John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts.  He was born into a wealthy family. John F. Kennedy’s paternal grandfather, P.J. Kennedy, was a wealthy banker and a liquor trader.  His maternal grandfather, John E. Fitzgerald, was a politician who served as a congressional representative and as the mayor of Boston. John F. Kennedy, nicknamed “Jack”, was the second oldest of nine siblings. When he was younger, he was chronically ill and suffered from severe colds, the flu, scarlet fever, and even more severe, undiagnosed diseases that forced him to miss school for months at a time.

Kennedy was a poor student and an ill-behaved boy. He attended a Catholic boarding school, in Connecticut, called Canterbury. He did excellent in some classes, and others, he almost failed. Even though he had bad grades, he was very intelligent and went to Choate, an elite preparatory school.   When Kennedy was struggling in his classes, his father wrote him a letter of encouragement saying, “If I didn’t really feel you had the goods, I would be most charitable in my attitude toward your failings… I am not expecting too much, and I will not be disappointed if you don’t turn out to be a real genius, but I think you can be a really worthwhile citizen with good judgement and understanding.”

In 1936, Kennedy attended Harvard University, after attending Choate Prep and spending one semester at Princeton. At Harvard, he was the same way as he was when he was younger. He excelled in the enjoyable classes and did poorly in the hard classes. When his father was appointed Ambassador to Great Britain in 1939, Kennedy decided to research and write a senior thesis on why Britain was so unprepared to fight Germany in World War II. His paper was written so well that after his graduation in 1940, it was published as a book called Why England Slept. After selling more than 80,000 copies, Kennedy’s father sent him a cablegram saying, “Two things I always knew about you, one that you are smart, two that you are a swell guy. Love dad.” 

After graduating from Harvard University, Kennedy joined the U.S. Navy and was assigned to command a patrol torpedo boat in the South Pacific. On August 2, 1943, his boat, PT-109, was hit by a Japanese warship and split in two. Two sailors were killed, and Kennedy’s back was badly injured. He led the survivors to a nearby island where they were rescued six days later.  He earned a Navy and Marine Corps medal for “extremely heroic conduct” and a Purple Heart for the injuries he suffered.   Kennedy’s older brother, pilot for the Navy, was killed in a plane crash in August 1944.

In 1946, after Kennedy’s discharge, he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives and won the election. He served three terms from 1946 to 1952. In 1952, Kennedy decided to challenge Republican incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge, for his seat in the U.S. Senate and won. After the election, he met Jacqueline Bouvier at a dinner party and they were married on September 12, 1953. They had three children. While recovering from one surgery, he wrote another book, Profiles in Courage, which won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize.

After Kennedy’s eighth-year in the Senate, he decided to run for president. In the 1960 primaries, Kennedy chose Senate Majority lead, Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate.  On November 8, 1960, Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in the general election and became the 35th President of the United States. He was the first Catholic president and the first president born in the 20th century.  On January 20, 1961, Kennedy gave his inaugural address, from which the famous saying came, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

In 1961, Kennedy created the Peace Corps by executive order, and created the Alliance for Progress to foster greater economic ties with Latin America. On April 15, he authorized a covert mission, called the Bay of Pigs, to overthrow the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, which failed. In 1963, Kennedy signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Great Britain and the Soviet Union to help ease Cold War tensions.

On November 21, 1963, President Kennedy and his family flew into Dallas, Texas for a campaign appearance. The next day while Kennedy and his family were driving through cheering crowds in downtown Dallas, Kennedy was shot dead in his car. John F. Kennedy died at the age of 46 at the Parkland Memorial Hospital. Kennedy’s assassin was later murdered while being transferred between jails.