John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy was president for a thousand days and has cast a shadow over American politics ever since. Born in 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts, the second son of Joseph Kennedy, a financier and ambassador to Britain who intended the presidency for the family, he was sickly throughout his life — Addison's disease, a ruined back, constant medication that was concealed. He commanded a patrol torpedo boat in the Pacific, was rammed by a Japanese destroyer, and swam his surviving crew to an island towing a wounded man by his lifejacket strap in his teeth. He entered the House in 1947, the Senate in 1953, and won the presidency in 1960 by about 112,000 votes, helped by the first televised debates, in which he looked better than Nixon. His first months brought the Bay of Pigs, an invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained exiles that failed completely and which he publicly took responsibility for. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 is the reason he is judged well. Given a near-unanimous recommendation to strike, he chose a blockade, kept the exchange going for thirteen days, and settled by trading the Jupiter missiles in Turkey secretly. He signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, committed the country to the Moon, and moved late but decisively on civil rights, sending the bill Johnson would pass. He was shot in Dallas on 22 November 1963. The Warren Commission found Oswald acted alone, and a majority of Americans have never believed it. His widow gave the Camelot comparison to a journalist a week after the funeral, and it stuck to the whole administration.
- Lived: 1917 CE – 1963 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: president, commander_in_chief, senator
