John F. Kennedy Born in Brookline

Summary

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts. The second of nine children in the politically prominent Kennedy family, he graduated from Harvard and served as a U.S. Navy officer during World War II. After the war, Kennedy represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House and Senate. He won the 1960 presidential election and became the thirty-fifth president in January 1961, the youngest person elected to the office. His administration confronted the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, accelerating American involvement in Vietnam, competition with the Soviet Union in space, and growing domestic demands for civil rights. Kennedy supported the goal of a crewed lunar landing and increasingly backed federal civil-rights legislation in 1963. On November 22, 1963, he was assassinated while traveling in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded him as president.