September 2014 Auction Ends Thursday, September 25th, 5pm Pacific
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 9/25/2014
John F. Kennedy autograph manuscript unsigned, with numerous corrections to his own notes. Written as a Massachusetts senator in 1957, JFK pens his thoughts about his alma mater, Harvard University, to be incorporated in ''College Yard: Minutes by Thirty-Nine Harvard Men'' published in October of 1957 and edited by Brooks Atkinson, who asked Kennedy to write the piece. Kennedy pens over 400 words in blue ink on the back of a speech relating to labor racketeering, dated 21 March 1957. Autograph manuscript reads in full: ''Let us praise great men - Professor Kittredge is supposed to have stopped one day, pointed to the Harvard Library, and stated that the entire college could burn down and if that Library continued to stand, the essence of Harvard would endure. I am inclined to think however that even the Library could have gone up in the general conflagration, and if Kittredge and his fellows had endured, for the essence of Harvard is not the buildings - the Library, however important their supporting functions may be. It is the teachers and the students and the interrelationships between them. It is the teachers not the Library who are the organ of memory, distilling the knowledge of the past, and I knew many great teachers at Harvard who have patiently attempted to show their the enchantment of thought to young men who were more enchanted with life itself in this spring time of youths. But one teacher known to generations of Harvard men stands out - Arthur Holcombe. Under his direction in a course in American Government, I discovered for the first time the distractions of the Congressional Record, as I studied for one term the eventual political extinguishment of an obscure junior Republican Congressman from upstate New York. But Prof. Holcombe's greatest impact was not his vast erudition, but in personality and character. Dispassionate, reserved, self-restrained, without illusions but idealistic, he combined all these qualities and principles, that made him ideally equipped for to meet his responsibilities, as a teacher, and as a citizen. He taught my father, and forty years later my younger brother, and to them, and to all, he set a standard to which in later life, they all could repair. Deeply moved by the things which he thought important, he refused with wry detachment those debates over trivialities which are incidental to our limited imagination and harbor too closely around loneliness. One day he said to me after the 1946 election he said to me with cheerful pride, 'I had the pleasure yesterday of voting for three of my former students, one for Senator, one for Governor & one for Congressman, and they were all elected.' It did not matter to him that the party labels may be different, they had been his students and graduates of Harvard and that was enough.'' Pages measures 8'' x 10.5''. Handwritten portion runs four pages; speech is ten pages. Toning and staple holes, otherwise near fine with bright handwriting.
Four Pages of Handwritten Notes by Senator John F. Kennedy, on the Back of a Speech Delivered in 1957 -- With Over 400 Words in His Hand as a Rare Tribute to His Alma Mater, Harvard
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