Harvard Confronts Problems In Bid For Kennedy Archives

Time is running out for Harvard in its battle to keep at least a portion of the Kennedy Library complex in Cambridge.

With the November 24 library corporation board meeting approaching, University officials are meeting with corporation members and Congressmen to put together the multi-million dollar Charlestown package that may enable the archival portion of the library to remain in Cambridge.

That package includes plans, drawn up by the Boston Redevelopment Authority with help from Harvard, for the location of the museum in an existing building and an overhaul of the USS Constitution.

The University must secure committments for federal funds from a number of different agencies--including the Interior Department, U.S. Park Service, Housing and Urban Development Department, and the General Services Administration--to make the Charlestown alternative work.

But even if the University secures those committments it is not altogether clear that the corporation board members will choose to separate the Kennedy museum from the archives.

Corporation board members have been paying increasing attention to the site available at the University of Massachusetts's Columbia Point campus--a site that would provide room for the whole complex and nullify the need for two separate buildings.

The corporation members are also attracted to the site because the surrounding Dorchester community has expressed interest in obtaining the whole complex for the area.

That community approval is attractive to corporation members, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.), who have expressed fear that the Cambridge community will oppose making the library into anything more than a repository for a dingy stack of books and a few quiet scholars.

Kennedy in particular, sources say, is unsure whether the archives can be effectively separated from the museum without the archives losing some of their vitality.

Kennedy's current role cannot be downplayed. If he is in favor of a split-site plan he may be capable of scraping together the federal funds needed for the Charlestown project.

In recent discussions with corporation members and congressmen, Harvard officials have emphasized the potential damage of splitting the archives from the Institute of Politics, which will be placed next to the archives if they are built in the MBTA subway yards site across from Eliot House.

They have also stressed the need to place the Kennedy Library in a major learning center such as Harvard.

UMass officials said yesterday they are hoping to sit down on an informal basis with corporation board members to show them the plusses of the Columbia Point site.

Nan Robinson, vice president for planning at UMass, said yesterday, "The feasibility of the single site is going to be much more spelled out," than Harvard's split site proposal by the time the board meets in November.

Earlier in the year the Kennedy Library Corporation bowed to Cambridge community protests about possible pollution and traffic that a museum would bring to Harvard Square and announced that the museum would not be in Cambridge.

At the same time the corporation asked for alternative sites for both the museum and the whole complex. Of those alternatives only the UMass proposal remains in competition with the Harvard proposal as a site for the library's final location