Thoughts of Kennedy: I Pusey Remembers John F. Kennedy, Found Him 'Naive' in the Beginning

When John F. Kennedy '40 took office, he seemed to President Pusey "almost naive." But Pusey, who felt that Kennedy "matured" while in office, "came to join the group of real admirers before I got through."

Pusey's reminiscences about Kennedy are contained in a 27-page transcribed interview-one of 250 such transcripts which have been released to students and reporters as part of the Kennedy Library's "oral history" project. The facility, which is temporarily housed at the Federal Records Center in Waltham, has over 900 interviews on tape with associates of Kennedy-ranging from the members of his Cabinet to the barber who cut his hair in the White House.

Many of the interviews have not been released to the public because the subjects have asked that they be kept confidential during their lifetime. Others will be released as soon as the Library staff can prepare typed transcripts.

Pusey's interview-which was taped in Cambridge in October 1967-discusses his relationship with John Kennedy from 1954, when he took office as President of Harvard, until Kennedy's assassination.

The first contact between the two men, Pusey said, came when Pusey asked him and Sen. Joseph S. Clark (D-Pa.) to sponsor a bill repealing a controversial provision of the National Defense Education Act which required teachers and professors to swear a loyalty oath and sign an affidavit affirming their loyalty.

Kennedy agreed to co-sponsor the bill, but did not attend the final floor vote at which it was defeated. Pusey said he felt "personally aggrieved, which may have been a silly reaction, but I felt he'd let us down and just not produced. It took me a long time to recover from that feeling."

Although the Act was a product of McCarthyism, and Pusey carried on a personal feud with Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (D-Wisc.), he said, "I don't remember ever talking to Kennedy about McCarthy. I just wasn't interested really in his view and knew nothing about it."

In 1959, when Kennedy announced his candidacy for President, Pusey "stood on the sidelines and watched and was rather amused by some of the members of this community who were so eager to get aboard . . . there was a lot of running around here then by people who were not averse to going to Washington."

While Kennedy was President, Pusey said, planning began for the Kennedy Library. An unspoken part of the plan, Pusey said, was that "perhaps we'd make a professor out of him before we got through. This is what we were dreaming about."

Pusey said he remembered the 1963 annual dinner of the Governing Boards-which was held in the White House-as a particularly moving experience. One unnamed member of the Board, he said, was so overcome that he collapsed physically during the dinner and had to leave.

Pusey said he felt that Kennedy was perhaps not ready to be President when elected, but that he matured in the office with amazing rapidity.

"My impression [during the campaign] was that he had not really thought seriously at all about what it required to be President of the United States before be got elected . . . [He thought] it was desirable, you know, and a nice thing, he was working for it, and then with realization he must have said 'My God, what have I done to get into this spot,' " he said.

"But that June in '61, when I sat with him [in the Oval Office], he was shaken by the experiences he had. And I remember him saying to me, 'Well Nate, when Franklin had this job, it was a cinch. He didn't have all of these world problems. He had only to cope with poverty in the United States, but look what I've got.' I remember being some what amazed that he could have reached the presidency and still have been as startled and shocked as he was by his meeting with Khrushchev. This seemed to me incredible.

"But from that moment on-there's just no question-this man began to mature and within the next period of time in my opinion he was growing by leaps and bounds, that is, during he last year, or year and a half, of his life," he said.

With Kennedy, Pusey said he "had a sense of slowly becoming one of his friends, though I was never an intimate friend, still I am sure we got on very well." Pusey felt honored, he said, when he was asked to march behind the President's coffin in his funeral.

"All of us felt there were two things especially to be remembered about the President. One, the fact that he was an active, practicing politician, who was also perfectly at home in a university community. The world of politics and the world of scholarship joined in him. We wanted to remember this as an inspiration for the future.

"The other was the tremendous appeal he had for young people as a symbol of courage and hope and daring. We wanted to keep that alive, too," Pusey said.