With Natalie Portman’s portrayal of “Jackie” stealing headlines in entertainment news, now is as good a time as any to revisit how popular she and her husband really were during the 1960s.

President John F. Kennedy, the youngest man ever elected to the Oval Office, had his life famously cut short by an assassin in Dallas during 1963.

But while he was living, Kennedy was the most popular president in U.S. history. His ascendancy to national stardom is mostly owed to his father Joe, and now a whole new generation of Kennedy’s owe their rising stars to the legacy left by the 35th president.

Here are five fascinating facts about JFK you might not have known:

His dad almost died in a terrorist attack on Wall Street

Joe and Rose Kennedy, JFK’s parents. (Wikimedia Commons)

A homegrown group of anarchists planted a bomb in New York on a wagon carrying cargo down Wall Street, and it exploded killing 38 people that day. The event happened shortly after JFK was born, and Joe was near the crime scene when it happened. So close in fact that it knocked him to the ground.

He’s the only president to have ever worn the Purple Heart

Ensign John F. Kennedy, USN, in South Carolina, circa 1942. Photograph in the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston.

During World War II, Kennedy was honored for his bravery after his “Patrol Torpedo” boat was sunk by a Japanese destroyer. During the episode Kennedy swam through the ocean to help rescue his injured crew mates, towing one of them by a belt clamped to his teeth while swimming.

He battled strong currents and remained out of sight from Japanese naval crews, swimming from island to island to find food and water while shipwrecked. JFK and the other survivors were rescued a few days later, and the writer John Hersey relayed the saga to excited audiences in “The New Yorker” and “Reader’s Digest”.

He had many, many affairs while in the White House

Marilyn Monroe/Flickr

Everyone gives Bill Clinton flak for his run-in with a White House intern, but JFK did it 50 years earlier with a 19-year-old named Mimi Alford in addition to Jackie Kennedy’s press secretary, Pamela Turnure.

President Kennedy is also thought to have had high-profile affairs with the mistress of mob boss Sam Giancana, actresses Angie Dickinson and Marilyn Monroe, dancer Blaze Starr, a Washington socialite who was ordered dead because of her pacifism and ties to Acid Era freak Timothy Leary.

The New York Post recently profiled each of the 12 biggest names linked to Kennedy’s bedroom.

He had four children with Jackie

U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy, flanked by her son, Jack Schlossberg, greeting U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (Wikimedia Commons)

The Kennedy’s are a notoriously large clan with branches that extend out of politics and into entertainment, business and fine arts. American tragedy that has come to define the family was evident early on in the first couple’s life, however, when they gave birth to a stillborn in 1956 who was to be named Arabella.

Then in 1963, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born prematurely, and died from complications just a few weeks later. The couple of course successfully raised Caroline and John F. Kennedy Jr, although their only son died off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in a plane crash in 1999. Jack Schlossberg, the pair’s only grandson and noted journalist, recently graduated from Yale and started working in Tokyo, Japan.

He was a Pulitzer Prize winning author

President Kennedy stands with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy outside the Oval Office (Wikimedia Commons)

Kennedy’s powerful aptitude with the English language was evident early on, when he wrote his senior essay at Harvard over England’s “lack of readiness” for World War II.Then at  just 22 years, old he penned his first book, “Why England Slept.”  As a writer for Hearst newspapers in 1945, he covered the U.N. meetings in San Francisco. The following year he won his first election.

Constant back pain and complications over Addison’s disease combined with injuries from the war led Kennedy to require back surgery, and he used the recovery time in a unique way: to write “Profiles in Courage,” a 1957 book about Americans who had taken “unpopular but admirable moral stands.” For his efforts as an author, Kennedy was rewarded the coveted Pulitzer Prize.