Today in history: JFK is born

(Image credit: (Corbis))

last updated 8 January 2015

May 29, 1917: John F. Kennedy was born. He was the 35th president, serving between 1961 and 1963. Kennedy, the youngest person ever elected president — was also the youngest to die in office, when he was assassinated on November 22, 1963. He was the fourth president to be killed. A 2010 Vanity Fair poll said JFK would be the choice of Democrats for a fifth face on Mt. Rushmore (Republicans opted for Ronald Reagan).

Kennedy's short-lived administration was marked by an energetic, restless approach to domestic and global challenges. In his inaugural address — regarded as one of the finest ever given — he told Americans, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." He 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," and added: "All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."

Kennedy challenged the U.S. to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade; he saw the space race as the ultimate competition with the Soviet Union, and between democracy and capitalism. But the U.S. and Soviets had serious confrontations on the ground: in Berlin, where the communists built a wall to keep its citizens from fleeing to the West, and in Cuba, where the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles nearly led to war between the two superpowers.

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