John F. Kennedy

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts, into a powerful Irish-American family. His father Joseph was a financier and former U.S. ambassador to Britain. Sickly throughout his youth, Kennedy still reached Harvard, where his thesis on Britain's failure to rearm became the 1940 bestseller "Why England Slept."

In the Navy he commanded PT-109 in the Solomons. After a Japanese destroyer cut his boat in half in August 1943, Kennedy towed an injured crewman to safety with a strap in his teeth. Amplified by his father, the story founded his political career. He won a Boston House seat in 1946 at 29, the Senate in 1952, and a Pulitzer for his 1957 book "Profiles in Courage."

In 1960 he narrowly defeated Nixon after the first televised debates, where his on-screen composure tilted close states. At 43 he was the youngest elected president and the first Catholic. His Inaugural urged Americans to "ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country." His New Frontier launched the Peace Corps, Apollo, and the first nuclear test-ban treaty. The defining moment was the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis: with advisers urging air strikes, he chose a naval quarantine, gave Khrushchev room to retreat, and pulled the world back from nuclear war.

His record is not unmixed. The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion was a humiliating CIA-backed failure. He authorised covert plotting against Castro and raised U.S. advisers in Vietnam from 900 to roughly 16,000. Public revelations after his death exposed Addison's disease, cortisone treatment, and serial affairs.

On November 22, 1963, Kennedy was shot in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald and died within the hour. Oswald was killed two days later by Jack Ruby. Successor Lyndon Johnson pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act in Kennedy's name. Historians still rate him highly for rhetoric and crisis judgement, even as later disclosures complicate the Camelot myth his family cultivated.