Kennedy was born at 83 Beals Street in
Brookline, Massachusetts on Tuesday,
May 29, 1917, at 3:00 p.m., the second son of
Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., and
Rose Fitzgerald; Rose, in turn, was the eldest child of
John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, a prominent
Boston political figure who was the city's mayor and a three-term member of
Congress. Kennedy lived in Brookline for his first ten years. He attended Brookline's public
Edward Devotion School from kindergarten through the beginning of 3rd grade, then
Noble and Greenough Lower School and its successor, the
Dexter School, a private school for boys, through 4th grade. In September 1927, Kennedy moved with his family to a rented 20-room mansion in
Riverdale, Bronx, New York City, then two years later moved five miles (8 km) northeast to a 21-room mansion on a six-acre estate in
Bronxville, New York, purchased in May 1929. He was a member of Scout Troop 2 at Bronxville from 1929 to 1931 and was to be the first Scout to become President. Kennedy spent summers with his family at their home in
Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, also purchased in 1929, and Christmas and Easter holidays with his family at their winter home in
Palm Beach, Florida, purchased in 1933. He attended
Riverdale Country School, a private school for boys in Riverdale, for 5th through 7th grade.
For 8th grade in September 1930, Kennedy was sent fifty miles away to
Canterbury School, a lay Catholic boarding school for boys in
New Milford, Connecticut. In late April 1931, he had
appendicitis requiring an
appendectomy, after which he withdrew from Canterbury and recuperated at home. In September 1931, Kennedy was sent over sixty miles away to
The Choate School, an elite private
university preparatory boarding school for boys in
Wallingford, Connecticut for 9th through 12th grades, following his older brother,
Joe, who was two years ahead of him. In January 1934 during his junior year at Choate, he became ill, lost a lot of weight, was hospitalized at
Yale-New Haven Hospital until Easter, and spent most of June 1934 hospitalized at the
Mayo Clinic in
Rochester, Minnesota for evaluation of
colitis.
He graduated from Choate in June 1935. Kennedy's superlative in his yearbook was "Most likely to become President". In September 1935, he sailed on the
SS Normandie on his first trip abroad with his parents and his sister
Kathleen to
London with the intent of studying for a year with Professor
Harold Laski at the
London School of Economics (LSE) as his older brother Joe had done, but after a brief hospitalization with
jaundice after less than a week at LSE, he sailed back to America only three weeks after he had arrived. In October 1935, Kennedy enrolled late and spent six weeks at
Princeton University, but was then hospitalized for two months observation for possible
leukemia at
Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston in January and February 1936, recuperated at the Kennedy winter home in Palm Beach in March and April, spent May and June working as a ranch hand on a 40,000 acre (160 km²)
cattle ranch outside
Benson, Arizona, then July and August racing sailboats at the Kennedy summer home in Hyannis Port.
In September 1936 he enrolled as a freshman at
Harvard College, residing in
Winthrop House during his sophomore through senior years, again following two years behind his older brother Joe. In early July 1937, Kennedy took his
convertible, sailed on the
SS Washington to France, and spent ten weeks driving with a friend through France, Italy, Germany, Holland and England. In late June 1938, Kennedy sailed with his father and his brother Joe on the SS
Normandie to spend July working with his father, recently appointed U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's by President Roosevelt, at the
American embassy in London, and August with his family at a villa near
Cannes. From February through September 1939, Kennedy toured Europe, the
Soviet Union, the
Balkans and the
Middle East to gather background information for his Harvard senior honors thesis. He spent the last ten days of August in
Czechoslovakia and
Germany before returning to London on
September 1, 1939, the day
Germany invaded Poland. On
September 3, 1939, Kennedy, along with his brother Joe, his sister Kathleen, and his parents were in the
Strangers Gallery of the
House of Commons to hear speeches in support of the United Kingdom's declaration of war on Germany. Kennedy was sent as his father's representative to help with arrangements for American survivors of the
SS Athenia, before flying back to the U.S. on
Pan Am's Dixie Clipper from
Foynes, Ireland to
Port Washington, New York on his first transatlantic flight at the end of September.
In 1940, Kennedy completed his thesis, "Appeasement in Munich," about British participation in the
Munich Agreement. He initially intended his thesis to be private, but his father encouraged him to publish it as a book. He graduated
cum laude from Harvard with a degree in
international affairs in June 1940, and his thesis was published in July 1940 as a book entitled
Why England Slept., and became a
bestseller.;
Jean Edward Smith, "Kennedy and Defense: The Formative Years",
Air University Review, (Mar-Apr, 1967) </bgref>
From September to December 1940, Kennedy was enrolled and audited classes at the
Stanford Graduate School of Business. In early 1941, he helped his father complete the writing of a memoir of his three years as ambassador. In May and June 1941, Kennedy traveled throughout South America.
