On September 7, 1968, the United States Navy commissioned what would turn out to be the last conventionally powered aircraft carrier it would ever build. She was 1,052 feet long, carried 80 aircraft and 5,000 men, and bore the name of a president assassinated five years earlier. USS John F. Kennedy (CVA-67) entered the fleet as a political compromise and served for 39 years as one of the most capable warships in American history. The argument over whether she should have existed never really ended. Neither did the argument that she was worth it.
The Last of the Conventionals
By the mid-1960s, the Navy's carrier program was caught in a debate that went to the highest levels of government. The first nuclear-powered carrier, USS Enterprise (CVAN-65), had commissioned in 1961 and proved the concept — unlimited range, no need for fuel, extraordinary operational flexibility. The Navy wanted more nuclear carriers. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did not. Nuclear propulsion was expensive, the reactors required specialized training, and the conventional carriers he was proposing were cheaper to build even if more expensive to operate over time.
Congress sided with conventional power for the ship that would become Kennedy. She was laid down in 1964 at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, the same yard that had built Enterprise and most of America's carriers before her. What emerged from the yard in 1968 was a modified Kitty Hawk-class design — some consider her a class of one — with an improved flight deck layout and updated electronics. She was optimized for conventional carrier aviation in a way her predecessors had not been, and she was, by any measure, an extraordinarily capable ship.
From Norfolk to Mayport
Kennedy spent most of her early career homeported at Norfolk, Virginia, before eventually shifting to Naval Air Station Mayport in Florida. The Atlantic was her ocean — the Mediterranean was her beat, the Cold War her context. She made deployment after deployment to the Sixth Fleet, operating with NATO allies, projecting American power across the sea lanes that connected North America to Europe at a time when Soviet ambitions made those lanes anything but assured.
Life aboard Kennedy was life aboard any big-deck carrier: the organized chaos of a floating city doing complex industrial work in an uncontrolled environment. Her flight deck was the focus of everything, the place where the mission either happened or didn't, and the thousands of crew below decks existed to ensure it happened. Snipes kept the steam plants running. Electronics technicians kept the sensors operational. Aviation ordnance crews kept the weapons ready. The ship was a machine that turned all of that effort into aircraft in the air, and she was good at it.
Incident at Sea
On November 22, 1975 — the twelfth anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination, a date that was not lost on anyone aboard — Kennedy was operating in the Mediterranean when USS Belknap (CG-26), a guided missile cruiser operating in company, crossed under her bow and the ships collided. Belknap's aluminum superstructure, raked by jet fuel that ignited, burned fiercely. Seven sailors died in the fire. The ship survived but was devastated. Kennedy's crew contributed to the damage control effort that saved Belknap from sinking entirely.
The Belknap incident had lasting effects on the Navy's ship design philosophy. The use of aluminum in superstructures — chosen for its light weight — was reconsidered after the fire demonstrated how catastrophically it burned compared to steel. The lessons were absorbed, as the Navy's hard lessons always are, at a cost that no one wanted to pay.
The Cold War and After
Kennedy served through the Cold War's entire late arc — the tensions of the 1970s, Reagan's buildup of the 1980s, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. She outlasted the threat she was built to counter and found new purpose in a world that turned out to be complicated in different ways. She deployed during operations in the Persian Gulf, contributed to the no-fly zones over Iraq in the 1990s, and in the months following September 11, 2001, deployed to the fight against terrorism in what would be among her final cruises.
By the early 2000s, Kennedy was the oldest active carrier in the fleet and one of the last conventionally powered ones. The Nimitz class nuclear carriers had become the standard, and the Navy's future was charted toward nuclear power exclusively. The arguments that had defined her construction — conventional versus nuclear, cost versus capability — had been settled in favor of the nuclear side.
Decommissioning
USS John F. Kennedy was decommissioned on August 1, 2007, after 39 years of service. At the time of her decommissioning, she was the last conventionally powered carrier still in active service — a distinction that also made her the end of a line that stretched back to the first steam-powered carriers of the 1950s. When the colors came down for the last time, an era in American naval aviation came down with them.
The sailors who served aboard Kennedy served on a ship that was a compromise, a controversy, and a workhorse. She wasn't what the Navy wanted when they built her. She turned out to be exactly what her crew made her: a ship that answered every assignment for nearly four decades and then came home.
If you served aboard Kennedy or want to honor someone who did, browse the full USS John F. Kennedy collection — cruise shirts, license plate frames, and gear honoring Big John and all who served aboard her.