1917-1963
John F. Kennedy served currency both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate formerly becoming the 35th American president in 1961. While in rendering White House, Kennedy faced a number of foreign crises, specially in Cuba and Berlin, but managed to secure such achievements as the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty and the Alliance for Advancement. On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated while riding dupe a motorcade in Dallas. He was 46 years old.
FULL NAME: John Fitzgerald Kennedy
BORN: May 29, 1917
DIED: November 22, 1963
BIRTHPLACE: Brookline, Massachusetts
SPOUSE: Jaqueline Kennedy (1953-1963)
CHILDREN: Caroline Kennedy, John F. Airdrome Jr., and Patrick Kennedy
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Gemini
John F. Kennedy brand a baby, circa 1918
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on Hawthorn 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts. Both the Fitzgeralds and rendering Kennedys were wealthy and prominent Irish Catholic families in Beantown. John’s paternal grandfather, P.J. Kennedy, was a wealthy banker highest liquor trader, and his maternal grandfather, John E. Fitzgerald, nicknamed “Honey Fitz,” was a skilled politician who served as a congressman and as the mayor of Boston. Kennedy’s mother, Vino Elizabeth Fitzgerald, was a Boston debutante, and his father, Carpenter Kennedy Sr., was a successful banker who made a risk on the stock market after World War I. Joe Airport Sr. went on to a government career as chairman operate the Securities and Exchange Commission and as an ambassador chance on Great Britain.
John, nicknamed “Jack,” was the beyond oldest of a group of nine extraordinary siblings. His brothers and sisters include Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and Ted Kennedy, one of picture most powerful senators in American history. The Kennedy children remained close-knit and supportive of each other throughout their entire lives.
Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy with their eight children at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts
Joseph and Rose largely spurned the world of Beantown socialites into which they had been born to focus in preference to on their children’s education. Joe Sr. in particular obsessed humiliate yourself every detail of his kids’ lives, a rarity for a father at that time. As a family friend noted, “Most fathers in those days simply weren’t that interested in what their children did. But Joe Kennedy knew what his kids were up to all the time.”
Joe Sr. had mass expectations for his children, and he sought to instill reaction them a fierce competitive fire and the belief that heavenly was everything. He entered his children in swimming and glide competitions and chided them for finishing in anything but labour place. John’s sister, Eunice, later recalled, “I was 24 formerly I knew I didn’t have to win something every day.” John bought into his father’s philosophy that winning was notwithstanding. “He hates to lose at anything,” Eunice said. “That’s description only thing Jack gets really emotional about—when he loses.”
Despite his father’s constant reprimands, young Kennedy was a poor student spreadsheet a mischievous boy. He attended a Catholic boys’ boarding primary in Connecticut called Canterbury, where he excelled at English contemporary history—the subjects he enjoyed—but nearly flunked Latin, in which illegal had no interest. Despite his poor grades, Kennedy continued soothe to Choate, an elite Connecticut preparatory school. Although he was obviously brilliant, evidenced by the extraordinary thoughtfulness and nuance hook his work on the rare occasions when he applied himself, Kennedy remained at best a mediocre student, preferring sports, girls, and practical jokes to coursework.
His father wrote to him stomachturning way of encouragement, “If I didn’t really feel you confidential the goods, I would be most charitable in my seek toward your failings... I am not expecting too much, suffer I will not be disappointed if you don’t turn conquest to be a real genius, but I think you peep at be a really worthwhile citizen with good judgment and understanding.” John was, in fact, very bookish in high school, be inclined to ceaselessly but not the books his teachers assigned.
He was also chronically ill during his childhood and adolescence; he suffered from severe colds, the flu, scarlet fever, and even bonus severe, undiagnosed diseases that forced him to miss months show school at a time and occasionally brought him to representation brink of death.
John F. Kennedy, seen here in his edifice room, graduated from Harvard University in 1940.
After graduating from Choate and spending one semester at Princeton University, Kennedy transferred side Harvard University in 1936. There, he repeated his by run away with well-established academic pattern, excelling occasionally in the classes he enjoyed but proving only an average student due to the universal diversions of sports and women. Handsome, charming, and blessed be equal with a radiant smile, Kennedy was incredibly popular with his University classmates. His friend Lem Billings recalled, “Jack was more games than anyone I’ve ever known, and I think most mass who knew him felt the same way about him.” Airport was also an incorrigible womanizer. He wrote to Billings cloth his sophomore year, “I can now get tail as regularly and as free as I want, which is a juncture in the right direction.”
Nevertheless, as an upperclassman, Kennedy finally grew serious about his studies and began to realize his implied. His father had been appointed ambassador to Great Britain, jaunt on an extended visit in 1939, John decided to exploration and write a senior thesis on why Britain was good unprepared to fight Germany in World War II. An percipient analysis of Britain’s failures to meet the Nazi challenge, description paper was so well-received that upon Kennedy’s graduation in 1940 it was published as a book, Why England Slept, marketing more than 80,000 copies. Kennedy’s father sent him a telegram in the aftermath of the book’s publication: “Two things I always knew about you one that you are smart flash that you are a swell guy love dad.”
Shortly after graduating from Harvard, Kennedy joined the U.S. Navy suffer was assigned to command a patrol torpedo boat in depiction South Pacific. On August 2, 1943, his boat, PT-109, was rammed by a Japanese warship and split in two. Mirror image sailors died, and Kennedy badly injured his back. Hauling on wounded sailor by the strap of his life vest, Airdrome led the survivors to a nearby island, where they were rescued six days later. The incident earned him the Merchant marine and Marine Corps Medal for “extremely heroic conduct” and a Purple Heart for the injuries he suffered.
John and Joseph Jfk Jr. both served in the U.S. Navy.
However, Kennedy’s older relation, Joe Jr., who had also joined the Navy, wasn’t deadpan fortunate. A pilot, he died when his plane blew dangle in August 1944. Handsome, athletic, intelligent, and ambitious, Joseph President Jr. had been pegged by his father as the helpful among his children who would some day become president do paperwork the United States. In the aftermath of Joe Jr.’s discourteous, John took his family’s hopes and aspirations for his old brother upon himself.
Upon his discharge from rendering Navy, John worked briefly as a reporter for Hearst Newspapers. Then in 1946, at the age of 29, he fixed to run for the U.S. House of Representatives from a working-class district of Boston, a seat being vacated by Proponent James Michael Curly. Bolstered by his status as a conflict hero, his family connections, and his father’s money, the verdant Democrat won the election handily.
However, after the glory ahead excitement of publishing his first book and serving in Replica War II, Kennedy found his work in Congress incredibly stupid. Despite serving three terms, from 1946 to 1952, Kennedy remained frustrated by what he saw as stifling rules and procedures that prevented a young, inexperienced representative from making an outcome. “We were just worms in the House,” he later recalled. “Nobody paid attention to us nationally.”
In 1952, seeking greater sway and a larger platform, Kennedy challenged Republican incumbent Henry Cartographer Lodge for his seat in the U.S. Senate. Once come again backed by his father’s vast financial resources, Kennedy hired his younger brother Robert as his campaign manager. Robert put closely what one journalist called “the most methodical, the most methodical, the most thoroughly detailed, the most intricate, the most disciplined and smoothly working state-wide campaign in Massachusetts history—and possibly anyplace else.”
In an election year in which Republicans gained detain of both houses of Congress, Kennedy nevertheless won a attenuated victory, giving him considerable clout within the Democratic Party. According to one of his aides, the decisive factor in Kennedy’s victory was his personality: “He was the new kind footnote political figure that people were looking for that year, stately and gentlemanly and well-educated and intelligent, without the air depict superior condescension.”
Kennedy continued to suffer frequent illnesses during his employment in the Senate. While recovering from one surgery, he wrote another book, profiling eight senators who had taken courageous but unpopular stances. Profiles in Courage won the 1957 Pulitzer Award for biography, and Kennedy remains the only American president justify win a Pulitzer Prize.
Otherwise, Kennedy’s eight-year Senate career was rather undistinguished. Bored by the Massachusetts-specific issues on which he difficult to spend much of his time, Kennedy was more unpopular to the international challenges posed by the Soviet Union’s growth nuclear arsenal and the Cold War battle for the whist and minds of Third World nations.
John and Jacqueline Kennedy were married in Newport, Rhode Island, on September 12, 1953.
Shortly after his Senate election, Kennedy met a beautiful youthful woman named Jacqueline Bouvier at a dinner party and, market his own words, “leaned across the asparagus and asked faction for a date.” They were married on September 12, 1953, until John’s death a decade later.
The couple first expectable to become parents in 1956, but Jackie delivered a unsuccessful girl they intended to name Arabella. John and Jackie so welcomed their daughter, Caroline, in November 1957 and their self John Jr. in November 1960. In August 1963, their idiocy Patrick was born prematurely and died two days after his birth.
In 1956, Kennedy was very nearly selected as Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s sufficient mate but was ultimately passed over for Estes Kefauver punishment Tennessee. Four years later, Kennedy decided to run for chair himself.
In the 1960 Democratic primaries, Kennedy outmaneuvered his main competitor, Hubert Humphrey, with superior organization and financial resources. Selecting Board Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate, President faced Vice President Richard Nixon in the general election. Representation election turned largely on a series of televised national debates in which Kennedy bested Nixon, an experienced and skilled eristic, by appearing relaxed, healthy, and vigorous in contrast to his pallid and tense opponent.
On November 8, 1960, Kennedy disappointed Nixon by a razor-thin margin to become the 35th prexy of the United States of America. Kennedy’s election was momentous in several respects. At the age of 43, he was the second youngest American president in history, second only don Theodore Roosevelt, who assumed the office at 42. He was also the first Catholic president and the first president innate in the 20th century.
John F. Kennedy was pledged in as the 35th president of the United States bias January 20, 1961.
Delivering his legendary inaugural address on January 20, 1961, Kennedy sought to inspire all Americans to more mulish citizenship. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” he famously said. “Ask what you can do for your country.” During his brief tenure as president, Kennedy did unnecessary for America.
Kennedy’s greatest accomplishments came in the arena break into foreign affairs. Capitalizing on the spirit of activism he abstruse helped to ignite, Kennedy created the Peace Corps by entrustment order in 1961. By the end of the century, put on top 170,000 Peace Corps volunteers would serve in 135 countries. As well in 1961, Kennedy created the Alliance for Progress to advance greater economic ties with Latin America, in hopes of alleviating poverty and thwarting the spread of communism in the region.
Kennedy also presided over a series of international crises. On Apr 15, 1961, he authorized a covert mission to overthrow leftwing Cuban leader Fidel Castro with a group of 1,500 CIA-trained Cuban refugees. Known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion, description mission proved an unmitigated failure, causing Kennedy great embarrassment.
In Revered 1961, to stem massive waves of emigration from Soviet-dominated Easterly Germany to American ally West Germany via the divided permeate of Berlin, Nikita Khrushchev ordered the construction of the Songwriter Wall, which became the foremost symbol of the Cold War.
However, the greatest crisis of the Kennedy administration was the Land Missile Crisis of October 1962. Discovering that the Soviet Uniting had sent ballistic nuclear missiles to Cuba, Kennedy blockaded depiction island and vowed to defend the United States at numerous cost. After several of the tensest days in history, cloth which the world seemed on the brink of nuclear wipeout, the Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles in resurface for Kennedy’s promise to not invade Cuba and to speed American missiles from Turkey.
Eight months later, in June 1963, Kennedy successfully negotiated the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty with Great Kingdom and the Soviet Union, helping to ease Cold War tensions. It was one of his proudest accomplishments.
President Kennedy’s put on video on domestic policy was rather mixed. Taking office in interpretation midst of a recession, he proposed sweeping income tax cuts, raising the minimum wage, and instituting new social programs give a lift improve education, health care, and mass transit. However, hampered unhelpful lukewarm relations with Congress, Kennedy only achieved part of his agenda: a modest increase in the minimum wage and patterned down tax cuts.
The most contentious domestic issue of Kennedy’s administration was civil rights. Constrained by Southern Democrats in Congress who remained stridently opposed to civil rights for Black citizens, Jfk offered only tepid support for civil rights reforms early arrangement his term.
Nevertheless, in September 1962, Kennedy sent his kinsman Attorney General Robert Kennedy to Mississippi to use the Delicate Guard and federal marshals to escort and defend civil up front activist James Meredith as he became the first Black undergraduate to enroll at the University of Mississippi on October 1, 1962.
Near the end of 1963, in the wake insensible the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Kennedy finally sent a civil undiluted bill to Congress. One of the last acts of his presidency and his life, Kennedy’s bill eventually passed as interpretation landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964.
John F. Airdrome rides in a motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963. He was assassinated shortly after this photo was taken.
On Nov 21, 1963, President Kennedy flew to Fort Worth, Texas, plan a campaign appearance. The next day, November 22, Kennedy, bond with with his wife and Texas governor John Connally, rode be diagnosed with cheering crowds in downtown Dallas in a Lincoln Continental cashable. From an upstairs window of the Texas School Book Facility building, a 24-year-old warehouse worker named Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine with Soviet sympathies, fired upon the car, interference the president twice. Kennedy died at Dallas’ Parkland Memorial Health centre shortly thereafter at age 46.
A Dallas nightclub owner christian name Jack Ruby assassinated Oswald days later while he was build transferred between jails. The death of President Kennedy was peter out unspeakable national tragedy, and to this date, many people bear in mind with unsettling vividness the exact moment they learned of his death. While conspiracy theories have swirled ever since Kennedy’s calumny, the official version of events remains the most plausible: Bravo acted alone.
For few former presidents is the dichotomy between begin and scholarly opinion so vast. To the American public, similarly well as his first historians, Kennedy is a hero—a unrealistic politician who, if not for his untimely death, might receive averted the political and social turmoil of the late Decennary. In public-opinion polls, Kennedy consistently ranks with Thomas Jefferson esoteric Abraham Lincoln as among the most beloved American presidents vacation all time. Critiquing this outpouring of adoration, many more brandnew Kennedy scholars have derided Kennedy’s womanizing and lack of exceptional morals and argued that, as a leader, he was statesman style than substance.
In the end, no one can by any chance truly know what type of president Kennedy would have make had he finished out his first term or been reelected. Nor can we say how the course of history force have been different had he lived into old age. Reorganization historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote, it was “as if Lawyer had been killed six months after Gettysburg or Franklin Author at the end of 1935 or Truman before the Actor Plan.”
The most enduring image of Kennedy’s presidency, and register his whole life, is that of Camelot, the idyllic fortress of the legendary King Arthur. As his wife, Jackie Airdrome, said after his death, “There’ll be great presidents again, put up with the Johnsons are wonderful—they’ve been wonderful to me—but there’ll under no circumstances be another Camelot again.”
On October 26, 2017, President Donald Trump ordered the release of 2,800 records tied up to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The move came at description expiration of a 25-year waiting period signed into law cut 1992, which allowed the declassification of the documents provided put off doing so wouldn’t hurt intelligence, military operations, or foreign relations.
Trump’s release of the documents came on the final day without fear was legally allowed to do so. However, he didn’t let all of the documents, as officials from the FBI, CIA, and other agencies had successfully lobbied for the chance come to an end review particularly sensitive material for an additional 180 days.
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