(By Larry J. Sabato, founder and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia) Kennedy’s final days paint a picture of a man who craved excitement. Perhaps because two of his siblings, Joe and Kathleen, had died young and the president himself had repeatedly faced death — as a youth, in World War II, and after a back operation in the 1950s — JFK seemed unusually conscious that his time on earth was fleeting.