A blown-up toilet seat gave the teenage John F. Kennedy's gang its name
At Choate, a Connecticut boarding school, young Jack Kennedy and his friends blew up a toilet seat with a firecracker. At the next chapel assembly the headmaster brandished the wreckage and denounced muckers. The boys promptly named themselves the Muckers Club. Their ringleader finished 64th of 112, yet classmates voted him most likely to succeed.
Kennedy was born on 29 May 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts, the second of nine children. Both grandfathers were Boston politicians, one a ward boss, the other a congressman and two-term mayor, and all four grandparents were children of Irish immigrants. His father, Joseph Sr., built a fortune, set up trust funds guaranteeing every child independence, and ran dinner tables thick with politics and demands for achievement. At five, Jack toured Boston wards with his grandfather during an unsuccessful campaign for governor.
Illness shadowed him from the start. Plans to study at the London School of Economics collapsed in 1935, and he withdrew from Princeton after two months with a gastrointestinal illness. At Harvard, a football injury left back problems that dogged him for life. He came alive intellectually as an upperclassman, travelling across Europe and the Soviet Union for his thesis and arriving back in London on 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland; his father was then American ambassador. The thesis, published in 1940 as Why England Slept, examined Britain's failure to rearm and became a bestseller.
The Army rejected him for his back. His father smoothed the way into the navy with misleading medical records, and after pleading to leave a quiet Panama posting, he reached the South Pacific commanding patrol torpedo boats. When PT-109 was sunk, his survival and rescue of his crew made him a decorated hero, though it left serious injuries.
He went on to represent a working-class Boston district in Congress, then Massachusetts in the Senate, winning a Pulitzer for Profiles in Courage. In 1960, helped by the first televised presidential debates, he narrowly beat Richard Nixon, becoming the youngest person elected president at 43 and the first Catholic. His brief term brought the Peace Corps, the Moon goal, the Bay of Pigs failure and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which nearly led to nuclear war. He was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963.
Source: John F. Kennedy
