John F. Kennedy: PT-109, the Missile Crisis and a Hidden Medical Regimen

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John F. Kennedy was born in 1917 into great wealth, descended from Irish immigrant families who rose through Boston ward politics but met the prejudice of the Yankee establishment. His father, Joseph Sr., made a fortune in banking, Hollywood and real estate, moved the family to New York and sent his sons to Protestant prep schools such as Choate, where John led a group of pranksters called the Muckers Club. Sickly and overshadowed by his brother Joe Jr., he found his footing at Harvard, where his thesis on Britain's slow response to a dictatorship's rearmament broke with his isolationist father and became a bestseller. In the Pacific his boat, PT-109, was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, and he towed a burned crewmate to an island, but the ordeal ruined his back.

After Joe Jr. died when his bomber exploded over England in 1944, their father's ambitions shifted to John, who won a 1946 House race with a publicity campaign funded by the family. Elected president in 1960 as the youngest ever elected and the first Catholic, he adopted a flexible response doctrine, then suffered the Bay of Pigs failure and saw the Berlin Wall go up. In the Cuban Missile Crisis he resisted calls for airstrikes, imposed a naval quarantine and used a back channel through Robert Kennedy, trading a no invasion pledge and the quiet removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Privately he lived with Addison's disease and severe pain, while the press largely kept his health and affairs out of print until his assassination in Dallas in November 1963.

• The crisis led to the Moscow-Washington hotline and the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
• In Vietnam he increased U.S. advisers and backed the Strategic Hamlet program, which relocated rural villagers into fortified compounds.
• He launched the Apollo program and the Peace Corps and, after hesitation, backed the civil rights movement.
• His regimen included corticosteroids, painkillers, amphetamine injections from a doctor nicknamed Dr. Feelgood, barbiturates and testosterone.
• His widow tied his presidency to Camelot in an influential interview, and Lyndon Johnson used the nation's grief to pass stalled legislation.