Brookline to the White House

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]

Kennedy won the 1960 popular vote by fewer than 120,000 votes out of a record 68.8 million cast. The electoral college was less close: 303 to 219, with a handful of unpledged electors voting for Senator Harry Byrd. [1]

Illinois went to Kennedy by fewer than 9,000 votes, helped by an unusually good result in Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago. Texas, Lyndon Johnson’s state, was also close. Republicans went to court and pushed recounts; the challenges did not change the result. Nixon declined to contest the election himself. [1]

The arithmetic matters for the “stolen election” story: Illinois had 27 electoral votes. Take them away and Kennedy still had 276, more than the 269 needed. To reverse the outcome, a fraud theory has to flip Texas too. [1]