Kennedy was born on 29 May 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was a rich businessman whom Franklin Roosevelt made ambassador to Britain in 1938. [1]
He was often ill as a boy and as a young man. In the Navy he commanded a patrol torpedo boat, PT 109. In August 1943, while the crew slept without posting a watch, a Japanese destroyer rammed and split the boat. Kennedy led the survivors to an island, and the episode made him a war hero. [1]
In 1946, at 29, he won a House seat representing a working-class Boston district. In 1952 he beat the Republican incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., for the Senate. During a long recovery from back surgery he produced Profiles in Courage, about eight senators who took unpopular stands; it won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography, with what the Miller Center calls the “handiwork” of his aide Theodore Sorensen. [1]
He married Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953. They had Caroline and John Jr.; a third child, Patrick, died two days after his birth in August 1963, three months before Dallas. [2]
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