John F. Kennedy

He nearly died of scarlet fever before he was three, and the illnesses kept coming — whooping cough, measles, ear infections, an emergency admission at 17 where doctors suspected leukemia and settled on colitis. He read through the convalescences and came out a fatalist. At Choate he finished 64th in a class of 112 and named his club after the headmaster's word for boys who spit in our sea. His Harvard thesis came out in 1940 as Why England Slept. On the night of August 2, 1943, a destroyer cut his patrol boat in half, and he swam a burned crewman to an island with the man's life-jacket strap in his teeth. A year later his older brother was killed over England, and the family ambition moved to him.

Not quite three years. He launched the Alliance for Progress, sent federal force into Mississippi and Alabama when governors would not move, put a civil rights bill before Congress on June 19, 1963, argued at American University that summer that peace did not require the Soviet Union to become American, signed the treaty that drove nuclear testing underground, and left about 16,000 American advisers in Vietnam. October 1962 and November 1963 are BriefHistory's ground, and it has them whole. This page is what the mythology sanded off.

In October 1960 he telephoned Coretta Scott King while her husband sat in a Georgia jail, and Black voters noticed. In office he moved the other way. He sent no civil rights bill for two years, because he needed Southern Democrats for everything else, and his brother, as attorney general, set the administration's early priority as keeping the president out of this civil rights mess. He had said in the campaign that a president could end discrimination in federally backed housing with an executive order. He signed Executive Order 11063 on November 20, 1962, almost two years in. And in October 1963 Robert Kennedy signed a written authorization for the FBI to wiretap Martin Luther King and the leaders of his organization. Hoover kept the taps running until 1966.

The renaming started almost at once. Idlewild became John F. Kennedy International Airport on December 24, 1963, Cape Canaveral became Cape Kennedy inside a month, and the Mint had a Kennedy half dollar in circulation by March 1964. Florida changed the cape back in 1973. The record keeps opening — Congress ordered the assassination files released in 1992, and the National Archives put out roughly 77,000 more pages over three days in March 2025. Public polls have put him at or near the top of every presidential ranking taken since he died. Historians are cooler and more divided, placing him eighth in the 2021 C-SPAN survey.

John F. Kennedy's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Why England Slept book
  His Harvard thesis on British rearmament, published at 23 1940
• Profiles in Courage book
  Won the Pulitzer — Ted Sorensen confirmed in 2008 how much of it he wrote 1957
• Cape Cod National Seashore law
  Co-sponsored as a senator and signed as president 1961
• Executive Order 11063 law
  Barred discrimination in federally supported housing 1962
• American University commencement address speech
  The case for rethinking the Cold War, delivered June 10 1963
• Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty other
  Ended atmospheric testing by the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union 1963

• 1934 aged ~17 Hospitalized at 17 while doctors suspect leukemia The eventual diagnosis was colitis.
• July 24, 1940 aged 23 Publishes Why England Slept
• August 2, 1943 aged 26 PT-109 is cut in half by a Japanese destroyer He towed a burned crewman to an island with a life-jacket strap in his teeth.
• August 12, 1944 aged 27 His older brother Joseph is killed on a bombing mission over England
• September 12, 1953 aged 36 Marries Jacqueline Bouvier in Newport, Rhode Island
• May 6, 1957 aged 39 Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage
• November 20, 1962 aged 45 Signs the housing order he had promised in the campaign
• August 9, 1963 aged 46 His infant son Patrick dies two days after birth
• November 22, 1963 aged 46 Shot in Dallas and pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital

• Robert F. Kennedy 1925–1968
  Senator and Attorney General whose 1968 presidential campaign was cut short by assassination. brother
• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 1929–1994
  First Lady who restored the White House as a museum and shaped the public memory of her husband's presidency. married to
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. wiretapped by his administration
• J. Edgar Hoover 1895–1972
  Longtime FBI director who built a powerful national police institution while conducting extensive political surveillance and abuses. kept on