BIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY OF A FAMOUS GEMINI: JOHN F. KENNEDY

US statesman and 35th president (1961-3), born in Brookline, Massachusetts, USA. Descended from Irish-Americans who had shown a talent for politics, he studied at Harvard, and his senior thesis became the best-selling Why England Slept (1940). His later Profiles in Courage (1956) won the Pulitzer Prize. He enlisted as a seaman in the US Navy, and after Pearl Harbor was commissioned as an ensign, given command of a PT boat, and assigned to the South Pacific. He was wounded when his boat was cut in two by a Japanese destroyer. (The public would never really be aware of the extent of his various medical problems.) Returning home to Boston with a citation for valor, the rich and ambitious young veteran joined the Democratic party and successfully ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1946. Massachusetts voters elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1952. In 1953 he married Jacqueline Bouvier; they were the parents of two children who survived infancy, Caroline Bouvier (1957- ) and John F., Jr. (1960-99). During recuperation from spinal surgery, Kennedy completed Profiles in Courage (1956), biographical sketches of political heroes, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957.

After an unsuccessful attempt to win the vice-presidential nomination on the ticket of Adlai E. Stevenson in 1956, Kennedy began to plan for the presidential election of 1960. He assumed the leadership of the Democratic party's liberal wing and gathered around him a group of talented young political aides, including his brother and campaign manager, Robert F. Kennedy. He won the nomination on the first ballot and campaigned with Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas as his running mate against Vice-President Richard M. Nixon, the Republican nominee. The issues of defense and economic stagnation were raised in four televised debates in which Kennedy's poised and vigorous performance lent credence to his call for new leadership. Kennedy won the election by a narrow margin of 113,000 votes out of 68,800,000 cast, but had to accept reduced Democratic majorities in Congress. He was the youngest president ever elected and the first Roman Catholic.

(source:biography.com)