The Library That Got Away

This is the first of a series of two articles on the history and construction of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. The second article, outlining the library's structure and collections, will appear one week from today.

This one got away.

One week from tomorrow, more than 6000 invited guests and hordes of journalists will descend on the University of Massachusetts campus at Columbia Point in Dorchester. People will come from all over the country for the dedication of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, an event which some feel has been too long in coming. President Carter will be there, Sen Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.) will be there and the Secret Service will be there.

Organizers of the event--who have been hard at work in an 11th-floor office in downtown Boston--predict a happy, festive occasion. There will be speeches and lots of hand-shaking and back-patting. A lot of Bostonians have been scrambling for invitations to the event for quite some time. As he did at last year's dedication of the Kennedy School of Government, Kennedy is expected to honor the memory of his brother solemnly. But underneath the pomp and the social scene is a story that people still hesitate to talk about. It is a story of community conflict, a family's frustration and Harvard's loss--one some people say was no loss at all, but others bemoan to this day.

The conflict goes all the way back to President Franklin D. Roosevelt '04, who established a policy for presidents to donate their papers and memorabilia to the National Archives. In November 1961, then President Kennedy announced that, in keeping with tradition, he would ask a committee of friends and officials to begin planning the building that would house his papers and mementoes. But Kennedy attached a condition to his announcement; he asked that his presidential library be "closely associated" with his almamater--Harvard. Shortly thereafter, White House officials sat down with University spokesmen to explore the issues.

Kennedy came to Cambridge--for the last time--almost two years later. As fromer Cambridge Mayor Edward A. Crane '35 recalls, October 16, 1963, was an exciting day. Kennedy watched the first half of the Harvard-Columbia football game and then took a sightseeing tour with city and University officials. The president examined several potential plots for the library, especially favoring a site across the street from Eliot House, adjacent to where the Kennedy School of Government stands today.

City Councilor Walter J. Sullivan, who accompanied Kennedy, says the president clearly preferred the 12-acre site, but thought that it might cost too much. And when University officials told the president that the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA)--which had used the site for more than half a century for its repair and storage yards--wasn't about to give up the land, Kennedy changed his mind. He settled for a site almost directly across the Charles from Winthrop House, where he had lived as an undergraduate.

After Kennedy's assassination, however, family members and officials decided that an Institute of Politics should also be established in the president's memory. The Institute--which the School of Government eventually incorporated--was aimed at linking the pragmatic world of the politician with the sheltered world of the academic. But if the library/museum was to be adjacent ot the Institute, as planners insisted, the site across the river was just too small. Officials realized that only the MBTA property was large enough to house the complex. Several discussions and millions of dollars later, the Commonwealth had purchased the land from the transit authority--and donated it to the federal government in President Kennedy's honor.

Six years after Kennedy's announcement, it looked like plans for the library were finally beginning to shape up. The Kennedy Library Corporation--a private body headed by Robert F. Kennedy '44--had raisedabout $18 million from 30 million contributors worldwide. The corporation, moreover, had selected a rising young New York architect by the name of I. M. Pei to design the building. The Cambridge City Council and Harvard had both welcomed Pei's plans; officials went happily about their business, waiting for construction to begin. But when the MBTA was forced to find an alternate location for its carbarn, nobody was selling. Almost a dozen neighborhoods rejected the agency's proposals, refusing to change local zoning laws. As each neighborhood turned the MBTA down, frustration levels rose, Crane says. By 1970, however, rounds of negotiations with Boston officials proved fruitful, a site was secured, and the state spent $53 million to transplant the yards.

But state and library officials lit up their cigars too early. Just when they thought the battle was over, a group of Cambridge residents launched a counter-offensive. The group charged that the library, because it contained both a museum and the archives, would bring more tourists, scholars and cars into already-congested Harvard Square. "A distinction was made as to the relative attractiveness of a museum versus a library," City Manager James Sullivan explains. "From the beginning, the community was divided on the issue." During the early 1970s, tensions within the community rose steadily until a major fight developed.

On the one hand was a group of citizens who said the new museum would destroy the Square, flooding it with hordes of tourists each day. Even now, representatives of this group--then loosely formed into the Committee to Protect the Environment (COPE)--defend their actions. City Councilor Francis H. Duehay, who says the museum would have brought between 40 and 60 tour buses into the Square every day, was one of these opponents. "Three million additional visitors a year was really an impossible burden for Harvard Square," he says.

Some University professors joined ranks with those who were concerned about the library's impact on traffic and pollution. Paul R. Lawrence, then a leading member of Neighborhood 10--the most vocal of four community groups that comprised COPE--and Donham Professor of Organization Behavior at the BusinessSchool, said opponents of the library were "almost all supporters of JFK." Lawrence says a large number of Cambridge residents worried about the library's impact, despite the small number of visible opponents.

Henry J. Steiner '51, professor of Law and an active member of a group of faculty members who shared a concern about the library's impact, says the group's single dominant concern was increased traffic. An influx of cars and people into the area, the group maintained, would block access to the Square, increase air pollution levels and overcrowd the area.

On the other hand was a more diffuse group of people who felt Harvard Square was the only proper site for the library complex--and that opponents harbored elitist feelings. Councilor Sullivan says opponents "didn't want the library. Period." Crane agrees, saying that even though Pei revised his plans twice to accommodate residents' fears--and appeared at public meetings on the proposal--"a very small handful of well-organized people put the harpoon into the library."

Robert Rosenthal, the Boston Globe reporter who covered the conflict, has said that while residents claimed they were worried about traffic and parking, "I think the real source of their antagonism lay in a sense of turf and in a deeply held though often unarticulated conviction that the area should be preserved for academic use rather than for the general public." Other observers are less kind. One high-level state source, who was party to the conflict, says a group of "Brattle St. Brahmins who think the rest of the world should defer to them" kept the pot boiling.

By 1974, Cambridge opponents channeled their feelings into a concrete proposal, and called for splitting the institution. Their recommendation--eventually adopted by both the Boston Redevelopment Authority and Harvard--called for keeping the archives in Harvard Square and moving the museum into an existing building in the Charlestown Navy Yard. Meanwhile, everybody waited for an environmental impact report prepared by the government's General Services Administration (GSA).

When the GSA report was released in February 1975, opponents greeted it with skepticism, filing requests for the original consultants' reports, which they felt had found problems where the GSA summary dismissed them. Sensing a long-term court battle and feeling the steady crunch of inflation, the Library Corporation--whose representatives in Cambridge had tried unsuccessfully to placate resident' fears--announced it would not build both the museum and archives in Cambridge.

The Library Corporation's decision brought an unexpected response, triggering almost frantic bids for a piece of the prestigious memorial. President Robert C. Wood of the University of Massachusetts was the first of 175 interested parties out of the starting blocks, issuing an invitiation to the corporation to come to either the UMass Boston or Amherst campus. Wood, The Crimson reported, "launched a massive campaign to bring the memorial to UMass even when the odds were ridiculously stacked against him." It was early 1975. Charles U. Daly, then vice president for government and community affairs, commented: "Ten years ago if someone put forward the Columbia Point site it would have been dismissed as ridiculous. But it isn't ten years ago."

Daly's prophecy proved right, for by November 1975 the library corporation had narrowed its choice down to two alternatives--the Cambridge/Charlestown archives/museum split or the Columbia Point "we'll take the whole thing" option. While Cambridge residents continued to protest, Dorchester opened its arms and welcomed the library. It was, as Dan H. Fenn Jr. '44, director of the library, says, a "very, very painful, difficult, unhappy time for everyone." President Kennedy had, after all, personally favored a Harvard site. But as family members and library corporation officers retreated for a now-famous weekend meeting in New York, Harvard Square seemed less than hospitable.

What exactly took place at the closed-door discussion may never be known, but in the end, the library corporation opted for the UMass proposal. Speaking at a Nov 24, 1975, press conference, Senator Kennedy said that "President Kennedy was very much a public figure and it is entirely appropriate that any library, museum or archive that carries his name be very much in the public eye. He would have wanted it that way."

The senator attacked what he called "a small group of intransigent opponents" in Cambridge, adding that the library corporation had decided the institution's two halves should not be split. Fenn says that although the President did want the library at Harvard, "the corporation was not willing to accept conditions which residents essentially imposed." In retrospect, says one source close to the family, the corporation had to make a choice whether the split-site proposal was worth the trouble--and they decided that it wasn't.

Some very bad blood, however, still flowed beneath the public explanations. It is widely rumored that the Kennedy family was angry--angry over the residents' opposition, angry that a memorial to the late president had been raked over the coals of controversy. At a caucus during the final meeting, Kennedy family members are said to have acquiesced to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's wishes that the UMass site be chosen. Sources close to the library corporation say that while discussion at the decisive meeting focused on logistical problems of a split-site, the vote was more influenced by perceptions of citizens' attitudes. At any rate, the old MBTA site reverted to the Commonwealth and the state donated 12 acres on Columbia Point for the library, despite some feeling that, in terms of economic development, a better site could have been found. Pei returned to his New York studio and drew up a fifth set of plans--the glass and pre-formed concrete structure which officials will dedicate on October 20.

University and city officials today are still separated by the divisions of four years ago. Both Duehay and Steiner think the Columbia Point location is more accessible than the Square and better for the library. Steiner says the library would have been a "touristic appendage" to Harvard, whereas at UMass 'it is a center of attention and attraction which stands in its own right." Councilor Sullivan, on the other hand, still believes a small group of "neighbors kicked the hell out of" the proposal and that "the citizens of Cambridge screwed themselves." Jonathan Moore, director of the Institute of Politics, hopes the library will be successful, adding that "any sense of disappointment of not having the whole cluster is well behind us." Some city officials, meanwhile, remain bitterly disappointed--officials who might agree with Crane's position: "October 20 is a day of mourning as far as Cambridge is concerned."