16 things you didn’t know about JFK!

JFK may have been the most popular president of the United States, however, there are still many things about him which remain unknown. Let's review 16 of them:

1.      The President was obsessed with his weight and therefore, he always travelled with bathroom scales.

2.      Kennedy was also the first President to dance with an African American woman at his inauguration gala.

3.      He desperately tried to learn French, a language in which his wife was fluent.

4.      Kennedy ordered that 1, 200 high-grade Cuban cigars be bought just before the day he was to order a ban on Cuban imports

5.      During his lifetime, he received four times the last rites: in 1947 after becoming gravely ill in England; in 1951 while stricken with a high fever in Japan; in 1954 following back surgery; on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas.

6.      When he signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty in Sept. 24, 1963, Kennedy used 16 pens.

7.      He gave all his $100, 000-a-year White House salary to charity.

8.      He used the coconut husk on which he'd scratched his PT-109 rescue message while stranded in the South Pacific during World War II as a paperweight on his Oval Office desk.

9.      Kennedy was the only U.S. president whose grandmother lived longer than he did.

10.  Kennedy had been the target of at least four assassination attempts before Dallas:one barely a month after he was elected president, when a retired postal worker, his car loaded with dynamite, followed the president-elect from Hyannis Port to Georgetown to Palm Beach. "Brother, they could have gotten me in Palm Beach. There is no way to keep anyone from killing me, " Kennedy told a Secret Service agent shortly after the suspect was apprehended, recounted Thurston Clarke in "JFK's Last Hundred Days." Two more assassination plots--one in Chicago, one in Tampa, Fla.--were uncovered in the weeks before Nov. 22, 1963.

11.  With just one phone call to Hollywood, JFK got a movie made! "Seven Days in May" was the title of the movie, one that highlighted the tensions between the peace and military factions within his own administration. Starring Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, the film was based on the 1962 novel of the same name about a Joint Chiefs of Staff plot to overthrow the president for supporting a nuclear disarmament treaty. "He wanted to raise the national consciousness about the problems involved if generals get out of control, " historian Arthur Schlesinger said. Eager to get the movie made, Kennedy decamped to Hyannis Port and turned over the White House grounds to the filmmakers for a weekend, even allowing them to stage riots.

12.  He was medically disqualified by the Army.

13.  Kennedy received the Pulitzer Prize for his 1957 “Profiles in Courage, ” which was, however, surrounded by controversy, because it was assumed that the volume was ghostwritten by his aide Theodore Sorensen.

14.  Kennedy installed a secret taping system in the White House.

15.  There were rumors that he considered dropping Lyndon Johnson from the 1964 ticket.

16.  Kennedy feared running for re-election against Mitt Romney’s father.

Sources http://abcnews.go.com, http://www.history.com.