Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, into a wealthy family. Educated at Choate preparatory school and Harvard University, he graduated in 1940. Following naval service in the Pacific in World War Two, he entered politics in 1946 and won election as a Democrat to the US House of Representatives. Spurred on by his father, Joseph Kennedy, in 1952 John Kennedy was elected to the upper house of Congress, the Senate, defeating the incumbent Republican.

Unsuccessful in gaining the 1956 Democratic vice-presidential nomination, Kennedy ran and won the party's presidential nomination four years later. His defeat of vice-president Richard Nixon in the subsequent election made him the nation's first Roman Catholic head of state. He was also, at the age of 43, the youngest president ever elected.

His presidency got off to an uncertain start, despite the promise in his inaugural address of January 1961 that the US would 'pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend [and] oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty ...'. Subsequently, his years in power were marked by several areas of tension in foreign affairs, together with a rhetorical commitment to domestic reforms, and most of all to the civil rights of black Americans.

He inherited the Eisenhower administration's plan to use anti-communist Cubans to invade Cuba in order to overthrow Fidel Castro's government there. In April 1961 the invasion ended in failure, and in Castro's survival. Many historians suggest it was this fiasco that led the Soviet Union to conclude that Kennedy was a weak leader, and that they could get away with installing nuclear weapons on Cuba in 1962. The subsequent Cuban missile crisis did much to restore Kennedy's reputation, as Soviet Communist Party leader Nikita Khruschev withdrew the missiles - after a 13-day stand-off that included the naval quarantine of the island by the US.

Domestically, Kennedy introduced the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962, and of the University of Alabama the following year - despite the opposition to this policy of each state's political establishment. More substantial legislation to encode civil rights was not passed, however, until the subsequent administration of Lyndon Johnson (1963-9).

Kennedy was assassinated by gun shot in November 1963. According to the Earl Warren commission established to investigate the assassination, a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, killed the president. However, few people found this an acceptable conclusion, and there has been consistent speculation ever since that Kennedy's death was the result of a conspiracy.