《JohnFKennedy》.doc

John F. Kennedy
Early Years
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, known as JFK, was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was the second child of Joseph Kennedy, Sr. and Rose Kennedy, who would eventually have nine children–JFK's older brother Joe Jr., and his younger siblings Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Robert and Edward. This generation of Kennedys would eventually become one of America's most famous political families.
Childhood in the Kennedy household was shaped largely by the influence of JFK's father, Joseph, an ambitious man who would achieve great success both in business and politics. The son of a Boston saloon owner, Joseph Kennedy had graduated from Harvard and married into Boston's Irish Catholic upper class in 1914 when he wed Rose, the daughter of the popular mayor John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald. At the time of JFK's birth, the United States had just entered World War I; Joseph Sr. left his job at a Boston bank to help manage a shipyard in nearby Quincy, which was busy churning out war vessels. After the war ended, Joseph Sr. began investing on his own, first buying out a chain of New England movie theaters in the early 1920s. He spent time in Hollywood buying and selling movie companies, before returning in 1930 to New York, where his acumen as a stock market speculator became legendary. He survived and even profited from the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and by the mid-1930s his fortune was immense. In 1949, he established trust funds for his children, guaranteeing each ten million dollars. In 1957, three years before JFK's run for the presidency, Joe Sr.'s fortune was valued at between $200 and $400 million.
With financial success came political involvement. In the 1930s, Joe Sr. became a major backer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, making large donations to the Democratic Party and even penning a book, in 1936, entitled I'm for Roosevelt. Later, his support for some of Roosevelt's more radical fiscal policies cooled, but he remained an enthusiastic Democrat and a famous, if controversial, national figure, holding posts as various as Director of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Ambassador to Great Britain. Nevertheless, Joe Sr. always felt himself something of an outsider in the elite worlds of Boston, New York, and Washington, where a kind of genteel anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiment prevailed Indeed, distrust of Catholics and immigrants was still a powerful force in the country at large, even by the 1940s. Joe Sr. vowed that his children would conquer such forces.
JFK spent his earliest childhood in Brookline, where he and his brother Joe Jr. attended the prestigious Noble and Greenough Lower School, which was filled with the sons of white, Protestant families who had kept the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds out of Boston's country clubs for years. Joe Sr.'s business kept him away from home for long stretches, but he was a formidable presence in his children's lives nevertheless. He encouraged them to be ambitious, emphasizing political discussions at the dinner table (and insisting that business matters were never to be discussed) and demanding a high level of academic achievement from each of them, particularly his sons. They were to compete against one another, it was understood; but in confrontations with outsiders, they were to close ranks. Family loyalty was paramount.
With Joe Sr.'s business ventures concentrated in New York and Hollywood, living in Boston no longer made sense, and in September 1927 the family moved to a rented mansion in Riverdale, a leafy suburb of New York City. Shortly thereafter, they shifted again, to a house in nearby Bronxville. For three years, JFK went to the Riverdale School; this was followed by a year at the Catholic Canterbury School, in New Milford, Connecticut. In the fall of 1931, he enrolled in Choate, a Connecticut boarding school dominated by the old Yankee aristocracy. An arch-conservative institution, Choate excluded Jews and barely tolerated Roman Catholics. JFK was following in his brother's footsteps–Joe Jr., athletic and popular, was a celebrity of sorts around Choate's campus. JFK's time there was less successful: he felt himself to be in his brother's shadow (Joe was a junior when JFK entered), and his grades were mediocre. Rowdy and disobedient, he and his friends were frequently in trouble with the school authorities. His chief gift was for making friends. "When he flashed his smile," the headmaster recalled, "he could charm a bird off a tree."
In 1935, JFK graduated from Choate, ranking 64th in a class of 112. He was a skinny young man with a narrow face and a sickly constitution. He had been frequently ill while at Choate, and after deciding to attend Princeton rather than follow his father and elder brother to Harvard, he had his freshman year cut short by a bout of jaundice. After taking the spring of 1936 off from school, he changed his mind and went to Harvard after all, enrolling in the fall of 1936.
 Harvard and World War II
In a way, JFK's first two years at Harvard echoed his experience at Choate. Again, he felt himself to be in the shadow of his older brother Joe Jr., who was two years ahead of him and pegged as the most intelligent and driven of the Kennedy boys. JFK continued to make only lackluster grades–"gentleman's C's," as the expression went. He wrote occasionally for the Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper, but had little involvement with campus politics, preferring to concentrate on athletics and his social life. He played football, and was on the JV squad during his sophomore year, but a bad fall led to a rupture of his spinal disc. The injury forced him off the team, and left him with back troubles that would plague him for the rest of his life. Off the field, in Harvard's social scene, he was more successful. He won membership in the Hasty Pudding Society and the Spee Club, one of Harvard's elite "final clubs," where bluebloods mingled and made the connections that kept America's aristocracy running. A contemporary called him "one of the most popular men in our class."
In 1937, while JFK was still in his sophomore year, Joseph Kennedy, Sr. was appointed Ambassador to Great Britain. This prestigious post opened new social avenues to the Kennedy family, and gave them front-row seats for the drama of World War II's approach. In the European theater, Adolf Hitler was preparing to occupy Austria and Czechoslovakia, and the British government was pursuing a policy of appeasement, designed to stave off war at all costs. As ambassador, Joseph Kennedy would staunchly support appeasing Hitler, and would be fiercely critical of Winston Churchill's calls for a stronger policy against the Nazi threat. History would not regard this impulse of Joseph Kennedy's to placate Germany any more kindly than future events would treat his strident anti-Semitism. "Never do business with Jews," he once told his sons, this bigotry ironic for a man who had himself been the victim of so much anti-religious sentiment, since he was Catholic.

In 1938, though, these concerns lay in the future, and JFK used his father's position to arrange a grand tour of sorts that would take him from France to Poland, down through Russia into the Mediterranean, and finally back up through Berlin and Paris, before bringing him home. He had made an earlier journey in the summer of 1937, and had returned very impressed with the organization and efficiency of the fascist states of Italy and Germany. This time, he arranged for his tour to count as a Harvard semester, and sailed for Europe in the winter of 1939, as Nazi tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. Using his father's connections, JFK was able to stay in ambassadors' homes for the majority of his trip, and he sent detailed reports to Joe Sr. from every stop. JFK's most prescient observation came in Poland, where he noted that "rightly or wrongly the Poles will fight over the Question of Danzig," referring to the controversy over a Polish seaport that led to Hitler's invasion of Poland.
The tour lasted seven months, and ended with JFK back in London for the summer of 1939. He was still there when war broke out–over Danzig, as he had predicted–in September 1939. Germany invaded Poland, and Great Britain and France immediately declared war on Hitler's Reich. (America, as it had at the beginning of World War I, remained neutral.) Hitler's armies quickly crushed the Poles, and tensions at the French-German border immediately settled into a quiet stalemate–the so-called "phony war," which would last well into 1940.
JFK began his senior year at Harvard in the spring of 1940, with the campus buzzing over the events happening across the Atlantic. JFK showed more of an interest in politics now, joining the Crimson editorial board and penning a thesis on England's foreign policy before the war. The thesis was critical of Neville Chamberlain's lenient dealings with Hitler, but echoed Joe Sr.'s attitude in suggesting that the British people would not have accepted war before 1939, in any event. Entitled "Appeasement at Munich," it was well-received and helped JFK graduate magna cum laude, the second-highest possible ranking. More importantly, Joe Sr. seized upon the thesis as a way of making his JFK a public figure. Joe Sr. pulled strings in the publishing industry, hired a newspaper reporter to edit and polish the prose, and eventually had the thesis–retitled Why England Slept–published as a book in July of 1940. It was a modest best-seller, and gave JFK his first taste of celebrity.
With Harvard behind him, JFK briefly attended Stanford Business School, and, along with most Americans of his age, registered for the draft, in October 1940. His number was called, but he used his status as a student to defer entry into the military until summer 1941. Meanwhile, he left Stanford and took a rather aimless trip through South America in the spring of 1941. At this time, he was dating a number of women, a pattern that would continue throughout his life, even during his marriage. His health problems persisted, as well. He had stomach trouble, was far too thin, and failed physicals for both the army and the navy. But again, his father's connections prevailed, and a friendly doctor gave JFK a clean bill of health. JFK was sworn in as a naval ensign on September 25, 1941, less than two months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor would drag America into World War II.
 The War Hero and Tragedy
The early 1940s marked a changing of the guard in the Kennedy clan. Joseph Kennedy, Sr.'s political star was in eclipse–in the country at large, because of his support for appeasement while Ambassador to Great Britain, and in the Democratic party in specific, because of his opposition, in 1940, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's nomination to run for a historically-unprecedented third term as President of the United States. His children, however, were on the rise. Kathleen Kennedy, JFK's favorite sibling, was working for a newspaper in Washington, and being romanced by the social elite of both the U.S. and Great Britain. Joseph Kennedy, Jr. vigorously opposed U.S. involvement in World War II while at Harvard Law School, but once Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese, he enlisted in the Naval Aviation Cadet Program, and was soon flying missions over Europe. Meanwhile, JFK (now "Ensign Kennedy") was working for Naval Intelligence in Washington, and sleeping with a Danish beauty named Inga Arvad, who worked as a columnist for the same paper as Kathleen. An exotic, well-traveled woman, Inga had connections to Nazi leaders, a circumstance which eventually got JFK in trouble with his superior officers. The young ensign was reassigned to a bureaucratic post in South Carolina, and his romance with the Danish beauty fizzled.
JFK found South Carolina paralyzingly dull, and he begged his father to pull strings to get him assigned to sea duty. Joseph Kennedy, Sr. obliged, and in late 1942, JFK was given an assignment on a Motor Torpedo Boat, or "PT boat," as it was informally known. After six months of training, he and his crewmates shipped out from San Francisco, bound for the South Pacific and combat with the Japanese. Promoted to lieutenant early in 1943, he was given command of a boat designated PT 109, and was the skipper of this boat on the night of August 2, 1943, when it was rammed by the Japanese destroyer Amigari. Two of JFK's crew were killed outright, while the others tried to stay afloat amid the wreckage. Under the young lieutenant's leadership, eleven men, several badly wounded, managed to hang on to the half of the PT boat that was still afloat and wait for help. None came, and after nearly fifteen hours, JFK led the men on a grueling swim to a nearby island. From there, he and his subordinate, Ensign Ross, made various forays through the coral islands, searching for help. It was days before they found a group of natives who carried a message to a British base, some thirty-eight miles away. Finally, on August 7, JFK and the other survivors were rescued by a party of British scouts and carried to safety.
The ordeal made JFK a war hero. He received the Purple Heart, as well as the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, and for the first time in his life, he began to outshine his brother Joe. After the incident of PT 109, however, the rest of JFK's war experience proved somewhat anticlimactic. JFK's frail health gave way: he contracted malaria, and his old back problems flared up. He was rotated back to duty in the U.S., and by spring of 1944, he found himself laid up in Boston's Chelsea Naval Hospital, diagnosed with a chronic lower back disease. That same spring, in London, his sister Kathleen married an English nobleman, William Hartington, the heir to the staunchly Protestant Duke of Devonshire. The difference of religion made it a controversial match from both families' perspectives–Rose Kennedy even went into seclusion for a while, claiming that she had "lost" a daughter. But Kathleen had the support of her brother Joe, who was then in London flying missions against German submarines, and so the marriage went forward.
By this point, Joe Kennedy, Jr. had been flying missions against the Nazis for some time, even turning down a chance to return to the U.S. in order to keep flying. Later, some would claim that JFK's sudden celebrity from the PT 109 incident rankled his older brother, and drove him toward a reckless pursuit of heroism. In any case, what became Joe Jr.'s final mission was an almost suicidally dangerous operation that consisted of dropping ten tons of high-explosive TNT on a German target in France. The mission proved fatal, as Joe Jr.'s plane exploded in the air over southern England on the evening of August 12, 1944. The devastating news reached the Kennedy family's summer home, in Hyannis, Massachusetts, a day later. The family was united in grief, and their sorrows only increased in S