Basic Facts:
Birth: May 29, 1917 at Brookline, Massachusetts
Death: November 22, 1963 at Dallas, Texas
Married: Jacqueline Lee Bouvier (1929-1994) Sept 12, 1953
Children: 4-Arabella (stillborn), Caroline, John, and Patrick (born prematurely, died two days later in 1963)
President: One term beginning January 20, 1961
Family:
After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in French literature from George Washington University in 1951, Jacquiline Bouvier started working for the Washington Times-Herald as an inquiring photographer. The following year, she met then-Congressman John Kennedy at a dinner party in Washington. He was elected to the Senate that same year, and the couple married on September 12, 1953, in Newport, Rhode Island.
They had four children, two of whom died in infancy.
- August, 1956, a stillborn daughter, Arabella
- Caroline Kennedy on November 27, 1957
- On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Republican opponent Richard Nixon in the U.S. presidential election. A little over two weeks later on November 25, Jacqueline Kennedy gave birth to the couple’s first son, John F. Kennedy, Jr.
- On August 7 (five weeks ahead of her scheduled due date), Mrs. Kennedy went into labor and gave birth to a boy, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, via emergency Caesarean section at nearby Otis Air Force Base. The infant’s lungs were not fully developed, and he was transferred from Cape Cod to Boston Children’s Hospital, where he died of hyaline membrane disease two days after birth.
Other:
John Kennedy was the second of nine children born to Joseph and Rose Kennedy of Massachusetts.
Kennedy was the first President born in the twentieth century.
He was also the first Roman Catholic President.
At age 43 he became the youngest man ever elected President. (Theodore Roosevelt was younger when he took office after the death of McKinley.)
By contrast, Eisenhower had been the oldest President to date.
Kennedy won the 1960 election, beating Vice-President Richard Nixon by only .2% of the popular vote, making it difficult for him to lead Congress.
Kennedy faced many illnesses and accidents prior to becoming President. In fact, he was administered last rites from a priest on at least four separate occasions in his life, not including his 1963 assassination.
Kennedy’s speech to the students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on October 14, 1960 was the start of the Peace Corps.
In his speech to a Joint Session of Congress on May 25, 1961, Kennedy set the goal of landing a man on the moon by 1969 for the United States Space Program (NASA).
Kennedy gave a famous speech in West Berlin in June 1963 that emphasized the importance of the “free world” fighting the “Communist world”. Two memorable phrases that he spoke in German were: “Lass’sie nach Berlin kommen,” or “Let them come to Berlin”; and “Ish bin ein Berleener,” or “I am a Berliner.”
Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963 in Dallas Texas. He had spent little more than a thousand days in office.
In 1965, the report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (also known as the Warren Commission) found that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, fatally shot Kennedy from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Three other government investigations were later conducted. All three agreed with the Warren Commission’s conclusions that Oswald’s shots did kill Kennedy. However, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1979 also concluded that another shooter fired upon Kennedy from the Dealey Plaza grassy knoll and missed. The existence of a second shooter and many other conclusions in these investigations are very controversial.
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Sources:
Internet Public Library
Doctor Zebra – Health and Medical History of President John Kennedy
Greenman, Barbara. The Timeline History of U. S. Presidents and First Ladies. Thunder Bay Press, San Diego, California, 2009.
Whitney, David C. The American Presidents. Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1969.