John F. Kennedy(1917–1963)

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born at Brookline, Massachusetts, on 29 May 1917, a great-grandson of Irish emigrants who had left Ireland during the Famine years. He served in the United States Navy in the Pacific during the Second World War, where his command of the patrol boat PT-109 and the rescue of his crew after it was rammed brought him a decoration for heroism.

He entered the House of Representatives in 1947 and the Senate in 1953. In 1957 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage, a study of political bravery. In 1960 he was elected President of the United States, the youngest man and the first Catholic ever elected to the office, and the first descendant of the Irish Catholic emigration to reach it.

His presidency opened the space age in earnest. In 1961 he committed the United States to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely before the decade was out, a goal met in 1969. He founded the Peace Corps, advanced the cause of civil rights, and in 1962 steered the Cuban Missile Crisis to a peaceful resolution that pulled the world back from nuclear war.

In 1963 he concluded the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, the first arms-control agreement of the nuclear era, and addressed enormous crowds on a triumphant visit to the land of his ancestors in Ireland. His inaugural call to ask what one might do for one's country remains among the most quoted lines in American public life.

The Kennedy name, from the Irish Ó Cinnéide, descendant of Cennétig, travelled from Munster to Massachusetts in the emigrant ships of the 1840s. Within a century the family carried it to the White House, and it has stood ever since for the long Irish journey from emigration to the summit of public life.