John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts in the USA. He was brought up in
Bronxville, New York, where his father Joseph Kennedy had moved the entire family. John
was the second of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s nine children.
He was reared in a family that demanded
intense physical and intellectual competition among children and was schooled in the
religious teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. John attended private elementary
schools, including a year at Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut and four years
at Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut. He entered Princeton University, but was
forced to leave during his freshman year as he suffered from jaundice. In 1936, he
enrolled at the Harvard University, graduating cum laude in June 1940. At Harvard he wrote
an honors thesis on British Foreign Policies of the 1930s, which was published in 1940
under the title Why England Slept, which went on to become one of the best-selling books
of those days. For six months in 1938, he served as secretary to his father, the then US
ambassador of Great Britain.
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