John Fitzgerald Kennedy, known as JFK, was born on May
29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was the second child
of Joseph Kennedy, Sr. and Rose Kennedy, who would eventually
have nine children–JFK's older brother Joe Jr., and his younger
siblings Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Robert and Edward.
This generation of Kennedys would eventually become one of America's most
famous political families.
Childhood in the Kennedy household was shaped largely
by the influence of JFK's father, Joseph, an ambitious man who
would achieve great success both in business and politics. The
son of a Boston saloon owner, Joseph Kennedy had graduated from
Harvard and married into Boston's Irish Catholic upper class in
1914 when he wed Rose, the daughter of the popular mayor John "Honey
Fitz" Fitzgerald. At the time of JFK's birth, the United States
had just entered World War
I; Joseph Sr. left his job at a Boston bank to help
manage a shipyard in nearby Quincy, which was busy churning out
war vessels. After the war ended, Joseph Sr. began investing
on his own, first buying out a chain of New England movie theaters
in the early 1920s. He spent time in Hollywood, buying and selling
movie companies, before returning in 1930 to New York, where his
acumen as a stock market speculator became legendary. He survived
and even profited from the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and by the
mid-1930s his fortune was immense. In 1949, he established trust
funds for his children, guaranteeing each ten million dollars.
In 1957, three years before JFK's run for the presidency, Joe
Sr.'s fortune was valued at between $200 and $400 million.
With financial success came political involvement. In
the 1930s, Joe Sr. became a major backer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal,
making large donations to the Democratic Party and even penning
a book, in 1936, entitled I'm for Roosevelt. Later,
his support for some of Roosevelt's more radical fiscal policies
cooled, but he remained an enthusiastic Democrat and a famous,
if controversial, national figure, holding posts as various as
Director of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the
Ambassador to Great Britain. Nevertheless, Joe Sr. always felt
himself something of an outsider in the elite worlds of Boston,
New York, and Washington, where a kind of genteel anti-Catholic
and anti-Irish sentiment prevailed. Indeed, distrust of Catholics
and immigrants was still a powerful force in the country at large,
even by the 1940s. Joe Sr. vowed that his children would conquer
such forces.
JFK spent his earliest childhood in Brookline, where
he and his brother Joe Jr. attended the prestigious Noble and Greenough Lower
School, which was filled with the sons of white, Protestant families
who had kept the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds out of Boston's country
clubs for years. Joe Sr.'s business kept him away from home for
long stretches, but he was a formidable presence in his children's
lives nevertheless. He encouraged them to be ambitious, emphasizing
political discussions at the dinner table (and insisting that business
matters were never to be discussed) and demanding a high level
of academic achievement from each of them, particularly his sons.
They were to compete against one another, it was understood;
but in confrontations with outsiders, they were to close ranks.
Family loyalty was paramount.
With Joe Sr.'s business ventures concentrated in New
York and Hollywood, living in Boston no longer made sense, and
in September 1927 the family moved to a rented mansion in Riverdale,
a leafy suburb of New York City. Shortly thereafter, they shifted
again, to a house in nearby Bronxville. For three years, JFK went
to the Riverdale School; this was followed by a year at the Catholic
Canterbury School, in New Milford, Connecticut. In the fall of
1931, he enrolled in Choate, a Connecticut boarding school dominated by
the old Yankee aristocracy. An arch-conservative institution, Choate
excluded Jews and barely tolerated Roman Catholics. JFK was following
in his brother's footsteps–Joe Jr., athletic and popular, was a
celebrity of sorts around Choate's campus. JFK's time there was
less successful: he felt himself to be in his brother's shadow
(Joe was a junior when JFK entered), and his grades were mediocre.
Rowdy and disobedient, he and his friends were frequently in trouble
with the school authorities. His chief gift was for making friends.
"When he flashed his smile," the headmaster recalled, "he could
charm a bird off a tree."
In 1935, JFK graduated from Choate, ranking 64th in
a class of 112. He was a skinny young man with a narrow face and
a sickly constitution. He had been frequently ill while at Choate,
and after deciding to attend Princeton rather than follow his father
and elder brother to Harvard, he had his freshman year cut short
by a bout of jaundice. After taking the spring of 1936 off from
school, he changed his mind and went to Harvard after all, enrolling
in the fall of 1936.
