The Washington Post published an article today showing JFK’s transcript and his application to Harvard:
Essays were certainly easier back then. In answering the application’s sole essay question “Why do you wish to come to Harvard? (The Committee will expect a careful answer to this question)”, JFK responded:
The report card is almost worthless without the proper context. As @ChoatieMom will readily admit, grade inflation was surely nonexistent at Choate in the 1940s (or whenever JFK was in school). I’m sure that he was not as mediocre as his report card makes him out to be. His style of writing is obviously subpar and filled with generic statements, but I’m sure that writing curriculum was subpar at the time.
This is a duplicate of an earlier thread. I’ll see if I can find it.
Note that JFK went to Harvard at a time when his Choate record was not a determining factor for admittance. 
I guess I was thinking of this older thread:
It’s no news that JFK was not a stellar student. He spent most of his time at Choate either in the infirmary or horsing around with friends. He graduated in the bottom half of the class.
Shouldn’t we just let him rest in peace?
Amen.
These documents were released by the JFK library. I assume this was done to promote discussion rather than stifle it.
It’s the 100th anniversary of his birth.
We’re talking 80+ years ago, he grad’d Choate in 1935.
These old snippets of apps drive me nuts. Things have changed umpteen times since then. Maybe umpteen dozen.
J.F. Kennedy was a Princeton man before he fell ill, quit Princeton, then enrolled at Harvard. Apparently, he wrote almost an identical essay to Harvard as he did Princeton:
http://www.businessinsider.com/jfks-application-essay-to-princeton-university-2013-11
The current admission practice drives everyone nuts.
JFK at least did not hire anyone to write his essay.
The key line is: Father’s occupation: Chairman, Securities and Exchange commission
At the time his father’s name held a lot of influence. I think the very idea that he wrote a letter of recommendation for his son is telling. There are certain political families that certainly have extensive influence. The Kennedys obviously, the Bushes, Roosevelt and more recently Clintons and Obamas. I don’t doubt his rather average report card would have been adequate for the time given the parental influence. Things may have been different for Jack if his son Joe hadn’t been killed in WW2. That’s all speculation though. I wouldn’t doubt that Harvard and Yale and a few other don’t pride themselves on having the children of influential people in their ranks.
Way back in 1936, when Kennedy entered Harvard, admissions was obviously different than it is in current times. Private schools like Choate were known feeders into the Ivies and one’s family name and prominence played a much bigger role than today. Thank goodness that admissions are more egalitarian today in many ways - we now see much more diversity, ethnic/racial, socio-economic, gender, etc.
As others have stated, we also see much more grade inflation today. It is comparing apples to oranges.
Although Kennedy may not have applied himself in high school, there is no doubt he was intellectually capable. By his junior year, he was on the Dean’s list and graduated cum laude. Call him a late bloomer. We all know a few, especially among young males.
A lot of people of prominence have attended Ivies with lackluster grades and achieved mediocre or worse performance while there - the Bushes being an example, Trump as well. Others, like Obama and the Clintons, were high achievers and self-made successes.
“Although Kennedy may not have applied himself in high school, there is no doubt he was intellectually capable. By his junior year, he was on the Dean’s list and graduated cum laude. Call him a late bloomer. We all know a few, especially among young males.”
His mundane admissions essay notwithstanding, JFK had considerable literary talent. In college he was a reporter and later editor of The Crimson. He reworked his senior thesis at Harvard and published it in book form as “Why England Slept” that became a best seller. And the fact that Harvard still has the original manuscript in Kennedy’s own handwriting, complete with his scratch-outs, erasures, and corrections, puts the lie to the political canard that his rich daddy paid to have it ghostwritten. His later book, “Profiles in Courage,” that he published while he was a Senator, won a Pulitzer Prize. The guy could write.
Those achievements plus the polished, articulate, and witty answers he regularly gave in his presidential press conferences made it clear that he was indeed intellectually very capable.
So, college essays are not crystal balls to predict the future of high school students.
JFK’s short answer wouldn’t even be considered college essays in today’s sense. It does show how absurd the college admission process has become in the last hundred years; it is now so much more personal beyond academics. Essays are just another excuse for today’s colleges to have a black box process.
We don’t know how JFK ranked in his school, what was his EC and how much money Joe Sr gave to H.