Standing in the Oval Office, Bay of Pigs from the other side, frock envy.

The Oval Office is surprisingly small.  At least that’s how it feels as I stand in the mocked-up version at the John F. Kennedy Museum (http://www.jfklibrary.org/) at Columbia Point in the southern half of Boston.  It had been an easy journey from my hotel on Boylston by taking the red line from down-town crossing four stops south to JFK/UMass and then popping up about fifteen or twenty minutes later in what feels remarkably like south west London.  There are streets full of solid residential properties with well-kept gardens and avenues amply planted with trees and shrubbery.  It’s a little disconcerting when you know you are two thousand miles from home. At the bus-stop I find the bus to the museum is free and the ten-minute route runs along the edge of the bay and loops into the University of Massachusetts before dropping off passengers at the front of the JFK museum.  The University of Massachusetts must have one of the most enviable locations for a university in the whole of the United States.  It is nestled on the waterfront with long lawns leading down to the water’s edge and buildings which look modern and well-maintained.  On this Sunday morning there are groups of students, male and female, black and white, doing American Football drills.  It all feels very relaxed. 

The idea of a Presidential library began with President Franklin D. Roosevelt during his second term of office as a means to store and preserve the evidence of a presidency for future generations.  It began a traditional that endures to this day.  There is, amongst others, the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California; the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, Georgia; the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas and the William J. Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arizona (does it contain ‘that’ cigar, I wonder).  The libraries are really archives and museums, bringing together in one place the artefacts and documents of a President and his Administration and making them available to the public for study and discussion. They also bring together personal papers and correspondence of Presidential family members, associates and friends.  I am not sure there is anything quite like it in the United Kingdom.  The Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston is impressive both in terms of the breadth of information it makes available but also the depth, and the engaging ways it presents it.  There are journal and diary entries about key events not just from JFK himself but also from his wife Jackie Kennedy, from his brother Robert who was his campaign manager and who became Attorney General during his administration and also from JFK’s secretary.  A visit to the museum begins with a nineteen-minute film mostly of JFK talking about his early home life and containing much family film footage, and then progresses through a series of corridors and rooms displaying interesting documents and articles pertaining to his life and career.  One learns about the 1960 campaign trail; the famous Kennedy-Nixon debate runs on a TV loop (they were surprisingly gracious to each other, American politics appears to have gone downhill rapidly since then); there is a wall showing the results of the 1960 election which clearly shows how close the race for the presidency was and then stuff on Kennedy’s inauguration and the three years of his office before he was assassinated on November 22^nd, 1963.  The handwritten notes, the official typed documents and the black and white films being run are generously supplemented by large glossy photographs on the walls of John and Jackie Kennedy meeting many famous political figures of the day and glass cases dotted here and there exhibit the many beautiful, valuable and sometimes strange gifts that they received along the way.  Two of the rooms deal with the US space programme which JFK was keen to see accelerated the Cuban Missile Crisis.  This latter room held particular interest for me as almost exactly a year before I had been standing in the warm and shallow waters of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba reading about and thinking about the invasion of Cuba from the Cuban’s point of view.  As I read the letters exchanged between JFK, Fidel Castro of Cuba and Nikita Khrushchev of Russia and mused on those thirteen days in October 1962 when the world seemed to be toppling towards nuclear war I wondered whether today, with communication so rapid and media coverage of events so expansive, three individuals, all with the need to maintain reputation and political position would be able to come to the arrangement they did.  JFK, so young and relatively new to the role seems to have shown remarkable wisdom and courage and a surprising lack of ego.  But before you think I am as dulI as dishwater in my interest in historical political and social events I would like to report that I also spent quite a long time admiring Jackie Kennedy’s frocks.

Back at the hotel, shoes off, scoffing pillow chocolates and considering which cocktail to start with that evening I reflected once more on how at home I felt in Boston.  Tomorrow I would be going for a tour of Harvard Business School and wondered if I would feel just at home, there.

The US trip photographs are on the Gallery.