John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963),
often referred to by the initials JFK and Jack, was an American politician who
served as the 35th president of the United States from January 1961 until his
assassination in November 1963. Kennedy served at the height of the Cold War,
and the majority of his work as president dealt with managing relations with
the Soviet Union and Cuba. A Democrat, Kennedy represented Massachusetts in the
U.S. House of Representatives and Senate prior to becoming president.
Kennedy was born into a wealthy, political family in
Brookline, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1940, before
joining the U.S. Naval Reserve the following year. During World War II, he
commanded a series of PT boats in the Pacific theater and earned the Navy and
Marine Corps Medal for his service. After the war, Kennedy represented the 11th
congressional district of Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives
from 1947 to 1953. He was subsequently elected to the U.S. Senate and served as
the junior Senator from Massachusetts from 1953 to 1960. While in the Senate,
Kennedy published his book Profiles in Courage, which won a Pulitzer Prize. In
the 1960 presidential election, he narrowly defeated Republican opponent
Richard Nixon, who was the incumbent vice president.
Kennedy's administration included high tensions with
communist states in the Cold War. He increased the number of American military
advisers in South Vietnam. In April 1961, he authorized a vain attempt to
overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Kennedy authorized the Cuban Project in
November 1961. He rejected Operation Northwoods (plans for false flag attacks
to gain approval for a war against Cuba) in March 1962; however his
administration continued to plan for an invasion of Cuba in the summer of 1962.
In October 1962, U.S. spy planes
discovered Soviet missile bases had been deployed in Cuba; the resulting period
of tensions, termed the Cuban Missile Crisis, nearly resulted in the breakout
of a global thermonuclear conflict. Domestically, Kennedy presided over the
establishment of the Peace Corps and the continuation of the Apollo space
program, and supported the Civil Rights Movement, but was only somewhat successful
in passing his New Frontier domestic policies.
On November 22, 1963, he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency upon Kennedy's death.
Marxist Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the state crime, but he was shot to
death by Jack Ruby two days later. The FBI and the Warren Commission both
concluded Oswald had acted alone in the assassination, but various groups
contested the Warren Report and believed that Kennedy was the victim of a
conspiracy. After Kennedy's death, Congress enacted many of his proposals,
including the Civil Rights Act and the Revenue Act of 1964. Kennedy ranks
highly in polls of U.S. presidents with historians and the general public. His
personal life has also been the focus of considerable interest, following
revelations of his chronic health ailments and extramarital affairs.
Early life and
education
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, at 83
Beals Street in the Boston suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts, to Joseph P.
Kennedy Sr., a businessman and politician, and Rose Kennedy (née Fitzgerald), a
philanthropist and socialite. His paternal grandfather, P. J. Kennedy, was a
Massachusetts state senator. Kennedy's maternal grandfather and namesake, John
F. Fitzgerald, served as a U.S. Congressman and was elected to two terms as
Mayor of Boston. All four of his grandparents were children of Irish
immigrants.n Kennedy had an elder brother, Joseph Jr., and seven younger
siblings: Rosemary, Kathleen ("Kick"), Eunice, Patricia, Robert
("Bobby"), Jean, and Edward ("Ted").
Kennedy lived in Brookline for the first ten years of his
life and attended the local St. Aidan's Church, where he was baptized on June
19, 1917.n He was educated at the Edward Devotion School in Brookline, the
Noble and Greenough Lower School in Dedham, Massachusetts, and the Dexter
School (also in Brookline) through the 4th grade. His father's business had
kept him away from the family for long stretches of time, and his ventures were
concentrated on Wall Street and Hollywood. In September 1927, the family moved
from Brookline to the Riverdale neighborhood of New York City. Young John attended the lower campus of
Riverdale Country School, a private school for boys, from 5th to 7th grade. Two
years later, the family moved to suburban Bronxville, New York, where Kennedy
was a member of Boy Scout Troop 2. The
family spent summers and early autumns at their home in Hyannis Port, a village
on Cape Cod, Massachusetts; Christmas and Easter holidays were at their winter
retreat in Palm Beach, Florida. In September 1930, Kennedy, then 13 years old,
attended the Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, for 8th grade. In
April 1931, he had an appendectomy, after which he withdrew from Canterbury and
recuperated at home.
In September 1931, Kennedy started attending Choate, a
prestigious boarding school in Wallingford, Connecticut, for 9th through 12th
grade. His older brother Joe Jr. had already been at Choate for two years and
was a football player and leading student. He spent his first years at Choate
in his older brother's shadow and compensated with rebellious behavior that
attracted a coterie. They carried out their most notorious stunt by exploding a
toilet seat with a powerful firecracker. In the ensuing chapel assembly, the
strict headmaster, George St. John, brandished the toilet seat and spoke of
certain "muckers" who would "spit in our sea". The defiant
Kennedy took the cue and named his group "The Muckers Club", which
included roommate and lifelong friend Kirk LeMoyne "Lem" Billings.
During his years at Choate, Kennedy was beset by health
problems that culminated with his emergency hospitalization in 1934 at Yale New
Haven Hospital, where doctors suspected leukemia. In June 1934, he was admitted to the Mayo
Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota; the ultimate diagnosis there was colitis. Kennedy graduated from Choate in June of the
following year, finishing 64th in a class of 112 students. He had been the business manager of the school
yearbook and was voted the "most likely to succeed".
In September 1935, Kennedy made his first trip abroad when
he traveled to London with his parents and his sister Kathleen. He intended to
study under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics (LSE), as his older
brother had done. Ill-health forced his return to the United States in October
of that year, when he enrolled late and attended Princeton University but had
to leave after two months due to a gastrointestinal illness. He was then hospitalized for observation at
Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. He convalesced further at the family
winter home in Palm Beach, and then spent the spring of 1936 working as a ranch
hand on the 40,000-acre Jay Six cattle ranch outside Benson, Arizona. It is reported that ranchman Jack Speiden worked
both brothers "very hard".
In September 1936, Kennedy enrolled at Harvard College, and
his application essay stated: "The reasons that I have for wishing to go
to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and
a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to
go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college, but is a
university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to
the same college as my father. To be a 'Harvard man' is an enviable
distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain." He produced that year's annual "Freshman
Smoker", called by a reviewer "an elaborate entertainment, which
included in its cast outstanding personalities of the radio, screen and sports
world".
He tried out for the football, golf, and swimming teams and
earned a spot on the varsity swimming team. Kennedy also sailed in the Star class and won
the 1936 Nantucket Sound Star Championship.
In July 1937, Kennedy sailed to France—taking his convertible—and spent
ten weeks driving through Europe with Billings. In June 1938, Kennedy sailed overseas with his
father and older brother to work at the American embassy in London, where his
father was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's U.S. Ambassador to the Court of
St. James's.
In 1939, Kennedy toured Europe, the Soviet Union, the
Balkans, and the Middle East in preparation for his Harvard senior honors
thesis. He then went to Czechoslovakia and Germany before returning to London
on September 1, 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland to mark the beginning
of World War II. Two days later, the family was in the House of Commons for
speeches endorsing the United Kingdom's declaration of war on Germany. Kennedy
was sent as his father's representative to help with arrangements for American
survivors of the SS Athenia before flying back to the U.S. from Foynes,
Ireland, to Port Washington, New York, on his first transatlantic flight.
When Kennedy was an upperclassman at Harvard, he began to
take his studies more seriously and developed an interest in political
philosophy. He made the Dean's List in his junior year. In 1940 Kennedy completed his thesis,
"Appeasement in Munich", about British participation in the Munich
Agreement. The thesis eventually became a bestseller under the title Why England
Slept. In addition to addressing Britain's failure to
strengthen its military in the lead-up to World War II, the book also called
for an Anglo-American alliance against the rising totalitarian powers. Kennedy
became increasingly supportive of U.S. intervention in World War II, and his
father's isolationist beliefs resulted in the latter's dismissal as ambassador
to the United Kingdom. This created a split between the Kennedy and Roosevelt
families.
In 1940, Kennedy graduated cum laude from Harvard with a
Bachelor of Arts in government, concentrating on international affairs. That
fall, he enrolled at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and audited
classes there. In early 1941, Kennedy
left and helped his father write a memoir of his time as an American
ambassador. He then traveled throughout South America; his itinerary included
Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.
U.S. Navy Reserve
(1941–1945)
In 1940, Kennedy attempted to enter the army's Officer Candidate
School. Despite months of training, he was medically disqualified due to his
chronic lower back problems. On September 24, 1941 Kennedy, with the help of
then director of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and former naval
attaché to Joseph Kennedy, joined the United States Naval Reserve. He was
commissioned an ensign on October 26, 1941, and joined the staff of the Office
of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C.
In January 1942, Kennedy was assigned to the ONI field
office at Headquarters, Sixth Naval District, in Charleston, South Carolina. He attended the Naval Reserve Officer Training
School at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, from July 27 to
September 27 and then voluntarily entered the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons
Training Center in Melville, Rhode Island. On October 10, he was promoted to lieutenant
junior grade. In early November, Kennedy
was still mourning the death of his close, childhood friend, Marine Corps
Second Lieutenant George Houk Mead Jr., who had been killed in action at
Guadalcanal that August and awarded the Navy Cross for his bravery. Accompanied
by a female acquaintance from a wealthy Newport family, the couple had stopped
in Middletown, Rhode Island at the cemetery where the decorated, naval spy,
Commander Hugo W. Koehler, USN, had been buried the previous year. Ambling
around the plots near the tiny St. Columba's chapel, Kennedy paused over
Koehler's white granite cross grave marker and pondered his own mortality,
hoping out loud that when his time came, he would not have to die without
religion. "But these things can't be faked," he added. "There's
no bluffing." Two decades later,
Kennedy and Koehler's stepson, U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell had become good
friends and political allies, although they had been acquaintances since the
mid-1930s during their "salad days" on the same Newport debutante
party "circuit" and when Pell had dated Kathleen ("Kick")
Kennedy. Kennedy completed his training
on December 2 and was assigned to Motor Torpedo Squadron FOUR.
His first command was PT-101 from December 7, 1942, until
February 23, 1943: It was a patrol torpedo (PT) boat used for training while
Kennedy was an instructor at Melville. He then led three Huckins PT boats—PT-98,
PT-99, and PT-101, which were being relocated from MTBRON 4 in Melville, Rhode
Island, back to Jacksonville, Florida, and the new MTBRON 14 (formed February
17, 1943). During the trip south, he was hospitalized briefly in Jacksonville
after diving into the cold water to unfoul a propeller. Thereafter, Kennedy was
assigned duty in Panama and later in the Pacific theater, where he eventually commanded
two more PT boats.
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