Summary
KENNEDY, John Fitzgerald, (brother of Edward M. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, grandson of John Francis Fitzgerald, and uncle of Joseph Patrick Kennedy II and Patrick J. Kennedy),
a Representative and a Senator from Massachusetts and 35th President of the
United States; born in Brookline, Norfolk County, Mass., May 29, 1917; attended the public and
private schools of Brookline, Mass., Choate School, Wallingford, Conn., the London School of
Economics at London, England, and Princeton University; graduated from Harvard University in
1940; attended Stanford University School of Business; during the Second World War served as a
lieutenant in the United States Navy 1941-1945; PT boat commander in the South Pacific; author
and newspaper correspondent; elected as a Democrat to the Eightieth, Eighty-first, and Eighty-second
Congresses (January 3, 1947-January 3, 1953); did not seek renomination in 1952; elected to the
United States Senate in 1952; reelected in 1958 and served from January 3, 1953 to December 22,
1960, when he resigned to become President of the United States; chairman, Special Committee on
the Senate Reception Room (Eighty-fourth and Eighty-fifth Congresses); unsuccessfully sought the
Democratic vice presidential nomination in 1956; elected thirty-fifth President of the United States in
1960, and was inaugurated on January 20, 1961; died in Dallas, Tex., November 22, 1963, from the
effects of an assassin’s bullet; remains returned to Washington, D.C.; lay in state in the Rotunda of the
U.S. Capitol, November 24-25, 1963; interment in Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Va.;
posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom on December 6, 1993.
BibliographyAmerican National Biography; Dictionary of American Biography; Burns, James M. John Kennedy: A Political
Profile. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961; Sorenson, Theodore. Kennedy. 1965. Reprint. New York: Perennial Library, 1988; Dallek, Robert. An
Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. Boston: Little Brown Co., 2003.
