John F. Kennedy

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts, the second of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy ^[1]. Both sides of the family were prominent in Boston Irish Catholic politics. His maternal grandfather, John F. Fitzgerald, had served as mayor of Boston, while his father built a fortune in banking, film, and securities before serving as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and as United States ambassador to Great Britain ^[2].

Kennedy's childhood was comfortable but marked by persistent illness. He suffered from scarlet fever as a small boy and endured a string of ailments through adolescence, including undiagnosed digestive and back problems that would trouble him for the rest of his life ^[3]. He attended Choate, a Connecticut boarding school, where teachers noted a quick mind paired with indifferent study habits.

He enrolled at Harvard College in 1936. A trip through Europe in 1939, while his father served in London, gave him a close view of the continent sliding toward war. His senior thesis on Britain's slow rearmament was published in 1940 as Why England Slept, and the book became a bestseller when its 23 year old author was barely out of college ^[1].

Kennedy joined the United States Navy in 1941 after being initially rejected by the Army because of his back. In the South Pacific he commanded a patrol torpedo boat, PT 109. On the night of August 1, 1943, a Japanese destroyer rammed and split the boat near the Solomon Islands. Kennedy led the survivors on a long swim to a small island, towing a badly burned crewman by gripping the man's life jacket strap in his teeth ^[4]. The rescue that followed made him a documented war hero, and he received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal along with the Purple Heart.

After a brief stint as a journalist covering the founding conference of the United Nations for Hearst newspapers, Kennedy entered politics ^[2]. His older brother Joseph Jr., long groomed for public office, had died in a 1944 bombing mission over Europe, and the family's political ambitions shifted to John. In 1946 he won a Boston area seat in the House of Representatives, and he held it for three terms.

In 1952 he defeated incumbent Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. for a Massachusetts seat in the United States Senate, a notable upset in a year when Dwight Eisenhower carried the state ^[1]. While recovering from spinal surgery in the mid 1950s, Kennedy worked on Profiles in Courage, a study of senators who took unpopular stands. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1957, though historians have long noted the substantial drafting role of his aide Theodore Sorensen ^[5].

Kennedy narrowly missed the Democratic vice presidential nomination in 1956, an outcome that raised his national profile without tying him to that year's losing ticket. Four years later he ran for president, overcoming doubts about his youth and his Catholicism. A widely quoted speech to Protestant ministers in Houston in September 1960 addressed the religion question directly, with Kennedy affirming his belief in the absolute separation of church and state ^[1].

The general election against Vice President Richard Nixon featured the first televised presidential debates in American history. Viewers who watched the opening debate on September 26, 1960, generally judged the composed, tanned Kennedy the stronger performer, an early lesson in the power of television in politics ^[6]. Kennedy won the popular vote by roughly 118,000 ballots out of nearly 69 million cast, one of the closest margins of the twentieth century ^[2].

Sworn in on January 20, 1961, at age 43, he was the youngest person ever elected president and the first Catholic to hold the office ^[1]. His inaugural address, with its charge to "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," remains among the most quoted speeches in American public life. He labeled his program the New Frontier, a call for national effort in science, space, and social policy.

Any honest account of John F. Kennedy achievements must begin with the Cold War, which dominated his 1,036 days in office. His first year brought a serious failure: the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, in which a CIA trained force of Cuban exiles was defeated within days of landing on the Cuban coast. Kennedy publicly accepted responsibility for the fiasco ^[2]. That summer the East German government, backed by the Soviet Union, sealed off West Berlin with the Berlin Wall, and Kennedy reinforced the American garrison in the divided city.

The defining test came in October 1962, when American reconnaissance flights photographed Soviet nuclear missile sites under construction in Cuba. For thirteen days Kennedy and his advisers weighed responses ranging from air strikes to invasion. He chose a naval quarantine of the island and opened back channel negotiations with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The Cuban Missile Crisis ended when Moscow agreed to withdraw the missiles in exchange for an American pledge not to invade Cuba and a private undertaking to remove American missiles from Turkey ^[7]. Many historians regard it as the closest the world has come to nuclear war.

Kennedy also pursued arms control. In 1963 the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space, and under water ^[7]. Earlier, in 1961, he had created the Peace Corps by executive order, sending American volunteers to teach and work in developing countries, and he proposed the Alliance for Progress to fund development in Latin America ^[2].

On May 25, 1961, Kennedy asked Congress to commit the nation to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely before the decade ended, a goal fulfilled by Apollo 11 in July 1969 ^[8]. On civil rights he moved cautiously at first, but in June 1963, after federal confrontations over the desegregation of the University of Alabama, he delivered a televised address calling civil rights a moral issue and sent Congress the legislation that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after his death ^[1].

Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier, a photographer for the Washington Times Herald, on September 12, 1953, in Newport, Rhode Island ^[1]. The couple had four children: a daughter stillborn in 1956, Caroline, born in 1957, John Jr., born shortly after the 1960 election, and Patrick, who died two days after his premature birth in August 1963. Jacqueline Kennedy restored the White House interiors and gave a celebrated televised tour of the mansion in 1962, helping define the glamour that later generations attached to the administration.

Behind the vigorous public image, Kennedy lived with serious medical problems. He was diagnosed with Addison's disease, a failure of the adrenal glands, in 1947, and he depended on steroids, pain medication, and a back brace for much of his adult life, facts largely concealed from voters at the time ^[3]. Records opened decades later showed a far more fragile patient than the public ever saw.

Kennedy's extramarital affairs, documented by biographers after his death, were not reported by the press during his lifetime under the era's journalistic conventions ^[3]. The family split its time among the White House, the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, and Palm Beach, Florida.

In late 1963 Kennedy began early campaigning for reelection, including a fence mending trip to Texas, where the state Democratic Party was split by factional feuds. On November 22, 1963, he rode in an open limousine through downtown Dallas beside his wife, with Texas Governor John Connally seated ahead of him. As the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository at 12:30 p.m., shots struck the president in the neck and head. He was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where doctors pronounced him dead at 1:00 p.m. ^[9].

Police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, a 24 year old former Marine employed at the depository, within hours. Two days later, as officers transferred Oswald through the basement of Dallas police headquarters, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed him on live television ^[9]. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson took the presidential oath aboard Air Force One that afternoon at Love Field, with Jacqueline Kennedy standing beside him in her bloodstained suit.

The Warren Commission, appointed by Johnson and chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren, concluded in 1964 that Oswald acted alone ^[9]. Its findings have never fully settled public opinion, and polls across the decades have repeatedly shown that many Americans suspect a wider conspiracy, making the assassination one of the most debated events in the country's history.

Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, where an eternal flame, lit by his widow, marks the grave ^[1]. Days after the funeral, Jacqueline Kennedy told the journalist Theodore H. White that her husband had loved the musical Camelot, and the name attached itself to the administration's memory of youth, style, and unrealized promise.

The substance of the record is more contested than the myth. Scholars credit Kennedy with steady judgment during the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the test ban treaty, and with setting the course for the Moon landing, while noting that his major domestic bills, including the civil rights and tax cut proposals, passed only under Johnson ^[2]. His deepening of the American commitment in Vietnam, where more than 16,000 military advisers were serving by late 1963, remains a subject of argument about what he would have done with a second term ^[7].

His memory is kept in stone and institutions: the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on Boston Harbor, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, and schools and streets across the world ^[10]. Basic John F. Kennedy facts, his 46 years, his thousand day presidency, his margin of 118,000 votes, sit alongside a durable public fascination. Decades of polling have consistently ranked him among the most admired modern presidents, and any John F. Kennedy biography must weigh a brief record against an outsized place in national memory.