His six years in the House of Representatives were not distinguished by legislative achievement. He had among the highest absenteeism rates in the chamber, much of it explained by illness. He found most of his colleagues boring, found the arcane House rules maddening, and was described by a future rival, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, as a 'playboy' whose performance was 'pathetic.' What Kennedy was building during these years was not a legislative record but a political network: almost every weekend Congress was in session, he flew back to Massachusetts to speak to veterans' groups and civic organisations, keeping an index card file on everyone who might be useful later.

He supported the Truman Doctrine's containment of communism and voted against the Taft-Hartley Act, which restricted the power of labour unions. He backed the Internal Security Act of 1950, which required communists to register with the government, and he publicly blamed the Truman administration for the 'loss of China.' He was not the most principled legislator of his era, but he was assembling a position: anti-communist, pro-labour, Irish Catholic, and increasingly national in his ambitions.

In 1952, Kennedy ran for the Senate against a Republican three-term incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge Junior. His father financed the campaign aggressively, including, it later emerged, a half-million-dollar loan that persuaded the Boston Post to switch its editorial support to Kennedy. His brother Robert, then twenty-six, managed the campaign. Their mother and sisters hosted a series of 'teas' in hotel parlours across Massachusetts to reach women voters. Dwight Eisenhower, running for president that same year, carried Massachusetts by more than two hundred thousand votes. Kennedy defeated Lodge by seventy thousand. The following year, he married Jacqueline Bouvier.

The Senate years were marked as much by illness as by legislation. Kennedy underwent several spinal operations between 1953 and 1955, at times receiving Catholic last rites, his condition genuinely life-threatening. During his long convalescence in 1956, he produced 'Profiles in Courage,' a book about United States senators who had risked their careers by following their consciences. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1957. Years later, his close adviser Ted Sorensen confirmed in his memoir that he had done much of the writing. But the book gave Kennedy something more valuable than a literary reputation: it gave him a public identity as a man who admired moral seriousness, whatever the private reality.

In 1954, when the Senate voted to censure Joseph McCarthy, the Red-baiting senator from Wisconsin, Kennedy was the only Democrat who did not cast a vote against him. He had drafted a speech supporting the censure but was hospitalised for back surgery before it could be delivered. He never stated publicly how he would have voted. It damaged his standing with liberals for years. The episode captured something true about Kennedy at this stage: he was a cautious politician, calculating the cost of every position, unwilling to spend political capital on causes he did not consider essential to his own survival.

He was re-elected to the Senate in 1958 with seventy-three per cent of the vote, the largest winning margin in Massachusetts political history. That margin was his launch pad. He began travelling the country immediately, building the networks he would need for a presidential run in 1960.

On January 2, 1960, Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. He was forty-two years old. His opponents included Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, the 1952 and 1956 nominee Adlai Stevenson, and Senator Hubert Humphrey. The central questions about Kennedy were his age, his experience, and his Catholic faith: no Catholic had ever been elected president. His campaign strategy was to win enough primaries to prove that a Catholic could attract popular support, which would then force the party bosses to take him seriously.

He defeated Humphrey in the Wisconsin and West Virginia primaries, building momentum into the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. He arrived at the convention with the most delegates but not quite enough to guarantee the nomination on the first ballot. A second ballot could have given the nomination to Johnson or someone else. Kennedy's team worked through the night to secure just enough delegates, and he won on the first ballot. He then chose Johnson as his running mate, overriding his brother Robert's objections, calculating that the Texas senator could deliver Southern votes.

The general election against Richard Nixon, the incumbent vice president, opened with Nixon holding a six-point lead in the polls. Kennedy's Catholicism was a genuine liability. He addressed it directly on September 12, before a gathering of Protestant ministers in Houston, telling them: 'I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party candidate for president who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters, and the Church does not speak for me.' It was one of the most effective speeches of his campaign.

Then came the debates. On September 26, 1960, an estimated seventy million Americans, roughly two-thirds of the electorate, watched the first televised presidential debate in American history. Kennedy had met with the producer beforehand to discuss camera placement and set design. Nixon, recently out of hospital after a knee injury, arrived without the same preparation. Kennedy wore a blue suit that read sharply against the studio backdrop. Nixon wore a light suit that blended into the grey background; the studio lighting left him visibly perspiring. Kennedy looked directly into the camera, relaxed and tanned. Nixon looked at the reporters asking questions.

The contrast was decisive. One later analysis estimated the debates gave Kennedy roughly two million additional votes, largely from the first encounter. On Election Day, he defeated Nixon in one of the closest presidential elections of the twentieth century, leading by just two-tenths of one per cent in the popular vote and winning the Electoral College by three hundred and three votes to two hundred and nineteen. Kennedy was the youngest person ever elected to the presidency. He was forty-three.

He was sworn in as the thirty-fifth president of the United States at noon on January 20, 1961. His inaugural address was one of the most celebrated in American history. He spoke of the need for active citizenship: 'Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.' He invited the nations of the world to join the fight against what he called the 'common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.' He promised that while none of this would be finished quickly, 'let us begin.'

The address reflected a genuine ambition. Kennedy restructured the White House decision-making process around himself, favouring a model where all major decisions flowed directly to the president. He relied heavily on a small circle of staffers, and, despite concerns about nepotism, appointed his brother Robert as Attorney General. Robert became, in effect, the president's closest policy adviser on every major issue of the administration.

The new president moved quickly on several fronts. In one of his first acts, he signed the executive order establishing the Peace Corps, naming his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver as its first director. Through the programme, American volunteers worked in developing countries in education, farming, healthcare, and construction. Kennedy believed countries that received Peace Corps volunteers were less likely to turn to communist revolution. By March 1963 the organisation had five thousand members; within a year it had ten thousand.

Kennedy's first major foreign policy test was a disaster entirely of his own making. The Eisenhower administration had developed a plan to use CIA-trained Cuban exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro's government through an amphibious landing on Cuban soil. Kennedy approved the plan on April 4, 1961, accepting it with more enthusiasm than scrutiny. On April 15, eight CIA-supplied bombers left Nicaragua to strike Cuban airfields. They missed most of their targets, leaving the majority of Castro's air force intact.

Two days later, about fifteen hundred Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs. No popular uprising materialised to support them. No American air support was provided. Within two days the Cuban armed forces had crushed the invasion entirely: a hundred and fourteen exiles were killed and nearly twelve hundred were captured. Kennedy was forced to negotiate a ransom of fifty-three million dollars in food and medicine for the survivors' release. He took public responsibility for the failure, saying they had 'got a big kick in the leg' and deserved it.

The Bay of Pigs had consequences that rippled outward. It convinced Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that Kennedy was weak. It convinced Castro that another invasion was inevitable, making him receptive to Soviet overtures. And it convinced Kennedy that he needed to demonstrate resolve. He authorised a covert campaign of sabotage and espionage against Cuba, and the administration continued planning for a possible military intervention. These decisions set the stage for a confrontation that would bring the world closer to nuclear war than it had ever been before.

On October 14, 1962, CIA spy planes photographed Soviet construction of intermediate-range ballistic missile sites in Cuba, capable of striking most of the eastern United States. The photographs were shown to Kennedy two days later. He formed a secret advisory group, later known as EXCOMM, that met in the White House for nearly two weeks while Kennedy continued his public schedule, concealing the crisis from the American people.

The options were stark. A surprise air strike on the missile sites risked nuclear retaliation. Doing nothing left offensive nuclear weapons pointed at the American mainland from ninety miles off the coast of Florida. More than a third of Kennedy's national security advisers initially favoured the air strike. Kennedy decided instead on a naval blockade, which he called a 'quarantine' to sidestep the legal implications. On October 22, he announced the blockade on national television, warning that any Soviet vessel attempting to deliver offensive weapons to Cuba would be stopped and its cargo seized.

Soviet ships approached the blockade line. Several stopped. Several turned back. Kennedy and Khrushchev exchanged letters. The United Nations Secretary General urged both sides to step back. A Soviet missile shot down an American spy plane over Cuba, killing its pilot. Kennedy kept his nerve and did not retaliate. Behind the scenes, his brother Robert privately told the Soviet ambassador that the United States would remove its own missiles from Turkey shortly after the crisis ended.

On October 28, Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the Soviet missile sites in Cuba. The United States publicly pledged never to invade Cuba and privately agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey and Italy. The crisis was over. It had brought the world to the edge of nuclear war and then stepped back. Kennedy's approval rating jumped from sixty-six to seventy-seven per cent. A direct communication line, the Moscow-Washington hotline, was established between the two governments to prevent such a near-miss from happening again.

Before the missile crisis, Kennedy had already faced Khrushchev directly over Berlin. In June 1961, the two leaders met at a summit in Vienna. Kennedy left the meeting angry and shaken, feeling that Khrushchev had bullied him. Khrushchev, for his part, concluded that the young president was intelligent but weak. Weeks after the summit, the Soviet Union and East Germany began blocking movement from East Berlin into the western sector, erecting barbed wire that was quickly upgraded into the Berlin Wall.

Kennedy acquiesced to the wall's construction, though he drew a hard line on access rights to West Berlin itself. He sent Vice President Johnson to West Berlin to reaffirm American commitment, dispatched an army convoy through East German territory to demonstrate resolve, and announced a three-billion-dollar increase in defence spending alongside the deployment of more than two hundred thousand additional troops. He told his aides that the wall was 'not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.'

In June 1963, Kennedy returned to West Berlin for one of the most celebrated speeches of his presidency. Standing before hundreds of thousands of Berliners at the city hall on June 26, he declared American solidarity with the people of a divided city and used the Berlin Wall as evidence of communism's fundamental failure: 'Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect. But we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.' The speech ended with the phrase that became its emblem, delivered in German: 'Ich bin ein Berliner.' The crowd was ecstatic.

At home, Kennedy's presidency was shaped by a tension between ambition and caution. His domestic programme, which he called the 'New Frontier,' proposed federal aid to education, health insurance for the elderly, housing legislation, and a raise in the minimum wage. He won passage of the minimum wage increase in early 1961, along with housing and economic redevelopment bills, but his broader agenda was blocked by a coalition of conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

On civil rights, the tension was even more acute. Kennedy had expressed support for the movement during his campaign, and his brother Robert had called Georgia's governor to secure the release of Martin Luther King Junior from jail during the 1960 election. But on taking office, Kennedy did not introduce civil rights legislation. He needed Southern Democratic votes for his economic and foreign policy programmes, and he calculated that moving too fast on civil rights would cost him more than it would gain. Civil rights leaders, especially those on the front lines in the South, regarded him as lukewarm.

The Freedom Riders in the spring of 1961 tested that caution. The Congress of Racial Equality organised integrated bus rides to challenge the continued segregation of interstate transportation, and the riders were met with mob violence, including from law enforcement. Kennedy assigned federal marshals to protect them rather than sending troops, fearing that federal military intervention would inflame white Southern opinion. He instead pushed the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce federal law, which it did by September 1961.

Events forced his hand by 1963. In September 1962, when James Meredith attempted to enrol at the all-white University of Mississippi, a riot broke out that left two people dead and dozens injured. Kennedy sent three thousand troops to restore order and secured Meredith's enrolment. He began to doubt the version of Reconstruction history he had been taught. Then in June 1963, Alabama's governor George Wallace physically blocked the doorway of the University of Alabama to prevent two Black students from entering. Kennedy federalised the state's National Guard and forced Wallace to stand aside.

That evening, June 11, 1963, Kennedy gave a nationally televised address on civil rights: direct, morally urgent, and unlike anything he had said before on the subject. He proposed comprehensive legislation to guarantee equal access to public schools and other facilities, and to protect voting rights. The proposals became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The night his speech aired, an NAACP leader named Medgar Evers was shot dead in his driveway in Mississippi. The next morning, Congress defeated Kennedy's anti-poverty programme for Appalachia, largely because Southern Democrats voted against it in retaliation for his speech. Kennedy told an adviser he was glad he had given it anyway.

On August 28, 1963, more than a quarter of a million people gathered in Washington for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Kennedy had initially opposed the march, fearing it would damage the prospects for his civil rights bill in Congress. He watched King's speech on television and was deeply impressed. When the march leaders came to the White House afterward, Kennedy greeted them warmly and felt the march had strengthened, rather than weakened, his position. Three weeks later, a bomb at a church in Birmingham killed four Black children, and the moral weight of the civil rights bill became impossible to deny.

Beyond civil rights, two of Kennedy's most enduring commitments were to space and to nuclear restraint. In April 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space, deepening American anxieties about falling behind in the Cold War. Less than a month later, Alan Shepard became the first American in space. On May 25, 1961, Kennedy addressed Congress and committed the United States to landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade, calling it the most important and most difficult space project ever attempted.

He repeated the commitment on September 12, 1962, at a stadium in Houston: 'We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.' The Apollo programme received massive funding increases, and two new facilities were built: a launch centre near Cape Canaveral in Florida and a manned spacecraft centre in Houston. On July 20, 1969, almost six years after Kennedy's death, Apollo 11 landed the first crewed spacecraft on the Moon.

On the question of nuclear weapons, Kennedy moved from confrontation toward restraint. The Cuban Missile Crisis had sharpened his understanding of how easily miscalculation could lead to catastrophe. In June 1963, he delivered what became known as his 'Strategy of Peace' address at American University, outlining a path toward reduced nuclear tensions and announcing that the United States would postpone atmospheric nuclear tests. In July 1963, he sent a senior diplomat to Moscow to negotiate with the Soviets.

The result was the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signed in October 1963, the first nuclear weapons agreement of the Cold War. It prohibited testing in the atmosphere, underwater, and in space, though not underground. The United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union were the initial signatories. France declined to join and announced it was free to continue its own nuclear programme. Kennedy signed the treaty on October 7, 1963. It was one of the last major acts of his presidency.

By the autumn of 1963, Kennedy's administration was navigating an increasingly complicated world. In South Vietnam, the American-backed president Ngo Dinh Diem had been overthrown and killed in a military coup on November 1 and 2, a coup that Kennedy had authorised the CIA to support, though he had excluded assassination from the approved options. The number of American military advisers in Vietnam had grown from nine hundred under Eisenhower to sixteen thousand. More than a hundred Americans had been killed in action. Kennedy had signed an order in October authorising the withdrawal of a thousand personnel by year's end, but no final decision had been made about the broader American commitment.

He was in Texas on November 22, 1963, to smooth over a feud inside the state Democratic Party ahead of the 1964 election. He needed Texas. The motorcade through Dallas was meant to be a show of strength and accessibility: the president in an open car, waving to the crowds, demonstrating that he was not afraid to be among the people. The route through Dealey Plaza had been published in the Dallas newspapers the day before.

At half past noon, as the motorcade turned into the plaza, shots rang out from the upper floors of the Texas School Book Depository building overlooking the route. Kennedy was struck once in the back, the bullet exiting through his throat. A second shot struck him in the head. The car accelerated toward Parkland Memorial Hospital. At one o'clock in the afternoon, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was pronounced dead.

A man named Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine who had briefly defected to the Soviet Union and then returned, was arrested that afternoon for the murder of a Dallas police officer and subsequently charged with Kennedy's assassination. He denied everything, calling himself a patsy. Two days later, on November 24, before he could be brought to trial, Oswald was shot and killed by a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby, in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters, on live television. Ruby was convicted of murder, appealed his conviction, and died of cancer in January 1967 before a new trial could be held.

A commission led by Chief Justice Earl Warren concluded that Oswald had acted alone. That conclusion has never achieved universal acceptance. A later congressional investigation in 1979 found, with a third of the committee dissenting, that Kennedy was 'probably' assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, though it could not identify any other gunman. The Justice Department subsequently found no persuasive evidence of a conspiracy. Decades later, polls consistently show that a majority of Americans believe the full truth has not been told. The question has never been settled, and perhaps never will be.

Kennedy's body was brought back to Washington. On November 25, a Requiem Mass was held at the Cathedral of Saint Matthew the Apostle, attended by representatives of more than ninety countries. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. His widow, Jacqueline, later told a journalist that Kennedy had loved the Broadway musical Camelot and quoted its closing lines: 'Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief, shining moment that was known as Camelot.' The word attached itself to his presidency and never let go.

Many of the proposals he could not pass in life were enacted in the months after his death. President Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress, giving the force of federal law to the equal access and voting rights protections Kennedy had proposed in his June 1963 speech. The Revenue Act of 1964, based on Kennedy's tax-cut proposal, was also passed. The moral weight of a dead president's agenda, Johnson understood, was a political force that no living coalition could easily resist.

Kennedy's legacy has always been contested. Historians note that his legislative achievements in office were modest, that his caution on civil rights cost precious time, that his escalation in Vietnam planted seeds of a catastrophe he did not live to face. His personal life, kept carefully hidden during his presidency, became the subject of sustained public attention after revelations in the 1970s about his chronic health problems and numerous extramarital affairs. The gap between the image and the reality has never fully closed.

And yet the public memory has proved remarkably durable. In polls conducted decades after his death, Kennedy consistently ranks among the most popular American presidents, with a retrospective approval rating that in recent surveys has reached ninety per cent. He came third, behind Martin Luther King Junior and Mother Teresa, in a Gallup survey of the most widely admired people of the twentieth century. The airports, the space centre, the performing arts centre, the half-dollar coin, the schools and federal buildings that carry his name are scattered across the country like markers of a presence that people still feel the need to commemorate.

What the polls and the memorials are registering, perhaps, is not a precise assessment of what Kennedy achieved but a feeling about what he represented: a moment when the American presidency seemed to belong to someone young enough to believe that the hardest things were worth attempting precisely because they were hard. He said as much himself, in Houston in 1962, standing before a crowd in a football stadium, making the case for going to the Moon. The argument he made that day was not really about space. It was about what a country owes to the best version of itself. That argument outlasted him by more than sixty years, and it has not yet been resolved.