Often described as “the daughter of the mayor, the wife of the ambassador and the mother of the president,” Rose Kennedy is now the feature of an exhibit of personal letters and artifacts that opened yesterday at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Dorchester.
“[This exhibit] marks the opening of a particular collection: Rose Kennedy’s papers which finished being processed this year,” Frank Rigg, JFK Library and Museum curator, told The Daily Free Press. “The collection is now open for research.”
Rigg said Kennedy was one of the state’s most emblematic characters, making it appropriate to display Kennedy’s collection at the library.
“Some thought it would be a nice idea to let the public get a sense of what sort of materials are in [the archive],” he added. “We tried to select things from different parts of her life that somehow represent her.
“We can see her thoughts and responses to the important events that she was privilege to be a witness to,” he added.
The collection contains 185,000 items dating from 1883 to 1995. An adamant writer, and a pack rat of sorts, Kennedy saved everything from her travel journals and condolence mail to bills, financial letters, investments and appraisals.
Her diaries date from 1908 to 1995. She wrote so often about her children that each child has a separate file dedicated to his or her.
“She would write on an old date book, or a scrap of paper and she’d pin it to herself. We have all of those things,” Megan Desnoyers, a senior archivist at the museum, said.
“Some of it is junk, some of it is great,” she continued. “She was always very interested in travel and history and culture, so she would take classes on that and take notes.”
Desnoyers said she hopes the viewers will be able to get a better idea of who Kennedy was, both on and off the podium.
“I want people to get a sense of Rose Kennedy’s enthusiasm for life from this exhibit, for her approach to things, the letter where she writes to [John F. Kennedy],” Desnoyers said, relating an anecdote about Kennedy’s life.
“She gets a letter from her son, saying ‘I wish you would talk to me before you write to heads of state,’ because she had Khrushchev who she had just met when she was with the president,” she began.
“So she writes back to him and says ‘well it’s good you told me that — I was about to write to Castro.’ She had a very good sense of humor, and it is charming the way that it comes through,” she added.
Jim Wagner, exhibits specialist at the museum, helped choose writings for the exhibit that the public could identify.
“This is someone who is talking about taking a trip abroad and her experiences there,” Wagner said. “She writes about falling in love, and raising her children. Those are things that all of us can appreciate.
“It’s fun to hear about meeting a king or queen or spending time in the White House,” he continued, “but there are more human stories that would be of interest to anyone.”
Kennedy was born in Boston on July 22, 1890. Her father, John Fitzgerald, was the mayor of Boston from 1906 to 1907.
She married Joseph Kennedy in 1914 who later went on to become an American ambassador to Great Britain — and played a supportive role in her son John F. Kennedy’s campaigning and presidency. She died in 1995 at age 104.