John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

• 1. Introduction

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  The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum sits on Columbia Point in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, overlooking the ocean and Dorchester Bay. It took nearly two decades from a president's death to a dedication ceremony. Along the way, the project consumed more than $20 million, survived community revolts, the assassination of a second Kennedy, and an architect's quiet heartbreak over what the building could have been. How does a nation build a memorial to a president killed before his time? And what happens when the city that loved him most refuses to let the building go up?

• 2. A Site by the Charles

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  On the 19th of October 1963, just weeks before his assassination, President Kennedy spent a weekend in Boston scouting locations with architect John Carl Warnecke, the man who had designed his Tomb of the Eternal Flame at Arlington National Cemetery. Harvard University had offered several plots of land for the library. At the time, only four presidential libraries existed in the entire country: the Hoover, the Roosevelt, the Truman, and the Eisenhower libraries. Kennedy found them frustrating. Scattered in small towns from New York to Iowa, he felt they were placed too far away from scholarly resources.

  Kennedy chose a plot next to the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. The building would face the Charles River, and across the water stood Winthrop House, where Kennedy himself had lived during his upperclassman years. He wanted the complex to be more than a paper archive. Because he had encouraged his administration to preserve effects of both personal and official nature, it would be what he called a complete record of a Presidential era. That ambition gave the building its full name: the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

• 3. Choosing the Architect

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  After the assassination in November 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy took charge of the design process. A committee was formed to advise her, and it was she who would make the final decision. The group visited architects from around the world: Pietro Belluschi and others from the United States, Brazil's Lucio Costa, and Italy's Franco Albini. Meetings were held at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis, Massachusetts, and at architects' offices across multiple countries. In a secretive parallel process, the architects themselves voted anonymously for the most capable among their colleagues.

  Fourteen architects eventually served on the design advisory committee, representing institutions from MIT to the University of Pennsylvania, with international voices from Finland, Sweden, England, and Japan. On the 13th of December 1964, the Kennedy family announced that I. M. Pei had been chosen unanimously by a subcommittee. Pei was relatively unknown among the candidates at the time. Mrs. Kennedy described the choice as really an emotional decision. She appreciated that Pei did not seem to have just one way to solve a problem, that he approached each commission thinking only of it and then developed a way to make something beautiful. She added that he was born in the same year as Jack, and that she decided it would be fun to take a great leap with him.

  Robert Kennedy, then Attorney General, offered Pei the project's ambition in simple terms: it was meant to stimulate interest in politics. When asked if Pei would have to start from scratch, the answer was yes. Robert Kennedy sent him off with an encouraging grin and the words, "Good luck."

• 4. The Fundraising Drive

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  On the 13th of January 1964, Attorney General Robert Kennedy announced that an oral-history project would be undertaken for the library, featuring administration staff, friends, family, and politicians from home and abroad. Eugene R. Black Sr. agreed to chair the board of trustees, and the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation had already committed $1 million toward Black's $10 million goal.

  By March of that year, pledges had reached $4.3 million, including 18,727 unsolicited donations from the public. Venezuela pledged $100,000. The Governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Muñoz Marín, offered the same. On the 9th of July 1964, Postmaster General John A. Gronouski received $900,000 gathered from across 102 federal agencies. Many federal employees had contributed through a $5 withholding each payday over three years. The next day, the Indian ambassador to the United States, Braj Kumar Nehru, presented a $100,000 check at the River Club. Nehru said the Indian people were hit by a sad blow when the president died and that they held him in the highest regard, esteem and affection. He wanted Indian students studying in the United States to be able to use the library.

  By 1965, the $10 million goal had been surpassed. Fundraising was suspended when contributions reached $20 million. More than 30 million people ultimately contributed to the cost of construction.

• 5. Years of Opposition

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  In January 1966, Massachusetts governor John A. Volpe signed a bill allowing the state to purchase an old MBTA train yard as the library site. The project was expected to be complete by 1970. The original design called for a large complex housing the library, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and an Institute of Politics. The MBTA refused to remove its heavy machinery until 1970, and by then construction costs had risen past $20 million. Pei said the money they had six years earlier would barely pay for 60 percent of the original plans.

  Robert Kennedy, serving as a senator from New York and as president of the John F. Kennedy Library Corporation, was assassinated in 1968 before the building broke ground. Weeks before his death, William Manchester and Harper & Row donated $750,000 to the library, the first installment of an expected $5 million drawn from the profits of The Death of a President, the 1967 book that had caused a bitter feud between Manchester and the Kennedy family. Mrs. Kennedy responded by saying she found it so beautiful what Mr. Manchester did, and that she was glad Senator Kennedy had known about it before he died. Senator Edward M. Kennedy stepped down as vice president of the corporation to fill his brother's vacant position.

  By 1971, no construction had begun. Researchers worked from the Federal Records Center, which was temporarily housing some of the 15 million documents and manuscripts. The Cambridge community had shifted from welcoming the library in 1965 to fierce opposition. Residents feared over a million annual tourists would bring hordes of automobiles, fast-food franchises, and souvenir shops. A neighborhood group sued in federal court. In February 1975, the Cambridge site was abandoned.

• 6. Building on a Former Dump

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  In 1975, the Kennedy Library Corporation announced a new location: a 10-acre site offered by the University of Massachusetts Boston on the Columbia Point peninsula. Pei described the contrast with the original Harvard site as massive and blocky, in sharp contrast to what he called the mellow and urbane atmosphere of the library's original home near Harvard Square. The land itself had once been a garbage dump. Pei recalled finding old refrigerators and appliances under the soil and said, in all seriousness, that you could toss a lit match on the ground and watch it ignite as the soil emitted methane gas.

  Groundbreaking was held on the 12th of June 1977, with construction following in August. The area was covered with 15 feet of earth and topsoil. The final design was a geometric structure: a concrete tower standing 125 feet tall, housing offices and archives; a circular section containing two theaters; and a 115-foot grey-glass pavilion connecting the two. The concrete finish was a direct consequence of the budget. Pei would have preferred stone, which he believed offered more detail and a finer finish. More than 225 construction workers labored to complete the building by the end of 1979, at a total cost of $20.8 million.

• 7. The Dedication

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  On the 20th of October 1979, the dedication was held outside the building on the green. The Kennedy family sat on a blue-carpeted stage surrounded by yellow chrysanthemums, among them President Jimmy Carter. The ceremony opened with Caroline Kennedy introducing her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr., who read from the Stephen Spender poem "I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great."

  President Carter said Kennedy had embodied the ideals of a generation as few public figures had ever done in the history of the earth. Carter spoke of openly weeping upon hearing of Kennedy's death, something he had not done since his own father died ten years before. He then accepted the library on behalf of the American people and the National Archives and Records Administration.

  Senator Edward M. Kennedy described his brother's life as a voyage of discovery, a quest for excellence that inspired universal trust and faith. He said Kennedy had made America believe once more in the great historic purpose of the land and had made the nation young again.

  Pei accepted praise from critics who largely liked the finished building, but he himself was unsatisfied. The years of conflict and compromise had changed the nature of the design, and he felt the result lacked its original passion. In 2000, he said he had wanted to give something very special to the memory of President Kennedy, and that it could and should have been a great project. Despite his reservations, Pei later called the Kennedy commission the most important commission in my life.

• 8. What the Archives Hold

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  The library's permanent collection spans far beyond presidential papers. Seven exhibits occupy the museum floor, covering the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy's speeches and press conferences, and his administration's role in the Civil Rights Movement. One exhibit features the Mercury-Redstone 3 capsule, known as Freedom 7, in which astronaut Alan B. Shepard became the first American in space. The capsule came to the library in 2012, after being displayed at the United States Naval Academy's Armel-Leftwich Visitor Center from 1998 to 2012, and returned to the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., in 2021.

  Among the more personal objects on display is the original coconut on which Kennedy inscribed a rescue message for the crew of the PT-109. The coconut was delivered to coastwatcher Reginald Evans by Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, natives of the Solomon Islands. Kennedy's 25-foot Wianno Senior sailboat, Victura, acquired by the family when he was 15, is displayed on the grounds from May to October.

  The audiovisual archives hold over 400,000 still photographs taken between 1863 and 1984, more than 7.5 million feet of film shot between 1910 and 1983, and 11,000 reels of audio recordings spanning 1910 to 1985. The oral-history project begun in 1964 originally aimed to include 150 participants; it now contains over 1,100 interviews and continues to this day. It is modelled after the Columbia University Oral History Research Office program, the world's oldest such program, which began in 1948.

  The Ernest Hemingway Collection arrived at the library following a 1968 exchange of letters between Hemingway's widow Mary and Jacqueline Kennedy. In 1961, President Kennedy had arranged for Mary Hemingway to travel to Cuba despite a U.S. travel ban to retrieve her recently deceased husband's documents and belongings. A room for the collection was dedicated on the 18th of July 1980, by Patrick Hemingway and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The collection includes ninety percent of existing Hemingway manuscript materials, among them handwritten drafts of The Sun Also Rises and dozens of handwritten alternate endings to A Farewell to Arms, along with thousands of letters exchanged with writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein.