John Kennedy

The thirty-fifth President of the United States, and before that a lieutenant in the naval reserve.



He was born at Brookline on the twenty-ninth of May 1917, the second of nine children, and was ill for much of his childhood - scarlet fever at two, and a back that troubled him the rest of his life. He took his degree at Harvard in 1940 with a thesis on why Britain had not rearmed, which was published and sold.



The Army turned him down on his back. He got into the naval reserve in September 1941 with the help of a friend of his father's, and into the boats the same way. In April 1943 he took command of PT-109 in the Solomons.



On the night of the second of August a Japanese destroyer came out of the dark and cut the boat in half. Two of his crew were killed. He swam his men three and a half miles to an island, towing a man burned too badly to swim by the strap of his lifejacket held in his teeth, and went out again over the following days looking for help. He carved a message into a coconut shell and gave it to two islanders who carried it through Japanese-held water. All eleven survivors were taken off six days later.



He was given the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for it, and a Purple Heart for the back he had made worse. Asked later how he became a war hero he said: it was easy, they cut my PT boat in half.



His elder brother Joseph was killed flying a mission over England in August 1944. He was discharged on physical disability in March 1945 and went into the House the following year, the Senate in 1953, and the presidency in 1961 - the youngest man ever elected to it, and the first Catholic.



He was killed at Dealey Plaza in Dallas at half past twelve on the twenty-second of November 1963. He was forty-six. He is buried at Arlington.

His wife Jacqueline, his daughter Caroline and his son John.