, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A couple on the street in New York, summer 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Young people at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

New York City, summer, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Private party on the balcony of a New York City apartment building, summer 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

New York City, summer, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Young people at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, summer 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

New York City, summer, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Hare Krishna devotees wore traditional saffron robes and chanted in a New York park, summer 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

New York City, summer, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Central Park, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Central Park, summer, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

New York City, summer, 1969.

Vernon Merritt III/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

LIFE Magazine, Aug. 22, 1969.

LIFE Magazine

Political Fashion Statements From the 1952 Presidential Campaign

October 29, 2020May 6, 2014 by

These days, if you want to wear your politics on your sleeve, you don a campaign t-shirt. But in 1952, LIFE photographer Nina Leen captured models who were supporting presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower in much grander fashion. As these photographs attest, wearing pins, gloves, stockings and clothing that declared “I Like Ike” illustrated that political statements can be fashionable, too.

Of course, we wouldn’t go so far as to declare that these fashions played a central role in Eisenhower’s landslide victory over Democrat Adlai Stevenson in November of that year. But they probably didn’t hurt.

Finally, a note about the fifth slide in this gallery, featuring a woman in a dress emblazoned with the phrase “Daft About Taft” — a reference to Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio, who challenged Eisenhower for the GOP nomination in 1952. It’s worth remembering that just because a slogan rhymes doesn’t mean that it one should use it — especially if the implication is that the candidate’s supporters might be a little cuckoo.

Liz Ronk, who edited this gallery, is the Photo Editor for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Political Fashion, ‘I Like Ike,’ 1952

Nina Leen The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Eiffel Tower: A Paris Landmark Captured in a Classic Photo

January 17, 2020May 5, 2014 by

The popular French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850 – 1893) reportedly ate lunch in the Eiffel Tower’s restaurant every day for years—not because he loved the great iron monument but because, so the story goes, it was the only place in Paris where he could sit and not see the tower itself. Maupassant, like countless French artists and aestheticians of the late 19th century, despised Gustave Eiffel’s creation, seeing it as a vulgar eyesore and a blight on their beloved Parisian skyline.

Whatever. For the rest of the world, the Eiffel Tower is and has long been one of the singular architectural emblems anywhere on earth: a formidable, graceful, soaring structure that connotes Paris as surely and as indelibly as the Empire State Building, Il Duomo, Hagia Sophia and other enduring landmarks signify their own great, respective cities.

Here, LIFE considers the phenomenal edifice through a single picture: Dmitri Kessel’s classic 1948 portrait of La Dame de Fer as seen on a winter’s day.

Perhaps it’s the absence of a single, visible human form that lends Kessel’s photograph its timeless power. Maybe it’s the ill-defined look of the structure, almost phantasmal as it looms in the Parisian fog, that somehow draws the viewer even deeper into the scene—as if, given enough time, the fog itself might clear and, even as we watch, the spire might grow more defined in the stark winter light.

Whatever the source of this one picture’s abiding appeal, the allure of the tower itself remains undimmed 125 years after wondering, awestruck crowds first encountered what was then, and remained for the next four decades, the tallest manmade structure on the planet.

Eiffel Tower, 1948

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Behind the Picture: ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’

November 6, 2020May 4, 2014 by

Triumph. That’s the look on President Harry Truman’s face. Sheer, unadulterated triumph. In fact, of the countless politics-related photographs made over, say, the past century, one would be hard-pressed to point to a more famous image than W. Eugene Smith‘s shot of an ebullient Truman holding aloft a copy of the Chicago Tribune emblazoned with the now-legendary (erroneous) headline: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.

The reason for the picture’s immortality? It’s not the headline itself although that titanic error is, in its own way, rather marvelous—the screw-up was the result of an early press time and a poor prediction. Instead, the picture endures because of the look of unabashed, in-your-face delight in Truman’s eyes.

First, a brief discussion of the ’48 election itself. In what is generally regarded as the greatest upset in American political history, Truman beat the heavily-favored Republican governor of New York, Thomas Dewey, by a substantial Electoral College margin, 303 to 189, but by fewer than three million votes in the popular vote. (The right-wing, stridently segregationist “Dixiecrat” nominee, Strom Thurmond, won four states—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and his home state of South Carolina—and 39 electoral votes in 1948.)

A full two days after the election, the president was on his way back to Washington from his home in Independence, Mo., when his train stopped in St. Louis. There, someone handed Truman a two-day-old copy of the Tribune. (One version has a staffer serendipitously finding the paper under a seat in the station.)

Maybe Truman had already heard about the Republican-leaning Trib‘s embarrassing snafu, but he had not yet held a copy in his hands. Perhaps this was the first time he had any inkling of how huge and how hugely mistaken the headline actually was. However it shook out, in Smith’s photograph of that priceless moment, Truman’s elation upon coming face to face with the dead-wrong assertion of his defeat is positively palpable.

Seeing the image today, in the world of the 24/7 news cycle, it’s hard to believe that the photograph was not made on election night. After all, in an age of 24/7 news, when more and more media consumers get their breaking news via tweets and friends’ Facebook posts, two days can seem like a lifetime.

But the thrill evident in the face of the man holding that paper remains as indelible today as when it was captured all those years ago. It’s a defining image of more than a politician. The picture captures the feeling of sweet, improbable victory for a person who had been counted out too soon.

Harry Truman

A jubilant Harry Truman held up a Chicago newspaper emblazoned with the (erroneous) headline, “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN,” St. Louis, November 4, 1948. (W. Eugene Smith / LIFE Picture Collection)

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JFK: Portraits of a Political Superstar, 1947-1963

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New York Groovy: City Fashions from the Summer of 1969

Political Fashion Statements From the 1952 Presidential Campaign

The Eiffel Tower: A Paris Landmark Captured in a Classic Photo

Behind the Picture: ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’

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