John F. Kennedy's arrival at the White House marked a generational change in American politics. JFK was the first in many ways: the first president born in the 20th century, the youngest to reach that responsibility and, above all, the first Catholic to lead the United States, a nation founded and governed by Protestants.

Kennedy's curriculum staff and family was brilliant. His maternal grandfather had been mayor of Boston and a Democratic congressman, and his father an ambassador to Great Britain and a successful businessman. His father was an ambassador to Great Britain and a successful businessman, and he had graduate at Harvard and a Ph.D. at International Office. He had lived in Europe and toured the Middle East. He also held the Purple Heart, the highest military award, for his heroism in Asia during World War II, where he was wounded.

At the age of 30 he reached congress, at 39 he won the Pulitzer Prize and at 43 he ran against Nixon, whom he defeated by the narrowest margin known: barely 0.1% of the popular vote. That is, about 100,000 votes out of a census of 68 million voters.

In the early 1960s, the world was undergoing profound changes. The decolonization of Africa and Asia was unstoppable, fueled in part by the Cold War. Europe was in rapid international decline and the Non-Aligned Movement was advocating an alternative path to bloc politics. Even the Catholic Church wanted to update its message and integrate it "in the air of the times", which is why John XXIII - saint in 2014 - convened Vatican II.

John Kennedy governed in that scenario. His relations with the USSR were based on "peaceful coexistence", a proposal of Soviet President Khrushchev so that war would no longer be the solution to international disputes. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 challenged that unspoken pact, as it came close to triggering a nuclear war.

In foreign policy he faced the worsening Vietnam conflict and the construction of the Berlin Wall, which he tolerated by stating "a wall is better than a war". He also accepted the challenge of communist expansion in Latin America, which he tried to counter with the Alliance for Progress, a $46 billion program for the democratization of the hemisphere.

In domestic policy, Kennedy tackled vicious racial discrimination and drug trafficking with determination, as well as attempting to stimulate a depressed Economics . To tackle social problems he formulated the New Frontier Policy, a federal project that sought to extend Education and health care to the poor, inspired by the New Deal of President Roosevelt, whom he admired. The Mafia became another serious problem because, although the president had received tens of thousands of votes from organized crime in 1960, the attorney general, his brother Robert Kennedy, pursued the Cosa Nostra with a tenacity never seen before.

Kennedy was a contradictory president. Dubitative (as in the Bay of Pigs invasion, where he withdrew military aviation support without prior notice) and also energetic (he forcibly guaranteed compliance with a Supreme Court ruling so that the University of Mississippi would admit the first black student in its history). Sophisticated and a womanizer, he was an idealist capable of dreaming of taking man to the Moon, but also a calculating leader who authorized a coup d'état in South Vietnam or the assassination of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.

Inside Kennedy lived many Kennedys and perhaps that is where his spell lies. He was fascinating because he was enigmatic. He was fascinating because his admirable public virtues coexisted with dangerous private vices. At final, he was a president of flesh and blood, far removed from the victorious military halo of Eisenhower or the gray clerical appearance of Harry Truman.

Half a century ago, on November 22, 1963, two bullets ended the hopes of a generation and changed American history forever.