Kennedy on the Cape

The Kennedy Compound at Hyannis Port is a cluster of three colonial-style houses on a few acres of lawn sloping down to Nantucket Sound. From the outside, driving past on Irving Avenue, it looks modest. From the water, where the Kennedy sailboats came and went in the summer photographs that circulated globally through the nineteen sixties, it projects exactly what it was designed to project: old money, physical ease, the image of a family too confident in its position to need to display it.

For one thousand and thirty-six days of the Kennedy presidency, from January of nineteen sixty-one to November of nineteen sixty-three, this compound functioned as an informal seat of American power. Kennedy learned the results of the nineteen sixty election here, watching returns in the family's house while his press secretary Pierre Salinger managed the flow of information to the journalists camped outside. He was photographed here sailing Victura, his twenty-five-foot wooden sailboat, in images that Salinger supervised as carefully as any State Department release. The photographs were not candid. They were arguments: here is a young president, physically vital, relaxed enough to sail, competent enough to govern.

Kennedy vacationed here during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October nineteen sixty-two, though the exact dates when he was at the compound versus the White House during those thirteen days are not established in the sources this project consulted with day-by-day precision. What is established is that the compound was the staging ground for the image of a Kennedy presidency that the administration wanted the world to see: Cape Cod as character witness.

The compound remains privately owned. It is visible from the water. The Coast Guard patrols of Nantucket Sound that began when a president spent his summers here ended with his assassination. The house is still used by the family.