Early Years
Born with the world at his feet to Joseph and Rose Kennedy on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy graduated Harvard University in 1940. His honor thesis written that very year was entitled "While England Slept," and it concerned the British and the Munich Agreement. Originally intended for college use only, at the encouragement of his father, John F. Kennedy published it and it became a best seller.
Young John Kennedy enlisted in the US Navy and in 1943 demonstrated extreme bravery despite serious injury when a Japanese destroyer rammed his PT boat and he led survivors through perilous waters to safety. John F. Kennedy was complex man of many secrets; a war hero larger than life, but also a man besieged with physical pain and his own set of personal demons. Many of these were kept from the press and the public throughout John Fitzgerald Kennedy's lifetime.
Congress, Marriage and The Pulitzer Prize
After World War II, John Fitzgerald Kennedy became a Boston congressman and in 1953 advanced to the Senate and married Jacqueline Bouvier. While recuperating from back surgery, John Kennedy wrote "Profiles in Courage," for which he won the Pulitzer Prizein history.
The Presidency, Assassination and Immortality
John F. Kennedy's appeal to American youth was like no president before or since. An eloquent and articulate speaker, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the first Catholic president, the first man of Irish descent to become president and the second youngest man to assume that office. (Theodore Roosevelt was a few months younger.) Some of his programs fostered enormous economic growth, making America a more powerful nation than it had been since World War II. John Kennedy's vision of equal rights appealed to all who shared the dream of what America is supposed to be about.
John F. Kennedy spit in the face of communism's challenge by standing up to the Russians during theCuban Missile Crisis
of 1962. His achievements were many, but so should have been his shame. Perhaps it was the Addison's disease that rendered his seeming lack of self-control when it came to women and sex. John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on November 22, 1963, shocked and saddened the world.
A biography written shortly after John F. Kennedy's death perhaps best describes both the man and the president. It was entitled: "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ya."
