By the time of his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy stood at the helm of the greatest power the world had ever seen. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Harvard professor Fredrik Logevall has spent much of the last decade combing through material unseen or unused by previous biographers, searching for and piecing together the 'real' John F. Kennedy. This first volume of this sweeping two-part biography spans the first thirty-nine years of his life, revealing his early relationships, his formative and heroic experiences during World War II, and his deeply fascinating romance with Jackie Kennedy. In examining these pre-White House years, Logevall chronicles Kennedy's extraordinary life and times with authority and novelistic sensibility, putting the reader in every room where it happened.