1917-1963 · 35th president of the United States, serving from 1961 to 1963
About John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard, and commanded the torpedo boat PT-109 in the Pacific in the Second World War. He served in the House from 1947 and the Senate from 1953, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage (1956). Elected in 1960 as the youngest man and first Roman Catholic chosen president, he faced the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin crisis, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, and was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963.
John F. Kennedy took the oath of office from Chief Justice Earl Warren on the east front of the Capitol at noon on 20 January 1961, the morning after a heavy snowfall, in bitter cold. Robert Frost had just recited The Gift Outright from memory when glare kept him from reading the poem he had written for the day.