John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963),
commonly referred to by his initials JFK,
was an American politician who served as the 35th President of the United States from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963. The Cuban Missile
Crisis, The Bay of Pigs Invasion,
the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the
establishment of the Peace Corps,
developments in the Space Race,
the building of the Berlin Wall,
the Trade Expansion Act to lower tariffs, and the Civil Rights Movement. His "New
Frontier" domestic program was largely enacted as a memorial to him after
his death. Kennedy increased the American presence in South Vietnam by a factor
of 18 over Eisenhower, as to the number of military advisors and tolerated the
assassination of the president there.
Kennedy's time in office was
marked by high tensions with Communist
states, particularly Cuba. An attempt
in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs
to overthrow the country's dictator, Fidel
Castro, was thwarted by armed forces within three days. His administration
subsequently rejected plans by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to orchestrate false-flag attacks on
American soil in order to gain public approval for a war against Cuba. In
October 1962, it was discovered Soviet ballistic
missiles had been deployed in
Cuba; the resulting period of unease, often termed the Cuban Missile Crisis, is
seen by many historians as the closest the human race has ever come to war featuring the use of nuclear
weapons on both or multiple
sides.
After military service in the United States Naval Reserve in World
War II, Kennedy represented Massachusetts's
11th congressional district in
the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953 as a Democrat. Thereafter, he served in the U.S. Senate from that state from 1953 until 1960.
Kennedy defeated Vice President and Republican candidate Richard Nixon in the 1960 U.S. Presidential Election. At
age 43, he was the youngest man to have been elected to the office, the second-youngest president (after Theodore Roosevelt, who was 42 when he
became president after the assassination of William
McKinley). Kennedy was the first person born in the 20th century to serve as
president. To date, Kennedy has
been the only Roman Catholic president and the only president to
have won a Pulitzer Prize, for
his biography Profiles in
Courage.
Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas,
Texas on November 22, 1963. Lee
Harvey Oswald was arrested that
afternoon and determined to have fired shots that hit the President from a
sixth floor window of the Texas
School Book Depository. Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby mortally wounded Oswald two days later
in a jail corridor. The FBI and the Warren Commission officially concluded that Oswald was
the lone assassin, but its report was sharply criticized. The United States House Select Committee
on Assassinations (HSCA) agreed
with the conclusion that Oswald fired the shots that killed the president, but
also concluded that Kennedy was probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy. The majority of Americans alive at the
time of the assassination: 52% to 29%, and continuing through 2013 (61% to
30%), believed both that there was a conspiracy, and that Oswald was not the
only shooter.
Since the 1960s, information
concerning Kennedy's private life has come to light. Details of Kennedy's
health problems with which he struggled have become better known, especially
since the 1990s. Although initially kept secret from the general public,
reports of Kennedy being unfaithful in marriage have garnered press.
Kennedy ranks highly in historians'
polls of U.S. presidents, and with the general public. His average approval
rating of 70% is the highest of any president in Gallup's history of
systematically measuring job approval.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was
born at 83 Beals Street in Brookline,
Massachusetts, on May 29, 1917,[8] to businessman/politician Joseph Patrick
"Joe" Kennedy, Sr. (1888–1969)
and philanthropist/socialite Rose
Elizabeth Fitzgerald-Kennedy (1890–1995).
His father was the oldest son of businessman/politician Patrick Joseph "P. J."
Kennedy (1858–1929) and Mary
Augusta Hickey-Kennedy (1857–1923). His mother was the daughter of Boston Mayor John Francis "Honey Fitz"
Fitzgerald (1863–1950) and Mary
Josephine "Josie" Hannon-Fitzgerald (1865–1964). All four of his
grandparents were the children of immigrants from Ireland.
His
brothers were Joseph Patrick
"Joe" Kennedy, Jr. (1915–1944), Robert Francis "Bobby"
Kennedy (1925–1968), and Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy (1932–2009). Joseph Jr. was killed in action during World War II. Robert was JFK's
attorney general and then a senator who was assassinated in 1968; Ted was a
long-serving U.S. senator from 1962 until his death from brain cancer in 2009.
His sisters were Rose Marie
"Rosemary" Kennedy (1918–2005), Kathleen Agnes "Kick"
Kennedy (1920–1948), Eunice Mary Kennedy (1921–2009), Patricia Helen "Pat" Kennedy (1924–2006), and Jean Ann Kennedy (born 1928).
Kennedy
lived in Brookline for ten years and attended the Edward Devotion School, the Noble and Greenough Lower School, and
the Dexter School through 4th grade. In 1927, the
Kennedy family moved to a stately twenty-room Georgian-style mansion at 5040
Independence Avenue (across the street from Wave
Hill) in the Hudson Hill neighborhood of Riverdale, Bronx, New
York City. Kennedy 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
294 Pondfield Road in the New York City suburb of Bronxville, New York, where Kennedy
was a member of Scout Troop 2.[1] The Kennedy family spent summers at their
home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts and Christmas and Easter holidays at
their winter home in Palm Beach,
Florida. In September 1930, Kennedy—now 13 years old—attended the Canterbury School in New
Milford, Connecticut. In late April 1931, he required an appendectomy, after which he withdrew
from Canterbury and recuperated at home.
In September 1931, Kennedy was
sent to the The Choate School in Wallingford,
Connecticut for 9th through 12th
grade. His older brother had already been at Choate for two years as a football
player and leading student. He spent his first years at Choate in his older
brother's shadow, and compensated for this with rebellious behavior which attracted
a coterie. Their most notorious stunt was to explode 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 friend Kirk LeMoyne
"Lem" Billings.
During
his Choate years, Kennedy was beset by health problems that culminated in 1934
with his emergency hospitalization at New
Haven Hospital, where doctors thought he might have 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. For the school yearbook, of which he had been business
manager, Kennedy was voted the "most likely to succeed".
In
September 1935, he made his first trip abroad with his parents and his sister
Kathleen to London with the intent of studying under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics (LSE) as his older brother had done.
Ill-health forced his return to America in October of that year, when he
enrolled late and spent six weeks at Princeton
University. He was then
hospitalized for observation at Peter
Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston.
He convalesced further at the Kennedy winter home in Palm Beach, then spent the
spring of 1936 working as a ranch hand on the 40,000-acre (160 km2)
"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, where 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—bringing his convertible—and spent ten weeks driving
through Europe with Billings.[17] 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 Germany
invaded Poland. 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.
As an
upperclassman at Harvard, Kennedy became a more serious student and developed
an interest in political philosophy. In his junior year, he made the Dean's List. In 1940, Kennedy completed his thesis,
"Appeasement in Munich", about British participation in the Munich Agreement. The thesis became a
bestseller under the title Why
England Slept. He graduated
from Harvard College cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in government, concentrating on international affairs, that year.
Kennedy enrolled in and audited classes at the Stanford Graduate School of Business that fall. In early 1941, Kennedy left and helped his
father write a memoir of his three years as an American ambassador and then
traveled throughout South America; including Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.
On
September 12, 1953, Kennedy, then thirty-six, married 24-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier at St. Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island after a one-year courtship.
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