How much do you know about President John F. Kennedy? Take our quiz.

Over fifty years after his assassination in Dallas, John F. Kennedy remains one of the most famous and admired Americans of the 20th century. US voters routinely rank him among the best of the nation’s presidents, though historians remain split over the import of his thousand days in the Oval Office. Revelations about his philandering and health problems have darkened his image but not dimmed public fascination with him and his family, if the steady stream of JFK books, movies, and other media material is any guide. Today it is clearer than ever that his murder was a hinge of history. At dusk on Nov. 22, 1963, America was a different country, less innocent than it had been at sunrise.

Do you think you know John F. Kennedy, what’s real about him and what’s myth? Match wits with D.C. Decoder and rate your knowledge of the 35th president of the United States.

14. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born in Brookline, Mass., on May 29, 1917. Who was he named for?

AP/File
In this Jan. 20, 1961, photo, President John F. Kennedy gives his inaugural address at the Capitol in Washington after he took the oath of office.

Famous American author F. Scott Fitzgerald

Maternal grandfather John Francis Fitzgerald

Ancient Irish king Seán O’Kennedy

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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