John F. Kennedy – 35th president of the US

John F. Kennedy was the 35th president of the United States. He was the youngest person ever elected to the presidency. His assassination in 1963 shocked the country and the world.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was the second of nine children born to Joseph and Rose Kennedy. His father held government posts under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In 1940 Kennedy graduated from Harvard University. He completed his honors thesis, “Appeasement in Munich,” which was subsequently published as Why England Slept. During World War II he joined the U.S. Navy. He became an intelligence officer with the rank of lieutenant junior grade in Washington, D.C.
In 1946 Massachusetts voters elected Kennedy, a Democrat, to the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1951 Kennedy spent 6 weeks traveling in Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, and West Germany.

In 1952 Kennedy was elected to the U.S. Senate. While he was a senator Kennedy married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier. They had four children: a daughter, stillborn in 1956; Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, born in 1957; John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr., born in 1960; and Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, born in 1963.

Kennedy ran for president in the 1960 election. He promised to stop the spread of Communism. He sent military advisers, money, and supplies to fight Communists in Vietnam. Kennedy paid attention to the nation’s culture. He honored leading writers, artists, poets, and musicians, and invited them to the White House.
On November 22, 1963 Kennedy and his wife were riding through Dallas, Texas. Suddenly, bullets hit the president in the neck and the head. He died shortly after he was brought to the hospital.
Police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald for the shooting. Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner and a friend of local criminals, shot Lee Oswald. Later he said that he shot Oswald because he wanted to save Jacqueline Kennedy from the problems and worry of a long and painful trial. After his own trial, he was sent to prison for life, and died there in 1967.
On November 25, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington.

Kennedy was the first president to face a nuclear confrontation; the first to literally reach for the moon; the first in half a century to call a White House conference on conservation; the first to give the arts a prominent place in American national councils; the first since Theodore Roosevelt with whom youth could identify. He was also the only Roman Catholic to be elected president.
A television series based on Kennedy’s book was produced by Robert Saudek Associates in 1964. It won the 1965 Peabody Award, a prize recognizing outstanding achievement in television.
In 1989, Caedmon Audio Cassettes released an audio adaptation of Profiles in Courage. The narrator for this audio version was Kennedy’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr.

John F Kennedy – 35th president of the US