John spent the summer of 1935 studying at the London School of Economics. He then entered Princeton University but was forced to leave during the Christmas recess of his freshman year because of an attack of jaundice. In the fall of 1936 he enrolled at Harvard University, where he devoted himself strenuously but not very successfully to athletics and injured his back playing football. During his first two years at Harvard he continued to be an easy going student; then his work improved. Two trips to Europe, in 1937 and 1939, gave Kennedy the opportunity to observe international power politics at first hand. On his second trip, when his father was serving as ambassador to Britain, he stayed at American embassies, talking to newspapermen, political leaders, and diplomats. Returning to Harvard for his senior year, he wrote an honors thesis analyzing the British policies that led to the Munich Pact of 1938. This thesis, published in 1940 under the title Why England Slept, was well received by reviewers, who praised the 23-year-old author for his dispassionate judgments. Kennedy graduated cum laude from Harvard in June 1940. He then spent some months in 1940 and 1941 studying at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business in California and touring a number of the countries of Latin America.

Faced with the problem of choosing a career, Kennedy worked for several months in 1945 as a reporter for the Hearst newspapers, covering the conference at San Francisco that established the United Nations. There he noted the "belligerent Russian attitude." Ultimately he decided on a political career and returned to Boston. In so choosing, he took the place of his brother Joseph, who had seemed destined for politics but had been killed in World War II. His opportunity came when James M. Curley vacated his seat in the House of Representatives from the overwhelmingly Democratic 11th Massachusetts Congressional District to become mayor of Boston. Early in 1946, Kennedy announced his candidacy in the June Democratic primary. He began an elaborate and aggressive campaign against nine other candidates. One of his rivals called him "the poor little rich kid," and others referred to him as an outsider, a carpetbagger. But he campaigned ceaselessly, depending on a strong organization of personal followers rather than on regular Democratic party workers. In the primary he nearly doubled the vote of his nearest opponent, and his election in November was little more than a formality.

As a representative--he was reelected in 1948 and 1950--Kennedy had a mixed voting record, diverging sharply at some points from the policies of President Harry Truman and the Democratic party. On domestic affairs he followed the administration's Fair Deal policies in most matters, fighting for slum clearance and low-cost public housing. As a member of the Education and Labor Committee, he wrote his own temperate report concurring with the minority opposing the Taft-Hartley bill. On foreign affairs he backed the Truman Doctrine, but was critical of the president for not stemming the advance of communism in China. In April 1952, Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Senate against the Republican incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. Again depending on his own organization, he based his campaign on the slogan "Kennedy will do more for Massachusetts." In November, while the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower was carrying the state for president, Kennedy defeated Lodge by more than 70,000 votes. As senator, Kennedy concentrated at first on making good his campaign slogan. At the end of two years he could list a wide array of legislation he had obtained for Massachusetts businessmen. He expanded his program to cover all of New England and succeeded in uniting the senators from the area into an effective voting bloc. At the same time, he supported the St. Lawrence Seaway and the extension of the reciprocal trade program. On the troublesome question of the policies of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, who was admired by many of Kennedy's constituents, he took a middle position. To one McCarthyite he wrote: "I have always believed that we must be alert to the menace of communism within our country as well as its advances on the international front. In so doing, however, we must be careful we maintain our traditional concern that in punishing the guilty we protect the innocent." In December 1954, when the Senate voted censure against McCarthy, 67 to 22, Kennedy was ill in a hospital and did not vote; however, he reportedly had planned to speak and vote for censure.

Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier on Sept. 12, 1953. The couple had two children who survived infancy-- Caroline Bouvier, born on Nov. 27, 1957, and John, Jr., born on Nov. 25, 1960. A third child, Patrick Bouvier, died two days after his birth on Aug. 7, 1963. Not long after their marriage, Mrs. Kennedy had to help her husband through a serious illness. Increasingly troubled by his injured back, he underwent spinal operations in October 1954 and February 1955. During his long convalescence he occupied himself by writing a study of notable acts of political courage by eight United States senators. This book, published in 1956 as Profiles in Courage, received the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957. When, in May 1955, Kennedy returned to the Senate after his illness, he shifted his attention more and more toward national and international issues. He had previously told a magazine writer, with reference to critics who complained that he was not a "true liberal," that "I'd be very happy to tell them that I'm not a liberal at all." But by 1957 he was taking mildly liberal positions on the difficult question of civil liberties. He helped arrange a compromise between Northern and Southern positions on the civil rights bill passed in 1957. In Jackson, Miss., he frankly asserted that he accepted the Supreme Court decision of 1954 on desegregation of the nation's public schools.

In 1957 also, Kennedy obtained membership on the powerful Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, where he supported most of the Democratic policies. His emphasis shifted from military programs to economic aid to underdeveloped areas. In 1958 and 1959 he devoted much time and energy to labor reform legislation (soon after becoming a senator he had been appointed to the Labor and Public Welfare Committee), but in the end he was forced to accept the Landrum-Griffin bill, which incorporated some of his reforms but was less favorable to labor. Beginning in 1956, Kennedy aimed toward higher office. In the Democratic Convention of that year he almost wrested the vice-presidential nomination from Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. After the election he began speaking frequently throughout the country, and many writers began to speculate whether a Roman Catholic could be elected president. In 1958, Kennedy was reelected to the Senate by a margin of more than 874,000 votes. This firmly established him as a leading contender for the presidential nomination. In January 1960 he formally announced his candidacy. Backed again by a formidable personal organization, he defeated Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey, Jr., of Minnesota and other rivals in several hard-fought Primaries. At the convention he marshaled his forces so skillfully against those of Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas and Adlai E. Stevenson that he was nominated on the first ballot. Johnson became his running mate.

In accepting the nomination, Kennedy declared that "We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier," thus giving a name to his program. In the campaign against his Republican opponent, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, he took positions that, while middle-of-the-road, were somewhat more liberal than those held by Nixon, and defended them vigorously in an exhaustive campaign across the nation. When he appeared in a unique series of television debates with Vice President Nixon, his mature appearance undercut Republican arguments that he was too young and inexperienced for such high office. Although Public Opinion Polls predicted his victory, he was elected president by a margin of only 119,450 votes out of the nearly 69,000,000 that were cast. His Electoral vote was 303 to 219 for Nixon. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic to become president of the United States and, at the age of 43, the youngest man ever elected to that office, though Theodore Roosevelt was some months younger when he took office after the death of William McKinley in 1901. Kennedy's Catholicism may have helped him in the Eastern industrial states, and he won most of the Democratic South despite it, but the religious question apparently hurt him in the Middle West and West.

Kennedy was inaugurated as president on Jan. 20, 1961. He devoted his entire inaugural address to international affairs, calling on his fellow citizens "to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, ... against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself." His address was widely acclaimed as a classic political expression. Kennedy chose his cabinet to represent the country's main sections and interests. To reassure business, a Republican, C. Douglas Dillon, was appointed secretary of the treasury, and another Republican, Robert S. McNamara, who had been president of the Ford Motor Company, was named secretary of defense. Dean Rusk, who had headed the Rockefeller Foundation, became the new secretary of state, and Adlai Stevenson was appointed ambassador to the United Nations. Robert Francis Kennedy, the president's brother, became attorney general. Prior to the election, Kennedy had planned to present to Congress a sweeping legislative program similar to that of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first "100 days." The closeness of the election caused him to proceed more cautiously, but in his first months in office he sent Congress a record number of messages proposing broad programs to promote more rapid economic growth, rehabilitate depressed areas, improve urban housing and development, reform tax legislation, revise the farm program, conserve and develop natural resources, aid education, and provide better medical care for the aged. In effect, he was establishing his long-range goals. At the time he obtained little more from Congress than relatively short-range legislation to help pull the nation out of a mild recession in 1961.