John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960 as the youngest man ever voted into the office and its first Catholic, brought youthful vigor and soaring rhetoric to the presidency.

He guided the world through the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the Cold War came to nuclear war, and negotiated a partial nuclear test-ban treaty. He launched the Apollo program with a pledge to reach the Moon and began to embrace the civil-rights movement. His presidency was cut short by his assassination in Dallas in November 1963, a national trauma that still resonates.

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