John F. Kennedy

Based on Wikipedia: John F. Kennedy

The Man Who Almost Wasn't

On a moonless night in the Solomon Islands, a Japanese destroyer sliced a small American patrol boat clean in half. Two sailors died instantly. The surviving crew, stranded in hostile waters, faced almost certain death or capture.

Their commander, a skinny twenty-six-year-old with chronic back problems who probably shouldn't have been in combat at all, towed a badly burned crewmate to safety using a life jacket strap clenched between his teeth. He swam for hours through shark-infested waters. When they finally reached a tiny island, he carved a message on a coconut shell and sent it with a local fisherman.

Seven days later, they were rescued.

Sixteen years after that night, the skinny lieutenant would become President of the United States. His name was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and almost nothing about his path to power went according to plan.

A Family Built for Ambition

Kennedy was born in 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. His family tree reads like a political dynasty in the making. His maternal grandfather, John F. Fitzgerald (after whom he was named), had served as a United States congressman and two-term mayor of Boston. His paternal grandfather was a ward boss and state legislator. All four grandparents were children of Irish immigrants—people who had fled famine and discrimination to build something in America.

But it was Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who transformed the family's modest political influence into serious wealth and power. Joe Sr. made a fortune in banking, shipbuilding, and Hollywood film production. He was ruthless, strategic, and obsessed with his children's success.

There were nine Kennedy children in all. John, called "Jack" by the family, was the second-born son. This birth order would prove fateful.

Joe Sr. established trust funds that guaranteed each child lifelong financial independence—freedom from the ordinary pressures that shaped most people's career choices. But he demanded much in return. The Kennedy dinner table was a seminar in politics and ambition. Academic excellence wasn't encouraged; it was required. Competition among siblings was constant and fierce.

The eldest son, Joe Jr., was being groomed for greatness. He was the handsome one, the athletic one, the natural leader. Jack was the sickly younger brother, constantly battling mysterious illnesses that would never fully be diagnosed or cured.

A Body at War with Itself

Kennedy's health problems began in childhood and never stopped. At thirteen, he had his appendix removed and withdrew from school to recover. At prep school, he battled unspecified ailments that kept him in the infirmary. At Harvard, a football injury left him with chronic back pain that would torment him for life.

When he tried to enlist in the Army as World War II approached, doctors rejected him. His back was simply too damaged for military service.

This should have been the end of any combat aspirations. Instead, Kennedy's father intervened—providing misleading medical records and pulling strings with naval intelligence contacts. The Kennedy name, Joe Sr. argued, would bring positive publicity to the patrol torpedo boat fleet.

And so Jack Kennedy, who by all medical standards should have been sitting behind a desk in Washington, found himself commanding a small wooden boat in the Pacific, hunting Japanese destroyers in the dark.

PT-109

Patrol torpedo boats, called PT boats, were tiny and fast. They carried torpedoes and light weapons, operated at night, and relied on speed and surprise against much larger enemy vessels. Kennedy took command of PT-109 in April 1943, stationed on Tulagi Island in the Solomon Islands chain.

The night of August 1, 1943, should have been routine. Kennedy's boat was one of fifteen American PTs deployed to intercept Japanese destroyers carrying supplies and nine hundred soldiers to a garrison on nearby Kolombangara Island. The Americans had intelligence about the convoy. They were expecting it.

But nothing went right. The night was completely dark—no moon at all. Of the twenty-four torpedoes fired by American boats that night, not a single one hit its target. The Japanese ships passed through largely unmolested.

Around two in the morning, Kennedy spotted a destroyer heading north on its return trip. He tried to maneuver PT-109 into attack position. Before he could complete the turn, the destroyer Amagiri appeared out of the darkness and slammed into his boat at full speed, cutting it in two.

Two of Kennedy's crew died in the collision. The survivors clung to wreckage in enemy waters, miles from any friendly base.

What happened next became legend. Kennedy, despite aggravating his already damaged back in the collision, took personal responsibility for Patrick McMahon, a crewman so badly burned he couldn't swim. Kennedy put the strap of McMahon's life jacket in his teeth and towed him through the water for hours—nearly four miles—to a small island the crew had designated as their rallying point.

For the next week, Kennedy and another officer made repeated swims through the coral islands searching for help or supplies. They encountered sharks. They avoided Japanese patrols. Finally, they made contact with two Solomon Islanders who spoke English and had a canoe.

Kennedy carved a message into a coconut shell: "NAURO ISL COMMANDER... NATIVE KNOWS POS'IT... HE CAN PILOT... 11 ALIVE... NEED SMALL BOAT... KENNEDY."

The coconut reached an Allied coastwatcher. The crew was rescued.

The Making of a War Hero

The PT-109 story was perfect for propaganda. The New Yorker sent journalist John Hersey to write it up, and his account portrayed Kennedy exactly as the Navy hoped: modest, self-deprecating, courageous under impossible circumstances.

Kennedy received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his leadership and courage. The injuries he suffered qualified him for a Purple Heart. When asked later in life how he became a war hero, Kennedy gave a characteristically dry answer: "It was easy. They cut my PT boat in half."

After recovering for about a month, Kennedy returned to command another PT boat, PT-59. In November 1943, his boat helped rescue dozens of Marines under heavy fire at Choiseul Island, acting as a shield while rescue landing craft evacuated the troops.

But his health was collapsing. By December, doctors ordered him off duty and sent him to a military hospital. He spent months in treatment for his back injury, eventually retiring from the Naval Reserve on physical disability in March 1945.

He was twenty-seven years old, a decorated war hero, and too broken to serve.

The Brother Who Didn't Come Home

In August 1944, while Kennedy was still recovering, his older brother Joe Jr. volunteered for an extremely dangerous air mission over Europe. His plane exploded during the operation. His body was never recovered.

The family received the news a day later at their home in Hyannis Port.

Joe Jr. had been the chosen one—the Kennedy son destined for politics, perhaps even the presidency. Jack, the sickly second son, had been expected to pursue a career in journalism or academia, something suited to his intellect rather than his frail constitution.

Joe Jr.'s death changed everything. Jack later believed his brother had volunteered for the fatal mission partly to outdo him, to reclaim some of the glory Jack had earned in the Pacific. Whether or not that's true, the family's political ambitions now rested entirely on Jack's narrow shoulders.

He assembled a memorial book of remembrances for his brother. Then he began preparing for a different kind of life than anyone had planned.

From Correspondent to Congressman

Jack's father arranged for him to work as a special correspondent for Hearst Newspapers in early 1945. This was supposed to be his calling—writing, observing, analyzing. He had always been bookish. At Harvard, he'd written a senior thesis on British appeasement before World War II, which was published as a book called Why England Slept and became a bestseller.

But journalism was just a brief detour. In 1946, at age twenty-nine, Kennedy ran for Congress in a working-class Boston district. He won.

He served three terms in the House of Representatives, then successfully ran for the Senate in 1952, defeating the popular incumbent Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. During his Senate years, Kennedy wrote another book, Profiles in Courage, examining senators throughout American history who had taken unpopular stands on principle. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

The young senator was building a national profile. He was handsome, articulate, and wealthy. He had a compelling war record and could write (or at least put his name on) successful books. His family had money, connections, and an insatiable appetite for political power.

In 1960, he ran for president.

The Television Candidate

The 1960 presidential campaign introduced something entirely new to American politics: televised debates between the major party candidates. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, faced Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate and heavy favorite.

Nixon had served eight years as Dwight Eisenhower's vice president. He had foreign policy experience, name recognition, and the backing of a popular administration. Kennedy was young, Catholic (a serious liability in Protestant America), and relatively unknown outside political circles.

The first debate changed everything.

Nixon arrived exhausted and ill. He refused makeup and looked pale, sweaty, and uncomfortable under the studio lights. Kennedy, by contrast, appeared tan, relaxed, and confident. People who listened to the debate on radio generally thought Nixon had won on substance. People who watched on television overwhelmingly favored Kennedy.

It was one of the first demonstrations of how television would reshape politics. Image mattered as much as argument. How you looked while saying something became as important as what you said.

Kennedy won the election by one of the narrowest margins in American history—less than 120,000 votes out of nearly 69 million cast. At forty-three years old, he became the youngest person ever elected president.

Cold War Commander

Kennedy took office at the most dangerous moment of the Cold War—the decades-long standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union that defined global politics from roughly 1947 to 1991. Both superpowers possessed nuclear weapons capable of destroying civilization. Both were locked in ideological competition, with the Soviet Union promoting communism and the United States championing capitalism and democracy.

Almost immediately, Kennedy stumbled.

In April 1961, just three months into his presidency, he authorized an invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained Cuban exiles hoping to overthrow Fidel Castro's communist government. The operation, known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion, was a catastrophic failure. The exiles were quickly defeated, and Kennedy's administration was humiliated before the world.

The failure emboldened Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who concluded that the young American president was weak and could be pushed around. At a summit meeting in Vienna two months later, Khrushchev bullied Kennedy mercilessly. Kennedy later told a reporter it was the "worst thing in my life."

The consequences came quickly.

The Wall and the Brink

In August 1961, East German troops began constructing a wall through the center of Berlin. The city had been divided between communist East and democratic West since the end of World War II, but people could still move relatively freely between the two halves. Thousands of East Germans were fleeing to the West every week.

The Berlin Wall stopped that flow. Families were separated overnight. People attempting to cross were shot. For nearly three decades, the Wall would stand as the most visible symbol of communist oppression.

Kennedy sent an army convoy to reassure West Berliners that America would defend them. Two years later, in June 1963, he traveled to Berlin and delivered one of the most famous speeches of the Cold War. Standing near the Wall, he declared: "Ich bin ein Berliner"—I am a Berliner. The crowd of hundreds of thousands roared.

But Berlin was not the closest Kennedy came to catastrophe.

In October 1962, American spy planes photographed Soviet missile bases under construction in Cuba—just ninety miles from Florida. The missiles being installed were capable of carrying nuclear warheads to most major American cities.

For thirteen days, the world stood at the brink of nuclear war.

Kennedy rejected advice from military commanders who urged immediate airstrikes or invasion. Instead, he ordered a naval blockade (which he carefully called a "quarantine" to avoid the legal implications of the word "blockade") around Cuba to prevent additional Soviet military shipments. He demanded the removal of the missiles already there.

Behind the scenes, Kennedy and Khrushchev engaged in desperate negotiations. The young president who had been bullied in Vienna was now facing down the threat of apocalypse. One wrong move by either side could trigger a war that would kill hundreds of millions of people.

Khrushchev blinked. The Soviet Union agreed to remove the missiles in exchange for a secret American promise to remove similar missiles from Turkey and a public commitment not to invade Cuba. The crisis ended.

Kennedy had grown enormously in office. The chastened president who emerged from the Bay of Pigs was now a skilled crisis manager who had stared down nuclear annihilation and found a path to peace.

A Complicated Legacy on Civil Rights

Kennedy's record on civil rights—the movement to end legal discrimination against Black Americans—was decidedly mixed.

He personally sympathized with the cause. During the 1960 campaign, he had made a highly publicized phone call to Coretta Scott King when her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., was jailed in Georgia. The gesture helped Kennedy win crucial Black votes in close states.

But once in office, Kennedy moved cautiously. He needed Southern Democrats in Congress to pass his domestic agenda, and those Southern Democrats were the primary opponents of civil rights legislation. Pushing too hard on race risked losing everything else.

Events forced his hand. In 1961, Freedom Riders—activists testing the desegregation of interstate bus travel—were brutally attacked in Alabama while federal authorities initially did little to protect them. In 1962, Kennedy had to send federal troops to ensure that James Meredith, a Black student, could enroll at the University of Mississippi despite violent white resistance.

In June 1963, Kennedy finally gave a major televised address calling civil rights "a moral issue" and proposing comprehensive legislation. It was the strongest presidential statement on the subject in a century.

But the legislation was still stuck in Congress when Kennedy died. It would be his successor, Lyndon Johnson—a Texan with deep knowledge of congressional politics—who finally pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, invoking Kennedy's memory to shame opponents into supporting it.

Reaching for the Moon

Not everything Kennedy did was about crisis management. Some of his most lasting achievements looked toward a brighter future.

In May 1961, still stinging from the Bay of Pigs disaster and desperate for a victory in the space race against the Soviet Union, Kennedy addressed Congress with an audacious proposal: the United States would land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade.

At the time, America had barely put a man in space at all. The total American experience with human spaceflight amounted to fifteen minutes on a suborbital flight. Kennedy was promising to travel a quarter million miles to another world within nine years.

The Apollo program he championed would eventually fulfill that promise—though Kennedy would not live to see it. In July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. Armstrong's first words on the lunar surface echoed around the world: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Kennedy also created the Peace Corps, which sent young American volunteers to developing countries to teach, build infrastructure, and promote goodwill. The program still exists today, having deployed over 240,000 volunteers to 142 countries since its founding.

In 1963, Kennedy signed the first nuclear weapons treaty between the superpowers, banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space, and underwater. It was a small but meaningful step toward controlling the weapons that threatened human survival.

Dallas

On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy traveled to Dallas, Texas, on a political trip designed to shore up support in a state he needed to win for reelection in 1964.

Shortly after noon, his motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. The president was riding in an open convertible with his wife Jackie beside him. Texas Governor John Connally and his wife sat in front of them.

Shots rang out.

Kennedy was struck twice—once in the upper back and once in the head. He was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where doctors attempted to save him. At 1:00 p.m. Central Time, he was pronounced dead.

He was forty-six years old. He had been president for slightly less than three years.

Within hours, police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union and then returned to the United States. Oswald denied shooting the president, but evidence quickly mounted against him: the rifle found in the building where the shots originated was his, witnesses had seen him on the upper floors, and his palm print was found on the weapon.

Two days later, while being transferred between jails, Oswald was shot and killed on live television by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner. The only suspect in the assassination of a president was dead before he could stand trial.

The Questions That Never Stopped

The Warren Commission, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the assassination, concluded that Oswald had acted alone. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (the FBI) reached the same conclusion.

Almost no one believed it.

Conspiracy theories about Kennedy's death began immediately and have never stopped. Alleged conspirators have included the CIA (angry about the Bay of Pigs), the Mafia (angry about Robert Kennedy's prosecutions as Attorney General), Cuban exiles (angry about the failed invasion), the Soviet Union, Lyndon Johnson himself, and dozens of other candidates.

The theories persist because the official story feels unsatisfying. A young, glamorous president cut down by a lone misfit with a mail-order rifle—it seems too random, too meaningless for such a momentous event. Surely something larger must have been at work.

No compelling evidence of a conspiracy has ever emerged, despite countless investigations, books, films, and television documentaries over more than sixty years. But the questions linger. They probably always will.

What Might Have Been

Kennedy's death at forty-six froze him in history at his peak—young, handsome, eloquent, promising. We never saw him age, never saw him face the difficulties of a second term, never saw him potentially fail or disappoint.

The Vietnam War, which would destroy Lyndon Johnson's presidency and tear the country apart, was already escalating when Kennedy died. He had increased the number of American military advisors in South Vietnam significantly during his presidency. Would he have sent combat troops as Johnson did? Or would he have found a way to withdraw without losing face? We will never know.

His personal life, carefully hidden during his lifetime, became public knowledge in the 1970s. Kennedy had numerous extramarital affairs, including a relationship with actress Marilyn Monroe. His health problems were far more serious than the public knew—he suffered from Addison's disease, an adrenal gland disorder, and took a cocktail of medications including steroids and painkillers that might have affected his judgment.

None of this was known while he lived. The handsome young president who asked Americans what they could do for their country remained untarnished by scandal or failure.

Kennedy ranks highly in polls of historians evaluating American presidents. Whether this reflects his actual accomplishments—which were significant but incomplete—or the mythic status conferred by his dramatic death is impossible to say. He navigated the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. He inspired a generation with visions of service and exploration. He moved, slowly and reluctantly, toward justice for Black Americans.

He remains the most recent American president to die in office. Every president since has traveled in armored vehicles, surrounded by elaborate security, haunted by the memory of that motorcade in Dallas.

The coconut shell Kennedy carved in the Solomon Islands—the desperate message that saved his crew—sat on his desk in the Oval Office throughout his presidency. A reminder, perhaps, of how close he had come to dying young, long before anyone ever heard his name.