Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts were the parents of nine children, four of whom were males. Their sons were Joseph Patrick, Jr. (Joe) born 1915; John Fitzgerald (Jack) born 1917; Robert Francis (Bobby) born 1925; and Edward Moore (Teddy) born 1932.
Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Jr. graduated in 1938 from Harvard, where he was on the football team. He studied for a year at the London School of Economics. He entered Harvard Law School, which he left before graduation to enter the Navy during WW II. Joe, Jr., became a bomber pilot stationed in England. After flying 25 missions he was entitled to return to the U.S. Instead, he volunteered for a second 25 missions, after which he volunteered for a highly dangerous and secret mission named Operation Aphrodite. The plan called for a large bomber to be filled with 21,170 pounds of Torpex (fifty percent more powerful than TNT) and flown by radio control to German targets on the European continent after a skeleton crew of two parachuted out over England. A few minutes before Kennedy and his co-pilot were to bailout, the Torpex exploded. The explosion was so powerful it damaged accompanying observer planes and injured their crews. The blast also damaged fifty-nine buildings in an English coastal town. The bodies of the pilots were not recovered. Joe, Sr. intended for Joe, Jr. to enter politics and become a future president of the United States. With Joe, Jr.’s death, the lot fell to Jack.

JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY was 6'1" tall, with grayish green eyes and auburn (reddish brown) hair. His body type was thin. He weighed 95 pounds at age 14, 145 pounds in college and 165 points as an adult. He did not wear hats. When presented with the traditional ten-gallon hat before 2,000 Texans at Ft. Worth, he would not put it on. Prior to the JFK presidency most American adult males wore hats. A dress felt hat (fedora) was considered as necessary for being dressed as a white shirt and tie. After JFK, to this day few men wear hats.
Throughout Kennedy’s lifetime he suffered so many accidents, injuries, illnesses, and diseases, it is a miracle he lived to age 46. He had all the childhood diseases: scarlet fever, German measles, whopping cough, chicken pox, jaundice, and bronchitis. His tonsils and adenoids were removed. At age 13 he had an appendectomy. Three years later he spend several months in a Connecticut hospital and then went to the Mayo Clinic for further examination. In September 1935, he went to London to study at the London School of Economics for a year, but left within a matter of weeks, perhaps because of health issues. In October 1935, he enrolled at Princeton. After six weeks he was hospitalized in Boston for two months for possible leukemia, after which he spent two months recuperating at home. During JFK’s life he suffered with two primary ailments. A back problem which was probably a birth defect with his spine deteriorating as he grew older. While in the U.S. Senate, he had several operations on his back and was hospitalized for months. When he was assassinated in Dallas, he was wearing a canvas cloth back-brace with metal stays and an Ace bandage. The back-brace may have directly contributed to his death as it prevented him from falling forward into the well of the open convertible after the first shot to the upper back which would not have been fatal. JFK also had Addison disease and other ailments, including anemia and sub-functioning thyroid, gastritis, colitis, and disordered ulcer.

In September 1936 he enrolled at Harvard from which he graduated cum laude in June, 1940. From September to December, 1940, he audited classes at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In the Spring of 1941, JFK volunteered for the army but was rejected because of his back problems. In September of 1941, however, he was able to enter the navy where, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he was a PT boat commander in the Southwest Pacific. On a night patrol Kennedy’s boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. JFK, in spite of his already weak back, performed with extraordinary bravery in securing his shipmates and getting them to safety on a nearby island, for which he was awarded a medal for valor. WW II ended in 1945. JFK was a U. S. Congressman from 1947 to 1953 and a U. S. Senator from 1953 to 1960. John F. Kennedy became the 35th President of the United States on January 20, 1961. He served until he was assassinated on November 22, 1963. In spite of less than three years as President, he dealt with a number of significant matters, including the Bay of Pigs failure, the Cuban missile crisis, establishing the Peace Corps, increasing troop levels in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, including enrolling James Meredith in Ole Miss, and the man-on-the-moon program. His inaugural speech included a sentence for which he is remembered and which captured the spirit of America: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

Robert Francis Kennedy attended public grammar schools through the fifth grade. He attended the sixth grade at a private boys school in Riverdale, New York. His sixth grade was at Gibbs School for Boys in London where his father served as U. S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. For the remainder of his secondary education, he attended private schools in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Prior to his eighteenth birthday, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy to attend the V-12 Navy officer training program, during which he attended Harvard, Bates College, and then back to Harvard. While he was in the officer training program, the U.S. Navy commissioned the destroyer USS Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. RFK was allowed to drop out of the V-12 program and become an ordinary seaman in order to serve on the shakedown cruise of the ship named for his brother. On May 30, 1946, he received an honorable discharge from the Navy. That fall he entered Harvard as a junior, having received credit for time spent in the V-12 program. He was a starter on Harvard’s varsity football at end. RFK graduated Harvard in March of 1948 and began law school in September of 1948 at the University of Virginia. In 1950 he married Ethel Skakel. They had eleven children, the last of whom, Rory, was born after his assassination in 1968. After graduation from law school in June of 1951, RFK went to work with the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C., and later in New York. In 1952 he was appointed assistant counsel of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations under Republican chairman Senator Joe McCarthy. Afterwards, he was chief counsel of the Democratic Senate Labor Rackets Committee under Democratic chairman John L. McClellan. When JFK was elected President, he appointed RFK Attorney General. John Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, and was succeeded by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. Robert Kennedy continued to serve as Attorney General for nine months after the assassination before resigning to run for U.S. Senator from New York, which election he won. When President Johnson dropped out of the 1968 presidential race, the Democratic candidates were Senator Eugene McCarty, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Robert Kennedy. On June 5, 1968, after winning the California primary election, he made a brief early morning victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. While exiting the hotel through the kitchen, he was shot three times, dying the next day. He was 41 years old and the third Kennedy brother to die an untimely, tragic death.

Edward Moore Kennedy was the youngest of the nine children born to Joseph, Sr. and Rose Kennedy. His older brother, John, asked to be his godfather and his request was granted. Ted attended ten different schools by the age of eleven. He attended Milton Academy during four years of high school, graduating in 1950. He entered Harvard the same year. In May 1951 he was expelled from Harvard for cheating on an exam. Ted Kennedy volunteered for the army and served as an enlisted man for two years. He re-entered Harvard and during his senior year was a 6'2" 200 pound starting end on its football team. He graduated in 1956, after which he enrolled in the University of Virginia law school. He graduated Virginia in 1959. JFK, while serving as a Senator from Massachusetts, in 1960 was elected president of the United States. A Kennedy family friend was appointed to the JFK seat to hold it for Ted. In a 1962 special election, he was elected to the United States Senate. He served from November 7, 1962, until his death on August 25, 2009. Ted Kennedy was the fourth longest-serving Senator in U. S. history. During his time in the Senate, he served at various times as Majority Whip and Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, the Committee on Labor and Human Resource and the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Unlike his older brothers, who died young with dramatic deaths, Ted lived a full life dying at age 77 and one-half years. In 1964 he was a passenger in a small private plan which crashed, killing the pilot. He was seriously injured, spending months in a hospital and then more months convalescing. His back was injured and gave him problems for the rest of his life. While his life and political career were not brought short by his death like his brothers, his opportunity to be president of the United States was killed by the death of someone else. On July 18, 1969, Kennedy was attending the annual regatta at Martha’s Vineyard. Late that night while on the Island of Chappaquiddick, Kennedy and 28 year old Mary Jo Kopechne were in Kennedy’s Oldsmobile 88 when it went off Dike Bridge into a tidal channel on Chappaquiddick. Kennedy escaped, Mary Jo did not. Kennedy plead guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and was sentenced to twenty days confinement, which was suspended. Ted Kennedy declined to run for president in 1972 and 1976, although he was urged to do so. His reluctance to run was attributed to Chappaquiddick. In the 1980 presidential campaign, he entered the Democratic primary against President Jimmy Carter, who won the nomination and then lost to Ronald Reagan. Kennedy did not attempt a run for the presidency after 1980, but concentrated on work in the Senate.

There have been some American families who had several members hold public office at the highest national levels, such as the Taft family of Ohio, the Roosevelt family of New York and the Adams family of Massachusetts. Only the Kennedy family had four brothers. All four volunteered for military service during major wars, with two performing bravely in combat for which they received medals for valor. Three were United States senators, one of whom was also a U.S. Attorney General and another was also the thirty-fifth president of the United States.

Kennedy Brothers, rest in peace.