This film explores Kennedy's childhood years as the privileged but sickly son of one of the wealthiest men in America, his early political career as a lackluster congressman, his successful run for the U.S. Senate, and the game-changing presidential campaign that made him the youngest elected president in U.S. history.

Having earned John F. Kennedy's trust with his 1960 campaign-trail film Primary, cinéma vérité documentarian Robert Drew expressed his desire to document a president in crisis. When African American college students Vivian Malone and James Hood prepared to enroll at the all-white University of Alabama in June 1963, governor George Wallace defied a federal court order and vowed to prevent the students' enrollment. Kennedy granted unprecedented access...

A political documentary of the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary campaigns in which Senator John F. Kennedy upset Senator Hubert H. Humphrey. "'A new kind of reporting, a new form of history,' Robert Drew promised John F. Kennedy. He was proposing that a revolutionary, small camera operated by cameraman Ricky Leacock and sync sound recorder operated by himself, live with Kennedy day and night for nearly a week during the climax of his...