John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy was the most vigorous-looking president of the twentieth century and one of the sickest. As a child he survived scarlet fever and spent long stretches in hospitals and infirmaries; as an adult he lived with chronic back pain and Addison's disease, a serious adrenal disorder he and his advisers kept from the public. The image of youth and energy that carried him to the White House was real in its way, but it was also partly a performance, sustained through enormous private effort.

His chart puts an unusual weight on the hidden and the existential. He was born at 3:00 p.m. on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts, a time his mother recalled, and five planets fall in the eighth house: the Sun and Venus in Gemini, and Mercury, Mars and Jupiter in Taurus. The eighth house is a corner of the chart astrologers associate with crisis, mortality, secrets and shared power. A Gemini Sun in the eighth describes a quick, curious mind repeatedly drawn into high-stakes situations, and it is hard to imagine a life that fits the house more closely, from the sinking of PT-109 in the Pacific in 1943, when he helped rescue his crew, to the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

Libra rises in his chart, the sign of charm, poise and appearances, and few politicians have understood appearances better. In the first televised presidential debate in 1960, viewers saw a composed, tanned Kennedy beside a pale, uncomfortable Richard Nixon, and the impression helped decide a very close election. He became the youngest person ever elected president, at 43, and the first Catholic to hold the office.

Saturn, the planet of duty and pressure, sits in Cancer in the tenth house, the house of career and public role. Cancer is the sign of family, and Saturn there often describes a public career shaped by family expectations. Kennedy was the second of nine children of the ambitious Joseph P. Kennedy, and after his older brother Joe Jr. was killed in the war, the family's political hopes shifted onto him.

His Moon is in Virgo in the eleventh house, which governs friends, groups and ideals. Virgo is analytical and service-minded, and in the eleventh it points toward causes. The Peace Corps, established in 1961, and the challenge to land a man on the moon before the decade was out were the kind of practical idealism the placement suggests.

He was also a writer. Why England Slept, his Harvard thesis, became a book in 1940, and Profiles in Courage won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957. On November 22, 1963, he was assassinated in Dallas, at 46.

For a man with five planets in the house of mortality, the shortness of the life is the hardest fact in the chart. The Libra rising is what the country remembers.