USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) was the last conventionally powered aircraft carrier built by the United States Navy. She was commissioned in 1968 and decommissioned in 2007, a career that stretched from the Vietnam War through the Cold War through Desert Storm through Operation Iraqi Freedom — four decades that encompassed nearly every major chapter of postwar American naval history. When she was retired, she was the last of a line: every carrier that followed her into service was nuclear powered, and the Navy has not built a conventionally powered carrier since. Kennedy was the end of something, though her crew didn't know that at her commissioning, and wouldn't have cared if they had. She was a capable warship and they had a job to do.
The Ship
USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) was commissioned on September 7, 1968, at Norfolk, Virginia, and named for the thirty-fifth President of the United States — a Navy veteran of the Pacific War who had commanded PT-109 in the Solomon Islands and whose assassination in November 1963 had made naming a ship after him both an obligation and a tribute. She was classified as a unique design — she incorporated lessons from the Kitty Hawk class but had modifications that set her apart, including an angled stack and improved aviation fuel systems. She displaced more than 80,000 tons fully loaded, carried an air wing of approximately eighty aircraft, and was homeported at Norfolk, Virginia, for most of her career, with a later homeporting at Mayport, Florida.
The Career
Kennedy's career was long enough to encompass transformations in carrier aviation that would have been unrecognizable to her commissioning crew. She deployed to the Mediterranean repeatedly during the Cold War, maintaining the presence that deterred Soviet naval ambitions in the region. She deployed to the Red Sea for Operation Desert Storm in 1991, with Carrier Air Wing Three embarked, flying strikes against Iraqi targets as part of the Red Sea carrier force. She deployed to the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf after September 11, contributing to Operation Enduring Freedom and the broader war on terrorism. By the end of her career, the aircraft on her deck — F/A-18 Super Hornets, EA-6B Prowlers, E-2C Hawkeyes — were unimaginable in 1968, when her commissioning crew had reported aboard to an air wing that included F-4 Phantoms and A-4 Skyhawks.
The men and women who served aboard Kennedy across four decades represent something like a cross-section of American naval service during the most consequential period of the Cold War and its aftermath. The Mediterranean cruises of the 1970s and 1980s, the Desert Storm deployment, the post-9/11 deployments — each generation of Kennedy's crew lived a different version of the same fundamental experience: a carrier at sea, an air wing flying, a mission to execute.
The Last Conventional Carrier
Kennedy's decommissioning in 2007 closed a chapter in American carrier history. The conventionally powered carriers — oil-fired ships with their distinctive stacks and their dependence on underway replenishment of fuel — had been the standard American carrier from the first fleet carriers of the 1920s through Kennedy herself. The nuclear carriers that replaced them could steam indefinitely without fuel, eliminating a logistical constraint that had shaped carrier operations for decades. The trade-off was cost and complexity. The Navy decided, after Kennedy, that nuclear propulsion was worth both. She was the last argument against that decision, and she made the argument for forty years before the Navy finally retired it.
If you served aboard USS John F. Kennedy or want to honor someone who did, browse the full Kennedy collection — cruise shirts, license plate frames, and more.
Legacy
USS John F. Kennedy was decommissioned on March 23, 2007. Efforts to preserve her as a museum ship have been ongoing, with the ship spending years in various states of preservation consideration. Whether she ultimately becomes a museum or is scrapped, her record stands: the last conventionally powered carrier, forty years of service, every major deployment from Vietnam to Iraq. The crew that brought her home in 2007 was the last crew of the last ship of her kind. They knew what they were sailing in. They served it well.