JFK’s High School Physics Assignment

John F. Kennedy needs little introduction as the 35th President of the United States, but his path there started in unlikely fashion. He attended the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, from 1931 to 1935, living in the shadow of his athletic older brother Joe Jr. and often sick, underweight and nicknamed “Rat Face” by classmates. He was a lively, mischievous student rather than a model one: he formed the “Muckers Club” with a group of friends after a school prank, and Choate’s headmaster described him as having a “clever, individualist mind.” His grades were mediocre, and he graduated ranked 64th in a class of 112, though his classmates voted him “most likely to succeed.” JFK Library records note that his teachers saw potential, but that his papers were often disorganized and that he forgot books and supplies. He went on to Harvard, wartime heroism in the Pacific, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, and the White House.

That makes this physics assignment a unique piece of early Kennedy. This is his schoolwork from the Choate classroom, with his own handwritten answers, from a period when he was an ordinary struggling student with no hint of the presidency ahead. Surviving examples of Kennedy’s student work are scarce, and what exists is mostly held in institutions like the JFK Presidential Library. A single assignment in his own hand is a tangible link to the person he was before politics: a teenager working through a science course in a boarding school classroom. For collectors of Kennedy and presidential history, it offers something that speeches, portraits and signed photographs cannot, a view of the future leader as a student.