John F. Kennedy

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the 35th president of the United States, from January 1961 until his assassination in Dallas in November 1963. The youngest person ever elected president and the first Roman Catholic to hold the office, he led the country through some of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War, above all the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. His short presidency, his style and his violent death made him one of the most mythologised figures in American politics.

Kennedy was born on 29 May 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside Boston, the second of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald. Both sides of the family were Irish Catholic: his maternal grandfather, John F. Fitzgerald, had been mayor of Boston, and his father became a multimillionaire through banking, the stock market and film, later serving as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and, from 1938, ambassador to Britain. Jack, as he was known, was often seriously ill as a child and young man, a pattern of poor health that continued for the rest of his life and was largely hidden from the public.

He studied at Harvard, graduating in 1940. His senior thesis on Britain's slowness to rearm against Nazi Germany was published as Why England Slept and became a bestseller, helped by his father's connections.

Despite his health, Kennedy joined the US Navy in 1941 and in the Second World War commanded a motor torpedo boat, PT-109, in the Solomon Islands. In August 1943 a Japanese destroyer rammed and sank it. Two of the crew were killed. Kennedy, though injured, led the survivors to a nearby island, towing one badly burned man by a strap held in his teeth, and they were eventually rescued with the help of local scouts. He was decorated for his conduct, and the story became central to his public image. His elder brother, Joseph Jr., on whom the family's political hopes had rested, was killed on a bombing mission in 1944.

After a short spell as a journalist, Kennedy was elected to the House of Representatives for a Boston district in 1946 and to the Senate in 1952, defeating Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. In 1953 he married Jacqueline Bouvier. He underwent dangerous back operations in 1954 and 1955, and during his recovery produced Profiles in Courage, studies of senators who had taken unpopular stands, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957, though much of it was drafted by his aide Ted Sorensen. Doctors had diagnosed him with Addison's disease in 1947, a fact he concealed. His Senate record was modest, and he avoided taking a clear position on the censure of the anti-communist senator Joseph McCarthy.

In 1960 Kennedy won the Democratic nomination, choosing the Texan Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate, and faced Vice President Richard Nixon. He addressed fears about a Catholic president directly, promising to keep church and state separate, and performed well in the first televised presidential debates. He won by one of the narrowest margins of the century, about two-tenths of a percentage point in the popular vote, though more clearly in the electoral college. Allegations of fraud in Illinois and Texas were never shown to have changed the outcome.

In his inaugural address on 20 January 1961 Kennedy called on Americans to "ask what you can do for your country". He founded the Peace Corps, launched the Alliance for Progress for Latin America and, in May 1961, committed the country to landing a man on the Moon before the decade was out, a goal fulfilled by Apollo 11 in 1969.

His first months brought humiliation. In April 1961 a force of Cuban exiles trained by the CIA under a plan inherited from Dwight D. Eisenhower landed at the Bay of Pigs and was defeated within days by the forces of Fidel Castro. Kennedy took public responsibility. At a summit in Vienna in June, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev pressed him hard over Berlin, and in August East Germany began building the Berlin Wall. Kennedy built up American conventional and nuclear forces and, in June 1963, declared his solidarity with West Berlin in a celebrated speech there.

The gravest test came in October 1962, when American reconnaissance flights revealed that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. For thirteen days Kennedy and his advisers debated air strikes and invasion before choosing a naval "quarantine" of the island. The Cuban Missile Crisis ended when Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles in return for an American pledge not to invade Cuba and a secret promise to withdraw US missiles from Turkey. Shaken by how close the world had come to nuclear war, the two governments set up a direct hotline, and in 1963 signed, with Britain, the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

In South Vietnam, Kennedy increased the American military presence from about 900 advisers to some 16,000 personnel. Early in November 1963 a coup, which his administration had known about and encouraged, overthrew and killed the South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. Whether Kennedy would have expanded or wound down American involvement in what became the Vietnam War remains one of the most debated questions about his presidency.

Kennedy came slowly to civil rights, wary of losing Southern Democrats in Congress. His administration sent federal marshals and troops to protect James Meredith when he enrolled at the University of Mississippi in 1962. The mass protests led by Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham, Alabama, in the spring of 1963, and the violent response to them, pushed him further. On 11 June 1963, after Alabama's governor tried to block Black students from the state university, Kennedy told the nation in a televised address that civil rights were a moral issue and proposed a sweeping civil rights bill. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, with the approval of his brother and attorney general Robert Kennedy, wiretapped King. Much of Kennedy's domestic programme, including the civil rights bill and a large tax cut, was stalled in Congress at the time of his death.

On 22 November 1963, while riding in an open car through Dallas, Texas, Kennedy was shot and killed. Lee Harvey Oswald, a former marine who had lived in the Soviet Union, was arrested for the murder and was himself shot dead two days later by the nightclub owner Jack Ruby. The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Oswald had acted alone. A congressional committee in 1979 suggested a probable conspiracy, a finding based on acoustic evidence that was later discredited, and the assassination has been the subject of endless speculation.

Johnson, who succeeded him, used the national grief to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and much of Kennedy's stalled agenda. Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C. His popularity has remained exceptionally high, though historians have since documented his concealed illnesses, his many extramarital affairs and the gap between his rhetoric and his legislative record. Assessments generally credit him with growing in office and with skilful restraint in the missile crisis, while noting how little time he had to show what kind of president he would become.