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John F. Kennedy Essay

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John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts on May 29, 1917, the second oldest in a family of nine children. His great grandparents had come to the United States from Ireland in the mid-1800s after a food shortage caused severe poverty in that country. Although their families had not come to the United States with much money, both of John Kennedy's grandfathers became political leaders in Boston. One of them, John Fitzgerald, was elected mayor in 1905. John Kennedy's father, Joseph Patrick Kennedy became a very wealthy businessman, an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the United States Ambassador to Great Britain from 1938 to 1940.
John Kennedy moved to New York when he was ten years old. Since the family …show more content…

Kennedy asked Lyndon B. Johnson to run with him for Vice President. In the general election on November 8, Kennedy defeated Vice President Richard M. Nixon, in a very close race. Kennedy was the youngest man elected President and the first Catholic. Just after the election, the Kennedy's second child, John Jr., was born.
John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th President on January 20, 1961. In his Inaugural Address, he spoke of the need for all Americans to be active citizens. "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," he said. He also asked the nations of the world to join together to fight what he called the "common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself."

During his time as President, JFK had to make difficult decisions. Many of the hardest choices concerned the relationship between our nation and the Soviet Union. Since World War II, there had been a lot of anger and suspicion between the two countries but never any shooting between Russian and American troops. This "Cold War" was a struggle between the Soviet Union's communist system of government and America's democratic system. Because they distrusted each other, both nations spent enormous sums of money building nuclear weapons to use if war began.
During the next year, Kennedy set up a special telephone connection between the President's office in the

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