Exit the Kennedy Library

In the ten years since laequeline Kennedy first insisted that her husband wanted a memorial at the MBTA subway yards in Harvard Square, one thing was always certain: something--either a full-blown memorial with everything from cinemas to rocking chairs or a quaint brick library, accessible and interesting only to scholars, would be built on the site.

There were delays; the MBTA was at first reluctant to sell the yards, and then, once purchased, it caused relocation problems that tied the John F. Kennedy Library Corporation's hands right through the sixties.

There were scattered protests; residents adjoining the site began to complain in the early '70s about architect I.M. Pei's colossal architectural mock-ups and the potential pollution spawned by tourists flocking to Cambridge to gawk at the museum's coconuts, busts and other memorabilia.

Few observers, however, including most University officials who have been waiting a decade for the corporation to build the Kennedy Institute that is supposed to go along with the project, ever thought the Kennedy's would change their minds about the president's last request.

But in 1975 everything changed. In what may go down as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki of the Kennedy Library affair. Stephen Smith, president of the library corporation, made two searing announcements, three months apart.

The first yanked the museum portion of the library out of the yards while the second, dropped less than a month ago, threatened to move the whole complex including the archives out of Harvard Square unless someone comes up with a separate site for the museum acceptable to the board of directors.

And suddenly the Kennedy legacy had been altered. Two new sites at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and more prominently the UMass-Boston campus at Columbia Point on the ocean, emerged as complex contenders. Kennedy the scholar, inextricably linked for the last decade with his alma mater, was now Kennedy "the man of the sea" and Kennedy "the man of Massachusetts."

What happened? What makes a corporation, studded with the power of the Kennedy's and blessed with funds originally assessed at millions of dollars in private donations, want to pull out of a site fought over dearly and dreamed of for years?

Ostensibly, the reason was money. Slowly the $27 million in pennies and nickels collected from private contributors in the '60s had been whittled away, first by operating expenses and constant re-drawings of the plans, and then by inflation--something even the Kennedy's aren't immune to. Library Corporation officials now claim with what is left in the coffer the cost of building a memorial like the originally planned complex is out of reach.

But there was something else too. What was thought of by the Kennedy's as something that everyone would want to have in their own backyard turned out to be something ugly and repulsive to its prospective neighbors.

Kennedy officials weren't especially happy with Harvard's role either. The corporation apparently felt that Harvard did not work hard enough to pacify the diversified communities surrounding the site, leaving the library corporation to do all the dirty work.

So when some neighborhood groups demanded that the library corporation split the complex in half, or take its business elsewhere, many of the corporation directors, tired of being pestered by the neighborhood gnats and pleased to see that some people were still clamoring to get the complex, became anxious to adopt the latter suggestion.

The story is not over, and latest sources have it that Harvard has a site in Allston near the Business School that the corporation may find acceptable for the museum--thus enabling the archives to be kept in Cambridge.

But in any case, the corporation's final decision, to be reached June 23, may provide the long-awaited last word on a controversy that has gone on much too long for everybody involved.