Cape & Islands News

JFK film captures summer White House in Hyannis Port

 At the Center of the World
New film celebrates JFK's summer White House

Caroline Kennedy turns to speak with her father, President John F. Kennedy, as the president, children and aides walk across the lawn at the Kennedy compound. From "At the Center of the World: Hyannis Port and the Presidency of John F. Kennedy."

By James Kinsella

A standing ovation at the Hyannisport Club greeted the conclusion of a new documentary film, "At the Center of the World: Hyannis Port and the Presidency of John F. Kennedy."

The film debuted Friday evening in a fundraiser held at the club for the John F. Kennedy Hyannis Museum Foundation. More than 170 people attended the event.

Filmmaker Andrew Fone, tapping into archives at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and interviewing Cape Codders who were there during the years of the summer White House in Hyannis Port, delivered an incisive film filled with revealing, poignant and sometimes funny moments.

Rebecca Pierce with filmmaker Andrew Fone at debut of film.U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who is recovering from brain cancer at his home in Hyannis Port, did not attend the screening.

Kennedy, however, appears repeatedly in the film, sharing his thoughts about what Hyannis Port meant to his older brother John and to the Kennedy family in general.

"Well, it's home in a very real sense," said Senator Kennedy, who said Hyannis Port is "sacred ground" to the family.

Speaking of his older brother, the senator said, "He loved this place."

In the film, Fone uses the sound and image of manual typewriter keys typing dates on a piece of paper to mark the passage of time. It's the kind of machine that members of the press would have used to write their stories in those days.

"At the Center of the World" opens with the typewriter typing out Nov. 8, 1960, the day Kennedy was elected to the presidency.

John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, is shown voting in his hometown of Boston. He was all of 43 years old.

"Electricity was in the air," recalled Edward Kennedy, who two years later would be elected to fill his brother's seat.

Moments before the opening of film Friday evening at Hyannisport Club.The Kennedys headed for Hyannis Port to await the election results. Senator Kennedy recalls that his brother Robert F. Kennedy's house at the Kennedy compound was the nerve center.

The election was close and its outcome, Senator Kennedy said, was touch and go for hours. Not until six or seven the following morning, he said, did it look like John Kennedy had won.

The film touches briefly on Kennedy's pre-presidential life, from joining the U.S. Navy in 1941 to his heroism with PT-109 to winning election to the House of Representatives in 1946 and to the Senate in 1952. In 1953, Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier, and they enjoyed summer days sailing (she also went waterskiing) at Hyannis Port.

After a failed bid for the vice presidential spot on the Democratic ticket in 1956, Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency in 1960.

His run brought a foreshadowing to Hyannis Port of what his presidency would bring.

Gordon Caldwell, a photographer for what then was called the Cape Cod Standard-Times, recalled that his 40-hour workweeks at the small daily suddenly grew to up to 80 hours a week, many of which were spent on the front lawn of Kennedy's Irving Avenue house.

The hard-fought campaign against then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon drew to a close that Nov. 8 in Hyannis Port, where Senator Edward Kennedy recalled John Kennedy spent the day shifting between his parents' house, his brother Bob's house, and his own house.

At one point, in one of the recollections in the film that show how much things have changed in the past 50 years, aide David Crawford recalls Kennedy coming out to join his aides and the Secret Service in passing a football around.

Iris Flynn, left, a nurse to Rose Kennedy, with Judy Scarafile, president of Cape Cod Baseball LeagueThe next day, the presidency won, Kennedy, joined by his extended family, spoke at the National Guard Armory on South Street in Hyannis to a cheering crowd. That January, in bitterly cold weather, he would deliver his famous inaugural speech in Washington, D.C.

A few months later, the summer White House got under way.

In any given week, it typically would begin with the president flying on Air Force One to Otis Air Force Base, then transferring to Marine One, the helicopter that would deliver him to the front lawn of his father's home. Film footage shows the Kennedy children from the extended family racing to greet him.

On the weekend, the president would relax, sometimes sailing in his Wianno Senior catboat, the Victura, or taking it easy on his motorboat, the Marlin.

Senator Kennedy recalls his brother as a "charmer," a man genuinely interested in others, who would strike up conversations with people on the Hyannis Port pier or the beach.

The president had a special gift for befriending children, whether taking them in his golf cart to the village's little News Shop for penny candy, skipping stones with them, or having contests on whose shell would float out farthest on the water without sinking.

His relationship with the press that gathered at the compound nearly defies belief. Kennedy would come out, answer all their questions, and then ask them whether they had enough or wanted anything more.

Other routine episodes now seem to have occurred in another universe. When his daughter Caroline got a little older, she would go horseback riding in Osterville. President Kennedy would get in his yellow convertible and drive over to see her.

Kennedy's presidency, of course, wasn't all sailing and sunning. The Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the world stood posed at the brink of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, was an especially nerve-wracking time.

Making the film, Andrew Fone said, offered "a rare opportunity to really capture what was a very special time here on Cape Cod."

And personal tragedy also stalked the president at Hyannis Port: his third child, Patrick Kennedy, was born prematurely and died a few days later in a Boston hospital.

In the summer of 1963, in a bid for more privacy following the death of Patrick, the president and his family stayed at Brambletyde, a house on nearby Squaw Island.

John Kennedy's final tragedy would come that November in Dallas, when he was assassinated. Sadness, the film said, would hang over Cape Cod for many years.

Following the film's conclusion and the ovation that followed, Fone said that making the film offered "a rare opportunity to really capture what was a very special time here on Cape Cod."

Fone, his wife and children have a home in Centerville. He previously captured another subject close to many Cape Codders' hearts, the Wianno Senior sailboat, in a film titled, "Lady of the Sound."

Fone, who travels the world as a television producer with Fox News, is struck by the recognition in far-flung places that the names of Hyannis Port and Cape Cod can conjur to this day. In the interval of 45 years since the Kennedy presidency, Fone said, Cape Cod has become "an iconic part of American politics."

Without a doubt, Fone's vision touched the Cape Codders who gathered Friday to see his film. As Richard Penn of Puritan Clothing told him, "You hit it out of the park."