John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on 29 May 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts, the second of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr and Rose Fitzgerald. The crucial financial fact of his life precedes him: his father made an enormous fortune in banking, film distribution, spirits importing and stock market operations, and from 1926 established trusts for his children. Kennedy never had to earn a living (the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library).

Those trusts are the whole architecture of his money. Joseph Kennedy set up the first in 1926, a second in 1936 and a third in 1949, and by the early 1960s they were reckoned to hold about half the family fortune (Fortune). Kennedy drew income from his share; he never held the capital outright, and that distinction is what most published figures for him miss.

He studied at Harvard, where his thesis was published in 1940 as Why England Slept. It sold about 80,000 copies in Britain and America, and the royalties – on our estimate 30,000 to 40,000 dollars, a standard author’s share on that print run – were the first money he earned himself; he gave the British proceeds to bombed Plymouth and spent the American ones on a Buick convertible.

He served in the Navy in the Pacific, commanding the patrol torpedo boat PT-109. Its sinking in 1943, and his conduct in leading survivors to safety, produced the war record that underpinned his political career. He entered the House of Representatives in 1947 on a congressional salary of 15,000 dollars, and from that first year gave the whole of it to charity (UPI).

He moved to the Senate in 1952, where the salary had risen to 22,500 dollars, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for Profiles in Courage, a bestseller whose royalties he also directed to charity. What public office paid him, in total, is on the record: six years in the House, eight in the Senate and nearly three as President came to roughly 500,000 dollars in salary, and he gave every dollar of it away (UPI, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia).

The income he actually lived on came from the trust. When he became President it was disclosed that his personal holdings under the family trusts stood at 10 million dollars, producing about 100,000 dollars a year after tax (TIME). That, not the presidential salary, was the money behind the Georgetown house, the sailing and the campaigns.

As the 35th President from January 1961 he established the Peace Corps, committed the United States to a crewed lunar landing before the decade’s end, navigated the Cuban Missile Crisis and signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library). His civil rights legislation passed after his death as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The presidency paid 100,000 dollars a year, 94,600 for the partial first year, and in 1962 the whole of it went to six charities including the United Negro College Fund, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts (Snopes). He was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963.

The Pulitzer, the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for PT-109 and the Purple Heart came in his lifetime; the presidential library in Boston, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the space centre at Cape Canaveral and an airport in New York followed his death. He remains, in every survey of public esteem taken since, among the two or three most admired Presidents of the twentieth century.

None, then or now. A sitting senator or President could not take commercial money, and the family’s fortune made the question moot. The Kennedy name has since been licensed for nothing; the estate’s value today sits in archives, not endorsements.

He ran none. The family’s businesses were his father’s: the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, bought in 1945 for about 13 million dollars with roughly a million in cash and valued by 1963 at 75 million with annual rents of 13 million; New York property; oil interests; and Somerset Importers, sold in 1946 for 8 million dollars on an original outlay of 100,000 (Fortune). Kennedy’s connection to all of it was as a beneficiary of trusts that held it, and the profile keeps that money on his father’s side of the line.

The houses were family houses. The Hyannis Port compound on Cape Cod, the Palm Beach house and the summer places were held within the wider family rather than by him individually, and passed down the family rather than through his estate. He and Jacqueline Kennedy owned a house on N Street in Georgetown, sold when they moved to the White House, and later a country property in Virginia.

His own asset, then, was the trust interest: 10 million dollars disclosed in 1961, invested by the family office his father ran from New York, and never his to sell (TIME).