John F. Kennedy

NAME John Fitzgerald Kennedy, often known by his initials JFK. (1)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR John F. Kennedy was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963, and remains famous as the youngest man ever elected to the office and the first Roman Catholic to hold the presidency. (2) 

He is remembered for his Cold War leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis, his inspirational rhetoric, the creation of the Peace Corps, and for his shocking assassination in Dallas, which turned him into an enduring symbol of youthful promise cut short. (3)

BIRTH John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, the second child of Joseph Patrick "Joe" Kennedy Sr. and Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald Kennedy. (4) (5)

FAMILY BACKGROUND His father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. (1888–1969), was a wealthy businessman, financier, and later a politician and diplomat who served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. (6) 

His mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890–1995), was a philanthropist and socialite whose own father, John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, had been mayor of Boston; 

JFK was the second of nine children in this large, ambitious Irish-Catholic family. (7)

Below is a photo showing The Kennedy family in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, with JFK at top left in the white shirt, c. 1931

CHILDHOOD According to the Miller Center, Kennedy enjoyed a "privileged childhood of elite private schools, sailboats, servants and summer homes" even during the years of the Great Depression, and he later claimed he only really learned about the Depression's hardships from books he read at college. (7) 

He grew up with every material advantage, yet also suffered a series of childhood medical ailments, including scarlet fever, which he learned to underplay throughout his life. (6)

EDUCATION Kennedy attended the Choate boarding school in Connecticut before briefly enrolling at Princeton University, which he left after just one semester due to illness, subsequently transferring to his home state to attend Harvard College. (7) 

At Harvard, in his senior year, he wrote a thesis examining British government failures to prevent the Second World War; this became his first book, Why England Slept, published in 1940 when he was only 22, and he graduated from Harvard in 1940. (8)

CAREER RECORD 1941 Kennedy joined the U.S. Navy, eventually commanding the patrol torpedo boat PT-109 in the Pacific during World War II. 

1946 He won election to the U.S. House of Representatives for Massachusetts's 11th district, succeeding James Michael Curley, and served three terms as a congressman until 1953. 

1952 Kennedy defeated incumbent Republican Henry Cabot Lodge II to win a seat in the U.S. Senate. 

1957 His book Profiles in Courage won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography; he donated his entire $100,000 congressional/senate salary at points during his career to charity. 

1960 He was elected the 35th President of the United States, defeating Richard Nixon by roughly 113,000 popular votes out of nearly 69 million cast. 

1961–1963 Served as President until his assassination on November 22, 1963. (9)

APPEARANCE Kennedy was known for his photogenic, youthful appearance, striking blue eyes, and thick, dark chestnut hair. He stood 6 feet 1 inch tall. 

Kennedy had a perpetual tan that many mistook for robust health, when in fact both were partly side effects of the medication he took for his chronic illnesses. (10)

Oval Office portrait, 1963

FASHION As president, Kennedy favored simple, tailored two-button suits and was known for going hatless even at his frigid January 1961 inauguration, a choice widely credited with accelerating the decline of the American hat industry as other men followed his lead.

Kennedy changed his shirt up to three times a day. (10)

CHARACTER Kennedy was widely described as charismatic, witty, and outwardly relaxed under pressure, even though he privately battled chronic pain and illness that he worked hard to conceal from the public. 

He possessed a sharp intellect and a pragmatic approach to politics, driven by a strong desire to live life intensely due to a lifelong awareness of his own mortality. (7)

His experiences with his sister Rosemary, who had been given a lobotomy that left her unable to walk or speak normally, were said to be a major motivation behind his advocacy for people with intellectual disabilities. (10)

SPEAKING VOICE Kennedy spoke with a distinct, aristocratically accented Boston-Irish accent characterized by non-rhotic pronunciation (dropping the "r" sound in words like "car" or "Harvard").

Kennedy had a crisp, energetic delivery; he has been cited as the fastest recorded public speaker among major political figures, reaching speeds of around 327 words per minute. (10)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Kennedy was famed for his quick, self-deprecating wit, once dryly explaining his PT-109 heroism by saying, "It was involuntary. They sank my boat." He regularly used humor to defuse tension at press conferences, a skill that helped make him one of the most quotable presidents in American history. (11)

RELATIONSHIPS John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier on September 12, 1953, at St. Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island, in a wedding attended by roughly 800 guests and blessed by Pope Pius XII. (10) 

The couple had four children: a stillborn daughter in 1956, Caroline (born 1957), John Jr. (1960–1999), and Patrick, who was born prematurely in August 1963 and died just two days later. (2) 

The First Family in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, 1962

Kennedy was reported to have had extramarital affairs with several women, including actress Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline's press secretary Pamela Turnure, though the true extent of the Monroe relationship remains unconfirmed. (12) 

MONEY AND FAME Born into vast wealth managed via family trust funds, Kennedy was an heir to a fortune generated by his father.

Despite his family's immense wealth, Kennedy reportedly never carried cash and was known to borrow small amounts from friends and aides, sometimes failing to repay them. 

He donated his presidential salary to a range of charities, including the United Negro College Fund, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. (10)

FOOD AND DRINK Although the Kennedy White House became known for elevating state dinners with elegant French cuisine, JFK personally preferred simple lunches, usually soup, with New England-style fish chowder among his favorites, a nod to his Massachusetts roots. 

He was notably self-conscious about his weight and traveled with a portable bathroom scale wherever he went. (10)

MUSIC AND ARTS The Kennedy White House was celebrated for hosting cultural events, with Jacqueline Kennedy leading a broader effort to showcase classical music, opera, and the arts to elevate the White House's cultural profile during his presidency. (2)

LITERATURE Kennedy was an avid reader and a published author in his own right, writing Why England Slept (1940) as a young man and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Profiles in Courage (1957), which profiled U.S. senators who had shown political courage. (9) 

He had a well-known fondness for Ian Fleming's James Bond thrillers, having first read Casino Royale while recovering from back surgery in the mid-1950s, and in a March 1961 Life magazine profile of his reading habits he listed Fleming's From Russia, with Love among his ten favorite books.  The endorsement is widely credited with transforming Bond's fortunes in America, sending Fleming's U.S. sales sharply upward and helping make him the country's bestselling crime writer almost overnight; Fleming himself later described the Kennedys' interest as having an "electric effect" on his American sales. (13) (14)

NATURE Kennedy had a lifelong love of the sea, sailing and swimming from childhood at the family's Cape Cod home in Hyannis Port, a passion reflected in his choice to commission a mural of the Massachusetts waterfront for the White House pool to remind him of home. (7)

PETS Kennedy loved animals and, over his lifetime, owned cats, dogs, hamsters, a horse, a rabbit, a parakeet, and a canary. 

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave the family a dog named Pushinka, daughter of the Soviet space dog Strelka, and Pushinka's romance with the Kennedys' Welsh terrier Charlie produced four puppies the president jokingly called "pupniks." (10) 

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Kennedy swam roughly twice a day in the White House pool, which was heated to around 90 degrees, and he was a lifelong sailing enthusiast.  He was also a life member of the National Rifle Association. (10)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Kennedy's most notable engagement with science as president came through his strong support for the U.S. space program, famously committing the nation in 1961 to landing a man on the Moon before the decade was out. (2)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY A practicing Roman Catholic who attended Trinity Church in Washington during his presidency, Kennedy was nonetheless a firm advocate of separation of church and state, wary of mixing religious and political institutions. 

Evangelist Billy Graham had reportedly held back from discussing personal faith with Kennedy shortly before the assassination due to a cold, a meeting that never got the chance to happen again. (10)

PRESIDENCY On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected the 35th president of the United States, defeating the Republican candidate, Vice President Richard Nixon, by a popular-vote margin of roughly 113,000 votes out of nearly 69 million cast. It was, by any reasonable standard, a spectacularly close election. In a country containing something like 180 million people, the presidency had effectively been decided by a number of voters that would barely fill a large football stadium.

Kennedy was 43 years old when he won, making him the youngest person ever elected president—a distinction sometimes confused with being the youngest president. That honour belongs to Theodore Roosevelt, who was 42 when William McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and Roosevelt inherited the job without having to endure the tiresome business of winning a presidential election first. Kennedy was also the first president born in the 20th century, an apparently simple distinction that nevertheless announced that America was entering a new political generation.

He was inaugurated on January 20, 1961, and arrived in Washington promising a "New Frontier" of national progress. 

JFK Inauguration

His presidency soon acquired another, rather more romantic nickname: "Camelot." The label was encouraged after his death by his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, who recalled his fondness for the Broadway musical Camelot, with its nostalgic vision of a brief, shining kingdom that could never quite be recaptured. It was an unusually effective piece of myth-making, though the actual Kennedy White House contained considerably more telephones, briefing papers and geopolitical anxiety than King Arthur's court.

Kennedy's administration lasted less than three years, but it was packed with enough history to keep several ordinary presidencies busy. Within months of taking office, he authorised the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, a CIA-backed attempt by Cuban exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro. The operation collapsed with embarrassing speed, leaving Kennedy to learn one of the oldest lessons of politics: inherited problems can be unpleasant, but inherited secret military plans are often worse.

There were more constructive initiatives as well. In March 1961, Kennedy established the Peace Corps, placing his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, in charge. The organisation sent American volunteers overseas to work in education, health, agriculture and community development, and became one of the administration's most enduring symbols of youthful idealism.

Abroad, Kennedy faced a succession of Cold War crises. The Berlin Crisis intensified tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union and culminated in the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Then, in October 1962, came the Cuban Missile Crisis, when American reconnaissance discovered Soviet nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba. For 13 extraordinarily tense days, the world watched two nuclear superpowers manoeuvre around one another with the sort of caution normally associated with carrying a tray of full cups across a freshly polished floor. The crisis ended when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles in exchange for an American promise not to invade Cuba, alongside a separate, initially secret agreement to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.

Kennedy also made space exploration a central national ambition. In May 1961, only weeks after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, Kennedy challenged the United States to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade. It was an astonishingly ambitious promise considering that America had, at that point, barely managed to send an astronaut into space for a few minutes. Yet the enormous expansion of the Apollo programme that followed eventually produced the Moon landing in 1969, fulfilling Kennedy's goal six years after his death.

At home, the growing Civil Rights Movement presented Kennedy with an equally profound challenge. Initially cautious about alienating Southern Democrats, he became increasingly involved as protests against racial segregation intensified. Federal troops and marshals were used to enforce court orders protecting Black students seeking admission to previously segregated universities, including the University of Mississippi and the University of Alabama. In June 1963, Kennedy addressed the nation and called civil rights a "moral issue," proposing legislation that would eventually become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Kennedy's presidency was therefore a strange combination of glamour, optimism, catastrophe and near-catastrophe. There were elegant state dinners and youthful idealism, but also nuclear brinkmanship, failed invasions and deepening conflict over racial inequality. The Camelot image suggested a golden age, though in reality it was a very brief administration conducted under the persistent possibility that the entire world might, at any moment, become considerably less picturesque.

POLITICS A moderate Liberal Democrat, Kennedy championed domestic reforms under his "New Frontier" agenda, which sought federal funding for education, medical care for the elderly, government intervention to stem recession, and federal action against racial discrimination. In foreign policy, he combined firm anti-communist containment with diplomatic initiatives like the Alliance for Progress. (7)

SCANDAL Rumors of extramarital affairs, most persistently with Marilyn Monroe, have dogged Kennedy's legacy, with the two reportedly spending time together at Bing Crosby's house in March 1962, although the full nature of the relationship has never been conclusively established. (12) 

MILITARY RECORD Kennedy joined the U.S. Navy and by August 1943 commanded the patrol torpedo boat PT-109 in the Solomon Islands, where it was rammed and split in two by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri. Kennedy led his surviving crew on a three-mile swim through shark-infested waters to a nearby island, where they survived on coconuts for about a week before Solomon Islanders Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana helped alert the Navy and secure their rescue. (11) 

For his leadership, Kennedy received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for heroism and the Purple Heart for his injuries, and his ordeal later inspired the 1963 film PT 109, for which he recommended actor Cliff Robertson to play him. (15)

Kennedy on his navy patrol boat, the PT-109, 1943.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Kennedy was hospitalized dozens of times over his life and was given the last rites on at least three occasions, with signs of adrenal trouble appearing as early as 1940. (10) 

In September 1947, while a 30-year-old congressman, he was diagnosed with Addison's disease, a hormonal deficiency that a later review suggested was likely caused by a rare autoimmune condition.  He managed the disease with daily doses of the steroid hydrocortisone, a treatment that boosted his energy but carried side effects including mood changes and depression, and he also suffered chronic back problems that required a brace and often forced him to work from bed or a hot bath. (12)

HOMES Kennedy's childhood began at the modest family home at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, before the growing family moved to a larger house nearby in 1920. 

 As an adult, his favorite retreat was the family compound at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, and as president he lived at the White House in Washington, D.C. (5)

TRAVEL As a senator and president, Kennedy traveled extensively, including a landmark 1963 visit to West Berlin, where his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech became one of the most quoted moments of Cold War diplomacy. (10) 

His final trip took him to Texas in November 1963 on a political tour intended to shore up support ahead of the 1964 election. (9)

DEATH Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, while riding in an open-top convertible motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, with his wife Jacqueline beside him.  He was struck by two bullets, one through the upper back and throat and a fatal shot to the head, and was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital at 1:00 p.m. 

The Kennedys and the Connallys in the presidential limousine moments before the assassination 

He received a state funeral on November 25, 1963, three days after his death, with a Requiem Mass at St. Matthew's Cathedral followed by burial at Arlington National Cemetery, an event watched by hundreds of thousands lining the streets and attended by representatives from more than 100 nations. 

Suspected gunman Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested but denied the shooting and was himself fatally shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby on November 24, 1963. Ruby was later convicted but died of cancer-related complications in January 1967 before a retrial could occur. (9)

Kennedy is the only U.S. President to be outlived by his grandmother; Mary Josephine Hannon (1865–1964) outlived him by ten months and was never told of his assassination.

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Kennedy's wartime heroics were dramatized in the 1963 film PT 109, starring Cliff Robertson, whom Kennedy himself had suggested for the role. (15) 

Kennedy was a pioneer of television politics; his September 26, 1960 debate against Richard Nixon was watched by over 60 million people and established television as a key medium in American presidential campaigns.

His assassination and funeral were among the most extensively broadcast news events of the 20th century, and Oswald's on-camera shooting became the first murder ever televised live to a national audience. 

ACHIEVEMENTS Kennedy became the youngest person ever elected U.S. president and the first Roman Catholic to hold the office.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage.

Kennedy established the Peace Corps, which has since sent more than 200,000 Americans to serve in over 130 countries. 

He steered the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis without nuclear war, set the goal of a Moon landing, and negotiated the 1963 Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty; 

Mount Kennedy in Canada was named in his honor in 1964, and his brother Robert became the first person to climb it the following year.

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Britannica (3) Library of Congress (4) National Park Service (5) NPS – JFK Birthplace (6) National Archives (7) Miller Center (8) New England Historical Society (9) JFK Library (10) Encyclopedia of Trivia (11) National Archives – PT-109 (12) Los Angeles Times (13) The Desert Sun (14) Woman's World (15) Military.com