How Harvard Lost the JFK Library

When former Cambridge City Councilor David E. Clem was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he found himself in the office of Massachusetts Senator Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy ’54-’56.

“I was 24 years old. I had never been invited to a senator’s office — much less Ted Kennedy’s office,” Clem said.

In 1974, Kennedy invited Clem, who was president of the Riverside Cambridgeport Community Corporation, along with other community leaders to discuss plans for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library to be built near Harvard Square.

The meeting came more than a decade after President John F. Kennedy ’40 originally announced that Harvard University would be the location of his archives and Presidential Library in 1961.

But in the end, the JFK library at Harvard never came to be.

When Kennedy, a former Crimson Business associate, visited Harvard in 1963, he originally preferred a location across from Eliot House, on what is now John F. Kennedy Street, for his library and archives.

The land, though, was owned by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority — and Kennedy, recognizing that it may be too expensive, decided that a different location, across the Charles River next to Harvard Business School, would do.

Following the President’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963, plans for the library were expedited. In the wake of his death, the decision was clear: the library must be built in the original spot President Kennedy wanted. It was also a larger site, allowing for the construction of a proposed Institute of Politics dedicated to Kennedy’s memory. The state government bought the land from the MBTA and donated it to the federal government, which manages and administers presidential libraries.

But obtaining the land was the first obstacle — plans to build the library in its location were met with fierce community opposition. Over the next 12 years, organizers, local and Harvard officials, and the Kennedy family and its allies sparred over the location and construction of the JFK Library — culminating, eventually, in the Kennedy Library Corporation electing to move the library out of Cambridge entirely.

The saga was a series of “endless little mini controversies,” Nicholas B. Lemann ’76, a former Crimson president, said. “The usual kind of NIMBY type stuff, neighborhood opposition, historic preservation issues, et cetera.”

When the Harvard Class of 1975 arrived on campus in the fall of 1971, construction of the Kennedy Library was still yet to begin — and for four years, the debate over its location would escalate.

Just a few months before their graduation, in February 1975, the Kennedy Library Corporation announced that the library would not be built on Harvard’s campus, instead choosing to begin construction at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, in Dorchester.

Clem says his main takeaway from the 1974 trip to Ted Kennedy’s office came from the actions of his fellow organizers, not the senator.

“I was more than awestruck by the notion that these neighborhood groups were steadfast in their opposition and took on some pretty formidable people,” Clem said.

The President’s Pick

In 1963, three years into his presidential term — and just over a month before he was killed — Kennedy toured Harvard with then-Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey, Class of 1928, and other city officials, to select a site for his presidential library.

The group examined several potential lots across campus, and Kennedy’s favorite spot was across the street from Eliot House — where, 15 years later, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government would stand.

However, the 12-acre site was being used by the MBTA to house its repair and storage yards, and was unwilling to sell the plot. As a result, Kennedy settled for the site off Western Avenue across the Charles River, opposite Winthrop House, where he lived as an undergraduate.

But his assassination a month later sent the nation reeling and made demand for a memorial to honor him even greater. The library, which was originally planned as a base for the President to retire to academia after he retired from politics, became a necessary tribute for a grieving America.

Following Kennedy’s death, then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ’48 said his brother “has been deprived of the personal enjoyment of such a library, but its speedy completion would be his dearest wish.” Just two weeks after the president was shot, Harvard and the Kennedy brothers announced a drive to raise $6 million to build the library at its Charles River location.

In 1964, after Kennedy’s assasination, Harvard professors suggested including an “institute” as part of the library complex, with the vision of bringing together politicians and scholars.

At the time, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. ’38, who had served as special assistant to the President and was on the JFK Library Corporation, said it would realize a solution to one of Kennedy’s greatest concerns by “bringing together the world of ideas and the world of affairs — the world of scholarship and the world of decision.”

But the same year, officials became concerned about whether there would be sufficient space for the library, the institute, and the museum on the two-acre Western Avenue plot. Pusey himself said he did not think that Harvard would be able to give more land to the Kennedy Library, while the Kennedy family felt that the existing plot was too small.

“Harvard wanted the archives, and that was sort of the crux of the dispute. Harvard didn’t want to deal with, as somebody said, the visitors and the tourism around a presidential library, they wanted the prestige of the archives,” Robert J. Rosenthal, a former Boston Globe reporter who covered the Library’s construction, said.

After several rounds of negotiations with Boston city officials, the MBTA yards were transplanted elsewhere for a hefty $53 million, and the site — the one Kennedy had initially wanted but felt would be too expensive — was freed up for the library.

Local Backlash

According to most contemporary reporting, the fiercest and loudest opponents of the library were a group of residents who lived in or near Harvard Square, in the area between Brattle Street up to Sparks Avenue, referred to as “Neighborhood 10.”

The residents campaigned against the library’s construction, arguing that it would bring unsustainable amounts of tourism and traffic congestion into Harvard Square.

According to Thomas P. O’Neill III, a former Massachusetts lieutenant governor, opposition by resident groups like Neighborhood 10 raised questions about the purpose of Harvard Square and the nature of the library and museum.

“Was Harvard Square going to be for academics and scholars, or was it going to be for the public at large?” O’Neill said.

Graham T. Allison ’62, a former HKS dean, also said the backlash came mostly from the Cambridge elite.

“I remember one wife of a business school professor at one of these hearings,” Allison said. “She said, ‘there’ll be people bringing RVs from Oklahoma wearing Bermuda shorts, and that’ll ruin Harvard Square.’”

Others, though, say that resistance to the JFK library did not only come from the wealthy Brattle Street crowd, pointing instead to local organizers in the Cambridge area.

“The majority of opposition to the Kennedy Library came from the Riverside, Cambridgeport, and mid-Cambridge neighborhood, not Brattle Street,” Clem said. “In fact, when we were invited to meet with Senator Ted Kennedy, there was no one from the Brattle Street Neighborhood Association involved in that.”

According to Clem, the fight against building the JFK Library at Harvard was led by former Cambridge City Councilor Saundra M. Graham.

Graham was a longtime activist who had battled Harvard before. In 1970, she stormed the stage at Harvard’s Commencement, calling for the University to support more low-income housing in Cambridge. The stunt led to a meeting between Graham — who would become the first black woman Cambridge City Councilor — and members of the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body. Eventually, she secured more low-income housing with Harvard’s support.

Graham represented Riverside, which was predominantly Black and low-income. For her, construction of the JFK library was another Harvard encroachment into local neighborhoods that would push locals out and drive up rent prices — the kind she had protested just a few years earlier.

Albert C. Pierce, a consultant to the JFK Library Corporation at the time, called Graham’s claim a “neat juggling act” in an interview with Esquire magazine, as the Neighborhood 10 organizers asserted that the library would devalue their properties, seemingly a contradiction.

Despite the residents’ frustrations, both the University and local political leadership were in support of the library being located in the Square.

“Others, both in the City Council and within the political framework of leadership, were very much in favor of it, not because they were Kennedy fans, but because they thought it was going to be good for the city of Cambridge,” O’Neill said.

Meanwhile, Neighborhood 10 held a series of public hearings and gathered signatures to showcase opposition to the library.

“They gathered signatures, and the signatures were aimed at impressing upon the Cambridge City Council and whomever that it was too small of an area,” said Mike Barnicle, a former columnist at the Boston Globe, “to place a library that would have a huge impact.”

‘A Slow, Public Death’

“Little mini controversies,” however, continued to plague the JFK Library development.

The corporation had hoped to open the library by 1976, in time for the U.S. bicentennial — and had hoped to break ground far earlier. But through the early 1970s, construction of the library faced obstacle after obstacle.

In May 1973, architect I.M. Pei revealed his first design for the former MBTA location. But his design received massive public backlash. Pei proposed an eighty-five foot tall glass pyramid, which architectural critics reprimanded, and buildings of poured concrete, which community groups deemed unseemly for the predominantly brick Harvard Square neighborhood.

Pei would eventually unveil a new design a year later, with brick buildings and no glass pyramid. But the damage had been done. That year, construction opponents proposed splitting the institution: Harvard would keep Kennedy’s archives, but the museum would be moved to the Charlestown Navy Yard.

Meanwhile, the government was still preparing an environmental impact report, which had already delayed construction as buildings at the MBTA site could not be demolished until the report was released.

When the report was finally released, in January of 1975, the General Services Administration found that the library’s impact would be minimal. Opponents remained skeptical, and The Crimson reported that JFK Library officials had viewed the report before it was public, dealing a huge blow to the report’s credibility.

On February 6, 1975, Stephen E. Smith, the late President’s brother-in-law and head of the JFK Library Corporation, announced that neither the Kennedy Library nor the museum would be built in Cambridge.

“It just died a slow public death, as far as the library being located in Cambridge,” Barnicle said.

The Kennedy Library would eventually be built on the UMass Boston campus, at Columbia Point — a location chosen by Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline L. “Jackie” Kennedy Onassis, who chose it because it would allow the library, museum, and archives to remain in one location.

“If you had said 10 years earlier, or 12 or 15 years earlier, that the Kennedy Library was going to go at Columbia Point, people would have laughed at you,” O’Neill said. “It just was going to be a ridiculous place to put it, because it had nothing to do with Jack Kennedy. It wasn’t in his congressional district, it wasn’t part of the Harvard that he wanted connected to the Kennedy library.”

But the failure to bring the Kennedy library to Harvard was not the end of the road for a memorial to the president at his alma mater.

The University had long been assessing how to honor its beloved alum beyond the construction of the library. Just days after Kennedy was killed, undergraduate House committees suggested naming what is now Mather House after the slain President, and the Harvard Corporation agreed to consider the proposal.

While that never materialized, the University did rename its Graduate School of Public Administration for Kennedy in 1966, dubbing it the John Fitzgerald Kennedy School of Government. Eleven years later, the Kennedy School and the Institute of Politics moved to a new location — at the site across from Eliot House where the Kennedy Library was supposed to be built.

The new building was dedicated in October 1978, in a ceremony attended by Ted Kennedy — who acknowledged his fight to bring the Kennedy Library to Cambridge in his speech at the event.

“Once, not long ago, Jack and all the others in our family had a different dedication in mind for this beautiful University site. But Harvard is a house of many mansions. It works its will in mysterious and wonderful ways,” Kennedy said. “And so the new home to which President Kennedy and our family come today is a happy place, full of remembrance of the past and full of promise for the future.”

“When Jack was an undergraduate living in Winthrop House and competing in sports against other houses with Yankee names like Eliot, Lowell and Kirkland,” Kennedy added, “he never dreamed that one day there would be a building named Kennedy on this campus.”

— Staff writer Abigail S. Gerstein can be reached at abigail.gerstein@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @abbysgerstein.

—Staff writer Thamini Vijeyasingam can be reached at thamini.vijeyasingam@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @vijeyasingam.