John F. Kennedy's Birth Chart

The ranking weighs prominence against frequency within the decade. Kennedy's list opens with the slowed Mercury (about one chart in 7 from the 1910s), then Mars in detriment in Taurus (about one chart in 6), and next Saturn as lord of the geniture, at about one chart in 28 the least frequent item on the page.

Next come nine of the ten planets above the horizon (eight or more: about one chart in 7), the Mercury–Venus mutual reception (any such exchange: about 37%), Saturn's detriment in Cancer (about 46%), a bucket layout with a Uranus handle (about one chart in 5) and Jupiter lost in the solar glare (about one chart in 21).

Rose Kennedy's 1969 account, in the transcript excerpts the park service posts, is the whole basis for the time, which makes it a time remembered by the person or family rather than one taken from a register. No Brookline register entry or certificate with an hour turned up online; the congressional Biographical Directory gives date and town only. Centennial coverage in 2017 and a JFK Library note on a bedside clock at the house repeat the family account.

Massachusetts kept Eastern Standard Time, UTC−5, in May 1917: the country's first daylight saving period began only on March 31, 1918. The stated hour therefore corresponds to 20:00 UTC on May 29, 1917.

One other time circulates, 3:09 PM, from an astrology web page that cites nothing. Cast for the same house, it keeps the Libra Ascendant (now 21°44′ Libra), the Virgo Moon and the daytime sect, and it changes a single house placement: Mars slips into the 7th house.

That makes Mars the most clock-sensitive planet: it lies 1°06′ past the cusp of the 8th house, and if the birth came later the cusp would overtake it before 6 minutes had passed. Start the clock 11 minutes sooner and Venus crosses into the 9th house; run it 15 minutes later and Saturn passes into the 9th house. Libra needed 2 hours 33 minutes to clear the horizon that afternoon. The Moon needs no clock: it crossed into Virgo 34 hours 39 minutes before the birth and did not leave for another 25 hours 20 minutes.

Mercury is at 20°35′ Taurus in the 8th house. It had been moving backward and turned direct less than a day before the birth, so at the stated hour it was advancing only 1.5 arc-minutes a day against the Sun's 57.5. By the databank's station test, that turns up in about one chart in 7 from the decade. Writers who weight stations call such a planet concentrated and slow to change course; the Mercury retrograde calendar lists its turning points.

Uranus had also halted less than a day before the birth, but turning the other way: at 23°43′ Aquarius it was beginning its retrograde season, drifting back by a fraction of an arc-minute daily. It is the one planet under the horizon, in the 4th house, and sits in its modern home sign.

Taurus holds three planets, Mars first at 18°25′, then Mercury (20°35′) and Jupiter (23°02′), inside a span of 4°36′. Add the two Gemini planets, the Sun (7°50′) and Venus (16°44′), and the 8th house collects five planets, a crowd that would shrink by one with the Mars shift described above.

The Moon sits apart in the 11th house at 17°12′ Virgo; the 10th house holds Saturn (27°09′ Cancer) together with Neptune. No planet strays out of bounds: Venus climbs farthest north in declination, 23°07′, still inside the 23°27′ limit set by that year's obliquity.

Between two planets, the closest contact is the Moon's square to Venus, 0°27′ off exact. Virgo and Gemini are both Mercury's signs, and Venus rules the chart, so the square ties the ruler to the Moon. Psychological astrologers frame a Moon–Venus square as friction between need and taste.

A tighter entry in the table involves an angle: Uranus sits 0°03′ from a quincunx to the Midheaven. The Midheaven was advancing 14°13′ an hour, so three minutes of clock error would move it 0°42′, and that exactness belongs to the stated hour only.

Uranus squares each Taurus planet, closest to Jupiter (0°40′), then Mercury (3°07′) and widest to Mars (5°17′). Within Taurus, Mercury is 2°09′ from Mars and 2°27′ from Jupiter, and from Virgo the Moon trines Mars (1°13′), Mercury (3°23′) and Jupiter (5°50′). Modern authors tend to link fixed squares to Uranus with abrupt breaks.

Saturn conjoins the Midheaven at 3°23′ and Neptune at 5°30′, the second across the Cancer–Leo line, a pairing some practitioners discount.

Apart from Uranus, every planet stands in houses seven to twelve, the half modern astrologers call public. It holds nine of them, and eight or more above the horizon occurs in about one chart in 7 born in the 1910s. No body sits in Libra or Aries, so the count holds for any minute of the Libra window. It also leans west, with seven planets in the western half.

Around the zodiac those nine span 118°46′, with Mars leading in Taurus and the Moon trailing in Virgo, an arc equal to their trine, while Uranus stands by itself in the empty stretch. Marc Edmund Jones, who sorted charts into seven shapes, would file this one as a bucket with a Uranus handle; the layout appears in about one chart in 5 born in the 1910s, and the chart pattern analyzer names any chart's shape.

Earth and air tie at four of twelve points, the Sun's sign tipping it to air; fire has only Neptune. Fixed signs lead with five. The old temperament formula gives sanguine first and melancholic second.

The Sun stood 43°55′ up, 10 hours 47 minutes after its 4:12 AM rising. That favors Sun, Jupiter and Saturn, the diurnal planets, over Moon, Venus and Mars, whose sect is the night; the sect calculator sorts any chart this way.

Saturn, top scorer among the seven traditional planets, is lord of the geniture, a lordship that falls to Saturn in about one chart in 28 born in the 1910s. Its points are mostly accidental: angular in the 10th house, direct, swift and in sect. Essentially it has only its own term against the detriment of Cancer, a weakness shared by about 46% of charts born in the 1910s. A birth 15 minutes later would take Saturn out of the 10th house, so the lordship is flagged as time-dependent.

Mars holds the other detriment: Taurus faces Scorpio, one of Mars's homes, a placement found in about one chart in 6 born in the 1910s. Venus, the ruler, trades signs with Mercury, Mercury in Venus's Taurus and Venus in Mercury's Gemini; some exchange of this kind between two traditional planets appears in about 37% of charts born in the 1910s.

Jupiter is 14°47′ from the Sun, just inside the zone called under the beams, a condition seen in about one chart in 21 born in the 1910s. Venus is nearer, 8°54′ away, still under the beams but just outside combustion; that condition for Venus occurs in about one chart in 9 from the decade. Older texts say a planet in the Sun's glare works out of sight.

Each event in the table carries its source, from the National Archives account of PT-109 to the Miller Center's presidential chronology; the dates are listed as biography, beside the chart they belong to.

The earliest is August 2, 1943, when the Japanese destroyer Amagiri rammed and sank PT-109, the patrol torpedo boat he commanded, in Blackett Strait in the Solomon Islands. On January 3, 1947, he took his seat in the House of Representatives for Massachusetts as the 80th Congress opened, and six years later to the day he began his term as a senator from the same state.

On November 8, 1960, he won the presidential election against Vice President Richard Nixon, and on January 20, 1961, he was inaugurated as the 35th president. On March 1 of that year he established the Peace Corps by executive order, and on May 25 he asked Congress to commit the nation to landing a man on the Moon before the decade was out.

October 22, 1962, brought the televised address announcing Soviet missile sites under construction in Cuba and ordering a naval quarantine. On June 26, 1963, he spoke in West Berlin, the speech remembered for its line “Ich bin ein Berliner.” On October 7, 1963, he signed the instruments of ratification of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which the United States, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom had signed in Moscow on August 5. On November 22, 1963, he was shot and killed while riding in a motorcade through Dallas, Texas.

No chart in the databank matches Kennedy on two of the Sun, Moon and rising signs, so the four nearest, Angelina Jolie, Paul McCartney, Novak Djokovic and José Rizal, share only his Gemini Sun and are ranked by how closely their Sun-through-Saturn degrees track his. Jolie's planets lie on average about 27° from Kennedy's, and none of the four has a planet within two degrees of its counterpart here. The roster lists no one else born on May 29, 1917.

Subtract 22°42′, the Lahiri value for 1917, and the Gemini Sun slides back to 15°08′ Taurus; the Moon lands in Leo (24°30′) and the Ascendant in Virgo (27°16′). In this zodiac Aries hosts Mercury and Mars, Venus shifts to Taurus and Jupiter clings to Taurus at 0°20′ of the sign.

Dignities shift too: sidereal Mars in Aries is at home rather than in detriment, Venus is in its own Taurus, and the Mercury–Venus reception lapses. On the clock, the sidereal Ascendant is the figure to watch: within 14 minutes after the stated hour it would reach Libra, and the 3:09 PM chart already has it at 29°02′ Virgo.

Saturn came back to 27°09′ Cancer on July 11, 1946, at age 29.1, 176 days before he entered the House. Jupiter regained 23°02′ Taurus on May 13, 1929, April 26, 1941 and April 8, 1953, the last 95 days into his Senate term. His death in November 1963 came before any later return.

Every position here was produced by precise astronomical calculations for the tropical zodiac, with the Lahiri table derived from it; houses are Placidus, cast for the Beals Street house at 42°20′ N, 71°07′ W.

For Kennedy's rates the comparison group is 1910s births: a large computed sample, timed evenly through the decade and placed in cities worldwide, bigger cities more often, each figure the fraction sharing the feature. The three features that depend on the hour, Saturn's lordship, the crowded upper half and Jupiter under the beams, are scaled to Brookline's latitude band, 30-45 degrees. The about page explains how birth-time sources are weighed.