The Life of John F Kennedy
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts, the second oldest in a family of nine children. Joe Junior, was born first, then Jack, Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Robert, Jean, and Edward. He was also the great-grandson of Irish immigrants who came to America in the 19th century. His great grandparents had come to the United States from Ireland in the mid-1800s after a famine caused severe poverty in that country. Although their families had not come to the United States with much money, both of John Kennedy's grandfathers became political leaders in Boston. One of them, John Fitzgerald (for whom he was named), was elected mayor in 1905. His father, the son of a saloonkeeper, had graduated from Harvard and at age 25 became the youngest bank president in the U.S. He was a highly skilled investor and money handler and made a fortune. Joseph Patrick Kennedy also became a very wealthy businessman, an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the United States Ambassador to Great Britain from 1938 to 1940. In 1914 Joe Kennedy had married Rose Fitzgerald, the daughter of John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, a colorful Boston politician. As an infant he lived in a comfortable but modest frame hou
After World War II, Germany had been divided into two countries: West and East Germany. West Germany, like the United States, was a democratic country where people elected their leaders. In East Germany, a communist country, like the Soviet Union, the government owned all the farms and factories and made many decisions without the approval of the people. The city of Berlin was also divided. Though surrounded by East Germany, half of Berlin was part of West Germany. Many East Germans who did not want to live in a communist country had moved to West Berlin. During their meeting Kennedy and Khrushchev strongly disagreed about the future of Berlin. Later that summer the Soviets built a huge wall dividing the two parts of Berlin. For many Americans and the western Europeans, the Berlin Wall became a symbol of communism. In the summer of 1963, John Kennedy visited West Berlin and spoke to a large crowd near the wall . He said that America would support democracy in Berlin and that he looked forward to the wall coming down one day. se in that suburb of Boston. As the family grew and the father's fortune increased, the Kennedys moved to larger, more impressive homes, first in Brookline, then in suburbs of New York City. John had a happy childhood, full of family games and sports. He attended private elementary schools, none of them parochial. He later spent a year at Canterbury School in New Milford, Conn., where he was taught by Roman Catholic laymen, and four years at Choate School in Wallingford, Conn. John seemed to grow up in the shadow of his older brother Joseph, who dominated family competitions and was a better student in school. Encouraged by his father to take part in school athletics, John, wiry but thin, played in half a dozen sports without making the varsity. When John graduated from Choate in 1935, he ranked only 64th in a class of 112. His classmates, however, voted him "most likely to succeed." John spent the summer of 1935 studying at the London School of Economics. He then entered Princeton University but was forced to leave during the Christmas recess of his freshman year because of an attack of jaundice. In the fall of 1936 he enrolled at Harvard University, where he devoted himself strenuously but not very successfully to athletics and injured his back playing football. During his first two years at Harvard he continued to be an easygoing student; then his work improved. At Harvard he wrote an honors thesis on British foreign policies in the 1930s; it was published in 1940, the year he graduated, under the title Why England Slept. to send soldiers to protect students who wanted nothing more than an education, he decided to speak to the nation on television about civil rights. He said Americans had a legal and a moral responsibility to provide equal access to education and guarantee voting rights for all citizens. In addition to all the problems and challenges of being President, John Kennedy also had to fulfill the role of our nation's head of state. He and his wife Jacqueline hosted dinners and parties in Washington for the leaders of other nations. They also traveled to Latin America and Europe. Because Mrs. Kennedy believed that the nation's capital should be the center for arts and culture as well as the center of government and law, she invited many musicians, writers, and dancers to the White House to perform. who was admired by many of Kennedy's constituents, he took a middle position. To one McCarthyite he wrote: "I have always believed that we must be alert to the menace of communism within our country as well as its advances on the international front. In so doing, however, we must be careful we maintain our traditional concern that in punishing the guilty we protect the innocent." In December 1954, when the Senate voted censure against McCarthy, 67 to 22, Kennedy was ill in a hospital and did not vote; however, he reportedly had planned to speak and vote for censure. This faith in activism
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Approximate Word count = 5791
Approximate Pages = 23 (250 words per page double spaced)
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