Ten Years Of Protest Takes its Toll

President John F. Kennedy '40 in 1961 issued a statement from the While House that he planned a library to house his papers. He later visited Harvard, toured the area with then-President Nathan M. Pusey '28, and announced that he had selected a site for the library near the Business School.

The library that Kennedy envisaged was not a memorial, but a political science center with himself-perhaps as a professor at Harvard-as the focal point.

More than ten years after Kennedy's assassination, the Institute of Politics and the Kennedy School of Government have been established, but the memorial museum is no closer to construction than when friends and relatives of the president first conceived of it in 1964.

Stephen Smith, head of the Kennedy Library Corporation, said this week that the museum will not be built in Harvard Square, Bitter community opposition to the project, he said, threatened to hold up construction for as long as another five years.

Smith's statement is the reversal of a decade of policy for the Kennedy family.

For years after a special state commission selected the site across from Eliot House in 1965, the corporation raised money--more than $31 million--and surmounted a series of legal obstacles that blocked its immediate acquisition of the site.

When the MBTA announced nearly two years ago that it was finally ready to move its subway cars to a new facility. I.M. Pei unveiled his design for the memorial complex. He planned a semi-circular building that would be capped off by an eight-story glass pavillion in the center. Pei said the "pearl in the oyster," which would have a huge American flag hanging from its ceiling and hold a bust of Kennedy, would be a fitting memorial to the president.

The reaction from Cambridge civic leaders was immediately critical. The building was "monumental" and "out of character with the Square." They said the library would choke off the area with traffic and pollution.

Almost exactly one year later Pei withdrew his design, which had been heavily attacked in architectural circles, and replaced it with a scaled-down version of the library. He eliminated two planned 350-seat auditoriums and split the Harvard owned building from the library, creating a park that would extend from Brattle Square to the Charles River.

But the opposition of the community groups, backed by the money of the Brattle Square set, was stronger than the Kennedy Corporation bargained for--and Smith eventually sent up the white flag. The Kennedys finally realized that Cambridge is not the kind of community that would welcome a million people a year--and all the urban problems they create--even to pay homage to the late president.