Presidential Libraries
2 stories, in order from the beginning of the trip.
1August 12, 2013
Dateline August 12, 2013, The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
After a few days on Cape Cod with Janice's Aunt Margaret and Uncle Bill, we drove into Boston for the JFK Library on Columbia Point. The fourth of our presidential library visits this year. The welcome at the door was more reserved than the others had been, worth noting only because it was so different. The library walks you through Kennedy's life in proper sequence: PT-109 in the Solomon Islands, Harvard, the House, the Senate, the 1960 race against Nixon that included the first televised presidential debate in American history, the inauguration and 'Ask not,' the Bay of Pigs lesson three months in, the Berlin Wall and 'Ich bin ein Berliner,' the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil rights, the moon program, the Test Ban Treaty, Robert Kennedy at Justice, Jackie's White House restoration, and Dallas. In the morning we drive west to Hyde Park for the FDR Library.
2August 13, 2013
Dateline August 13, 2013, The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum
After the JFK Library in Boston, we drove west across Massachusetts and into New York to Hyde Park, on the Hudson, for our sixth and final presidential library of the year: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The library sits on the old Roosevelt estate, dedicated by FDR himself in 1941, the original of the model every other presidential library has followed since. A $35 million renovation had just been completed, with the first major overhaul of the permanent exhibition in seventy years. Twelve thousand square feet of interactive video tables and digital flip-book screens walk you through the most consequential presidency of the twentieth century: Hyde Park, Harvard, the Navy under Wilson, polio at Campobello in 1921 (the cottage we had visited only the year before on our way through New Brunswick), the New York governorship, the inaugural at the bottom of the Depression with the line about fear itself, the fireside chats, the New Deal, the Arsenal of Democracy, Pearl Harbor and the Day of Infamy speech, the unprecedented third and fourth terms, Yalta, and Warm Springs.