(b. May 29, 1917; d. November 22, 1963) Member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate; thirty-fifth president of the United States (1961–1963).

Born less than two months after the United States entered World War I, John F. Kennedy came of age as the European postwar peace that had been precariously held together by the Versailles Treaty (1919) disintegrated in the late 1930s. Drawing upon a network of contacts developed by his father, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., then serving as the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, John Kennedy published his Harvard senior thesis on the failure of British leaders to prepare for the threat posed by Adolf Hitler's Germany as Why England Slept.

Despite a long history of serious health problems, Kennedy enlisted in the Navy during World War II and served in the Pacific campaign as commander of a torpedo boat. During one ill-fated mission, his boat...