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Family Life

The Kennedys had their first child, Caroline, in 1957; John Jr. was born a few days after his father won the presidency. A third child, Patrick, died two days after his birth in 1963. After a long succession of elderly Presidents, it was refreshing for many to see the Kennedy family's youth and vitality. One image in particular stood out: that of John Jr. playing under thePresident's desk in the Oval Office. When JFK died there was another image: Jacqueline Kennedy whispering to John Jr. to be sure to give a military salute as the casket carrying the President passed by.
The President's extended family was large, wealthy, and powerful. President Kennedy named his brother Robert attorney general so, as he put it, his brother could "get some legal experience" before gettinga job. Congress was not amused by the joke, and although Robert served ably, it later passed a law forbidding the President to make appointments of close relatives to federal office. President Lyndon Johnson, seeing Robert as a rival, maneuvered to keep him off the Democratic ticket in 1964 by stating that no cabinet secretary would be considered. Robert responded wryly that he was sorry to takeso many capable officeholders down with him.
In the November 1962 mid-term elections, John Kennedy's younger brother Edward (Teddy) successfully ran for a Senate seat in Massachusetts. After the President's death, Robert Kennedy would become a senator from New York state and a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968. This second Kennedy run for the White House was cut shortby another assassin's bullet. After winning the California Democratic primary, Robert Kennedy was gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan. Of the Kennedy brothers, Edward Kennedy would make the final run for the Oval Office in 1980 when he unsuccessfully challenged President Jimmy Carter's renomination. Despite this defeat, Edward Kennedy remained an active and senior member of the U.S. Senate until hisdeath in 2009.

The Political Climb
After being discharged from the Navy, John Kennedy worked briefly as a reporter for the Hearst newspapers, and in 1946, the twenty-nine-year-old Kennedy won election to the U.S. Congress representing a working-class Boston district. He served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, earning a reputation as a somewhat conservative Democrat. He wasre-elected in 1948 and again in 1950. In 1952, he ran for the U.S. Senate and defeated the Republican incumbent from another Massachusetts family with a long political history, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. That same year, he met Jacqueline Bouvier at a dinner party, and, as he later put it, "leaned across the asparagus and asked her for a date." The two were married a year later and had three children, one ofwhom died in infancy in August 1963.
Kennedy continued to be dogged by poor health. Left thin and sallow by malaria brought home from the war in the Pacific, he also suffered from Addison's disease, which many doctors considered terminal. He relied on a steady stream of painkillers and steroids to treat the symptoms of his many ailments. Constant back pain would prevent him from lifting even hisown small children. Ironically, though, Kennedy's public image was one of youth, health, and vigor. And Kennedy put one period of enforced convalescence from back surgery to productive use by writing Profiles in Courage, a book about Americans who had taken unpopular but admirable moral stands. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957.
Due to his continuing poor health, Kennedy hadone of the worst attendance records in Congress. His real achievements in the Senate were few, but almost immediately after election he began angling for even higher office. In 1956, he mounted a serious quest for the vice presidential spot alongside presidential hopeful Adlai Stevenson. He narrowly lost the spot to Estes Kefauver, a senator from Tennessee. Ultimately, though, this defeat proved...