Post-Hyannis Reflection: The American Experience Continues

Today marks the twelfth anniversary of the premiere of the American Experience documentary JFK, first broadcast on PBS on November 11, 2013. 

I remember attending a forum at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum two weeks and four days earlier that year, an event presented in collaboration with American Experience. 

That same evening, I met Andrew Young, the civil rights activist and diplomat, and Robert Dallek, the historian and author of several presidential biographies. 

Both were commentators in the documentary.

I had already met Harris Wofford, President Kennedy’s civil rights advisor, that August, and would later meet historian Evan Thomas in 2014 and Jean Kennedy Smith in 2017. They, too, were among the documentary’s commentators.

The film has remained one of my favorites because those encounters gave it a living connection. It is one thing to watch a documentary about history; it is another to have met some of the people whose voices shaped it. Their presence, even in memory, adds a kind of quiet warmth to the screen. Years later, I found a DVD copy of JFK at Newbury Comics in Cambridge in March of 2021. 

Though I already have a digital version, I still keep the disc as something tangible, a reminder of how deeply the story has accompanied me through the years.

As I type this entry, I have the documentary playing on my laptop. Hearing it again after my recent pilgrimage to Hyannis gives the narration a new depth. The images of Cape Cod, the beaches, the Hyannis Armory, all of it now feels personal, familiar, and alive.

When the film reaches the moment of President Kennedy’s victory speech, I can picture myself standing outside the Armory, where he spoke those words:

“And I can assure you that every degree of mind and spirit that I possess will be devoted to the long-range interest of the United States and to the cause of freedom around the world. So now my wife and I prepare for a new administration and for a new baby. Thank you.”

Hearing those lines again, I see not just the black-and-white footage but the red brick and the November light. History breathes when you have stood where it happened.

The most moving part of my visit was seeing the Kennedy Compound. 

I felt a little like Moses on Mount Nebo, able only to look upon the promised land from a distance. I imagined the family gathered there through the years, celebrating, mourning, and simply living their lives. I realized that these places were not just settings for history; they were homes filled with laughter, loss, and love.

When I visited the final resting place of Saoirse Kennedy Hill, I felt a quiet sadness. 

She was only twenty-two years old, younger than I am now. I remember standing there with a sense of pity for a life that ended so soon, though I knew almost nothing about her at the time.

It was only after returning from Hyannis and reading White House By the Sea by Kate Storey that I began to understand who she was. Saoirse had never lived in the public eye. She was the only child of Courtney Kennedy Hill, and by all accounts she was warm, bright, and full of energy. The book describes her as having a “big personality,” the kind of presence people remembered. When she took clothes to a local seamstress, the woman asked if she was a Kennedy. While other cousins might have smiled politely, Saoirse answered without hesitation, “Yes, I am. I’m Ethel’s granddaughter.”

I once saw a photograph of her with her mother at the White House. 

She looked so young, standing there where so much history had unfolded. I have often dreamed of visiting that same place myself. It moved me to realize that this young woman, who once stood on that red-carpeted drive, would later become a figure of quiet remembrance. It was not until she died that most of the public even knew her name.

Her story made me reflect on the many members of the Kennedy family who lived out of the spotlight, carrying the family legacy in ways that history rarely records. It also reminded me how brief and fragile life can be, even for those whose names are woven into national memory.

This trip, as well as the book, made me think about Jean Kennedy Smith with deeper appreciation. 

I had seen places that she herself had visited. I may have been outside the Hyannis Armory, where President Kennedy gave his 1960 victory speech, but she was inside on the stage with her parents and siblings when her oldest surviving brother delivered it. 

I may have been outside the Kennedy Compound, but she was familiar with its rooms and had precious memories of her time there.

Though much of White House By the Sea was tender, one passage unsettled me. After Ted Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy Shriver died in 2009, Jean, the last surviving sibling, stopped coming to the Cape, saying it was too painful, too heavy with their absence. I wondered if, when I met her in 2017, that ache still lingered, and if she ever considered visiting her childhood home one last time.

I have thought often about what this pilgrimage has meant to me. At first, it was simply a chance to visit the places where the Kennedys lived and walked, but I see now that it became something quieter and more inward. Walking through Hyannis was like walking through a mirror of my own life, a reflection of memory, faith, and time. I felt as though I had stepped into a space where the living and the remembered still shared the same air.

History has always been my refuge but being there taught me that history is not only a record of what has been. It is also a way of belonging. The Kennedys are remembered for their power and their tragedy, but what stayed with me most were the small things like the white clapboard homes, the sound of the sea behind them, the light falling across the church steps. These details reminded me that legacy is made not in moments of triumph but in how people live between them.

Each evening when I returned to my room, I wrote in silence. The words came slowly, as if I were trying to capture something I could not quite hold. The sound of distant traffic, the smell of salt in the air, and the hum of the heater became the rhythm of my reflection. I thought about the speeches I have read and the books I have collected, and how none of them can fully describe what it feels like to stand where a story began.

I realized that every pilgrimage, no matter how historical, becomes personal. It begins with admiration but ends with self-examination. I asked myself why I am drawn to this family, to these places. I think it is because their story holds the same questions that haunt all of us: What does it mean to live with purpose? How do we endure loss and still believe in hope? And what do we leave behind that might outlast us?

I think this trip has shaped my thoughts about what I want for the future. Hyannis is a quiet and modest town, but I grew to like it very much. Even now, as I settle back into my usual work and routine, I keep thinking about what life might be like if I lived there. I can picture myself in a small house with two or three bedrooms, all on one floor. On weekday mornings from Monday through Thursday, I would walk to a local CrossFit gym for the early class at five thirty. Those classes would help me meet people and become part of the community. Afterward, I would come home, shower, rest a bit, have breakfast, and then head out to work. Fridays would be lighter days, and I would spend the weekends walking around town and learning more about its history. I would hope to contribute to the Hyannis Public Library and the John F. Kennedy Hyannis Museum and make a meaningful and positive impact there. I might go into Boston once a month to visit the JFK Library or another historical site. I would also hope to contribute to telling the story of the Kennedy family to a new generation. I imagine that life there would feel peaceful, grounded, and meaningful.

The winters would be tough, but I would settle there because it would be home to me and I would make the best of it. I can imagine on very cold evenings, I would sit in my warm living room or warm home office reading and researching for papers or perhaps books for future publications. Though I would have no relatives nearby, my family could be the friends I have made on Instagram, though I know it would not be the same. I would also hope to find genuine, meaningful, and real love with someone special, hopefully with mutual interests as well.

I think I would visit the Kennedy Compound area only once a year, sometime in late October or November. If I lived there now, I would return on November twenty-second, the anniversary of President Kennedy’s death, to remember his life and legacy. I would view the house for a few minutes and then walk to the shore, sit on the granite rocks, and look out toward the sea. I would imagine him sailing his beloved Victura and think about the lands beyond the Atlantic that I have not yet seen but still hope to discover someday.

Sometimes I picture myself there again, walking along the same roads at dusk, hearing the gulls overhead, feeling the cool wind from the bay. The light would change, but the sea would remain the same. I imagine myself pausing by the memorial once more, not as a visitor retracing history, but as someone who has finally found a place to rest and reflect.

Hyannis, for me, has become more than a place on the map. It is a meeting point between memory and hope, a reminder that legacies are not only preserved in archives but in the quiet steps of those who continue to remember. Every journey there, whether by bus, by foot, or by page, feels like returning to a story that is still being written, one that asks not for grandeur, but for gratitude.

And on this Veterans Day, sixty-four years after President Kennedy spoke at Arlington National Cemetery, I want to conclude this entry with his words that still remind us of what remembrance truly means:

“Today we are here to celebrate and to honor and to commemorate the dead and the living, the young men who in every war since this country began have given testimony to their loyalty to their country and their own great courage.

We celebrate this Veterans Day for a very few minutes, a few seconds of silence and then this country's life goes on. But I think it most appropriate that we recall on this occasion, and on every other moment when we are faced with great responsibilities, the contribution and the sacrifice which so many men and their families have made in order to permit this country to now occupy its present position of responsibility and freedom...

On this Veterans Day of 1961, on this day of remembrance, let us pray in the name of those who have fought in this country's wars... that there will be no veterans of any further war—not because all shall have perished but because all shall have learned to live together in peace.”

Pilgrimage to Hyannis, Day Five: Farewell and Departure

In the evening after dinner, I packed my belongings so that I would not have to rush in the morning. I wanted my final hours in Hyannis to feel deliberate, not hurried. As I packed, I watched PBS and saw a short promotional segment about KISSINGER, an upcoming American Experience documentary.

The image of Kissinger immediately brought to mind a photo I had once seen in Patrick J. Kennedy's memoir A Common Struggle: a very young Patrick kneeling beside Dr. Kissinger, also kneeling, proudly showing him a small aquarium in his childhood bedroom. 

It reminded me that although I came to Hyannis for the Kennedys, my interest in history is not limited to a single family but to the currents of leadership, consequence, and human complexity that shape public life.

I slept lightly and woke around 4:30 in the morning, then drifted back to sleep. I had planned to walk before sunrise to the JFK Memorial at Lewis Bay to watch the first light over the water, hoping to later watch the sunset at the JFK Memorial in Cambridge once I returned home, a sunrise and sunset, two bookends to a pilgrimage. But when I opened the balcony door, the cold air rushed in. I had only a thin hoodie and had only just recovered from sinus trouble two days earlier. I chose, reluctantly, to remain inside.

At 9:00 I woke again and went downstairs for breakfast one final time, which I carried back to my room while listening to the morning news. Since I had already packed, it took only a few minutes to make sure nothing was left behind.

At 10:22 I checked out of the hotel, taking one last quiet look at the room that had sheltered me for four nights.

I still had time before my departure, so I walked to the Hyannis Public Library for a final visit. 

I do not fully understand why I felt so drawn to that small building, but it had become a sanctuary to me, not a tourist destination, but a place of warmth, stillness, and thought.

Returning to it four times in four days revealed something I had not consciously named. I did not go there for research or shelter or scenery. I went because it felt like a place where I belonged. It was not history behind glass like the museum, nor legacy preserved in stone like the memorials. It was something quieter, a living space of thought rather than tribute, of presence rather than memory. I realized, sitting there for the last time, that I was not only visiting Hyannis. I was rehearsing what it might feel like to live here, to have a corner of the world where I could enter, sit down, and not feel like a guest but someone slowly learning how to arrive. 

I sat for about fifteen minutes, absorbing the familiar hush, as if saying a small goodbye.

When I left, I briefly walked to see the nearby campus of Cape Cod Community College in Hyannis since I have been contemplating an eventual return to school. 

I learned that it mainly houses the ACCCESS program and that the main campus is nearly four miles away in Barnstable. It left me wondering what attending classes there would look like in practical terms, whether this place that felt spiritually familiar could one day also become educationally real.

With limited time remaining, I considered walking the Kennedy Legacy Trail again but decided against risking the distance. Instead, I returned to the first landmark I had visited on my arrival, the bronze statue of President Kennedy in front of the JFK Hyannis Museum. 

Four days ago, it was a welcome. Today it was a farewell. I stood before him for several minutes. The figure is sculpted barefoot, moving forward as if toward the sea. I did not speak aloud, but my thoughts were their own prayer of gratitude and hope. This would be the final image of Hyannis before I left.

Soon I walked the short distance to the Hyannis Transportation Center and arrived early for my bus. As it pulled away, I saw a Cape Cod Central Railroad train departing at the same time, two journeys leaving from the same point. I wondered where its passengers were headed and what new stories they were beginning.

During the ride back to Boston I sat quietly with my thoughts. 

I wondered what these four days would become in me over time. Whether I might return one day not as a visitor but as a neighbor. Whether this was the end of something or the beginning of something. Or both.

My bus arrived at South Station at 1:35 in the afternoon. 

Instead of going home, I made an unplanned decision. I took my luggage and went directly to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. 

I knew it would be closed due to the government shutdown, but I needed to stand there anyway, because that building is the other doorway through which this journey began, years earlier, when I met Jean Kennedy Smith.

The pilgrimage did not begin in Hyannis. It began the day I met her. That moment created the interior movement which led me here. She was the last living link to both Jack and Bobby and when she stood before me, she represented not history on display but history still breathing. I did not fully understand it at the time, but something sacred had begun. Returning to the library now was not repetition. It was return. The journey could not conclude on the Cape itself. It had to come back to the point of first stirrings, the quiet place where longing turned into pilgrimage.

Unable to enter the building, I walked down to the Harbor Walk behind it.

There, to my astonishment, Victura was still on display, facing outward toward the ocean as if ready to sail.

I had seen it before, but until this pilgrimage I had never fully understood how much of his identity was formed not in marble or monuments but in motion, in steering forward.

In Hyannis I walked the ground where he lived. Here I stood before a vessel that carried what grounded him. The boat was not memory. It was direction.

The boat pointed outward toward the open water, not anchored, not still. The inscription at Lewis Bay echoed in my mind, and I realized his words were the truest ending this pilgrimage could have. Not my own reflection, but his:

I believe that it is important that this country sail and not lie still in the harbors. Great opportunities lie before us, and great responsibilities have been placed upon us. I believe we can meet them. We have in the past, we are going to today, and I know we will in the future.
— John F. Kennedy, Address to the Nation on the State of the US Economy, August 13, 1962

Pilgrimage to Hyannis, Day Four: Sanctuary and the JFK Hyannis Museum

I woke up at 9:30 in the morning and slept moderately well. This would be my last full day in Hyannis before departing tomorrow. After having breakfast on time in my room, I went out into the late morning air. The forecast had warned of thunderstorms, but the storms never came. The sky shifted gently throughout the day, sometimes clouded and sometimes bright, as if the weather itself were reluctant to disturb the quiet.

Since I had already travelled by foot and by bus over long distances for the past two days, I chose to remain within walking distance of my hotel for this final day. I decided to walk the Kennedy Legacy Trail once more before visiting the John F. Kennedy Hyannis Museum.

Along the route I remembered that I had not yet gone inside St. Francis Xavier Church. 

This time I stepped through its doors. As I entered, an instrumental version of “God Help the Outcasts” rose in my mind again like a whispered prayer. 

The sanctuary was lined with sculpted reliefs of the Stations of the Cross, echoing the ones I had seen at Our Lady of Victory Parish in Centerville.

This parish holds the altar dedicated to Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. 

Church historians recall that President Kennedy sat in the second pew on the east side, with Secret Service agents in the rows before and behind him. 

Patrick Kennedy was baptized here. Maria Shriver was married here. 

The funeral mass for Eunice Kennedy Shriver was held here in 2009.

The sanctuary was empty when I entered, and I was able to locate the pew where President Kennedy would have sat. 

I sat down in silence. This was not a moment of historical reenactment. I simply sat there and let the stillness speak. 

For the first time I found myself thinking of him not as a statesman, but as another soul seeking strength. I do not know what he thought as he sat in that pew, but I was struck by the fact that before he was a president, he was a parishioner. A man among worshippers, looking toward God as any other man would.

When parishioners slowly began to enter, I rose and continued the Legacy Trail for a final time, eventually arriving again at the John F. Kennedy Memorial. 

The rough fieldstone walls seemed even more fortress like than before, like something carved out of time rather than built upon it. I sat on one of the stone benches and remained there for a while, simply watching the quiet of the water and the dimming light. I did not go down to the shoreline this time. I stayed still.

From the memorial I made my way back toward Main Street. Before entering the museum, I carried with me something I had learned the previous day while reading White House by the Sea by Kate Storey about how the museum came to be. In the early nineties the Hyannis Chamber of Commerce received constant calls from visitors who asked how to get to the Kennedy Compound. The homes were private, and there was no tour to offer. There was a memorial, but as the book noted, there was not really anything to learn there, only a fountain to toss a coin into. The solution became a museum, but Jackie had one requirement: it must be housed in a building that existed when Jack was alive so that the memories would be rooted in place, not presentation. Only then did the family give its blessing. Knowing this, I understood the museum differently, almost as a threshold where public memory meets the edges of private belonging.

By the time I reached Main Street again, the day no longer felt like a final stop on a trip. It felt like a threshold. 

I entered the museum at 1:43 in the afternoon. It felt like continuing the same stillness already begun in the church.

The first gallery began not with the presidency but with family. A large photograph of Jack and Jackie holding Caroline filled the opening wall. 

The exhibit did not introduce him through achievement, but through belonging. 

Just a few steps further, another family portrait appeared. This one from long before the presidency, before campaigns and motorcades, when the Kennedys were simply a string of children gathered around their parents at the shore. 

The wall text beside it, titled “The Early Years,” described how Joseph and Rose first came to Hyannis Port in the 1920s and how the summers there shaped the rhythm of their family life: sailing, swimming, sand underfoot, siblings tumbling in and out of each other’s laughter. Seeing them all together in this image set the tone for the gallery

A display nearby traced the shoreline and the compound grounds, showing how place itself shaped identity. 

Only then did the timeline lift outward into 1960, showing crowds gathered near the fence on election night, waiting for the results.

The next room was quieter, almost chapel like in its simplicity. 

White benches faced a screen showing old footage of the President sailing, narrated by Walter Cronkite.

The blinds were drawn, softening the light until the room felt hushed, like a return to stillness after the swell of the campaign. Here the story slowed.

Cronkite’s narration described how Hyannis Port restored him, how he came back to the sea not as escape but as renewal. It was easy to imagine him stepping briefly out of the public world into salt air and family light, where he could be simply Jack again.

From there the exhibition opened into Presidential Summers, filled with images of cousins racing across lawns and piling onto golf carts, and afternoons on the Victura. The presidency here did not separate him from family. It returned him to them.

Just beyond was a quieter gallery devoted to the Victura itself. 

The model was displayed as though still touched by the salt air. 

This was not framed as hobby but formation. The sea was where he learned to endure, to read shifts of wind, to trust instinct and restraint. His doodles of the boat were displayed beside it, unguarded and personal, traces of a man most at home in motion across open water. 

The boat’s Latin name, meaning she who is victorious, was not presented as prophecy but as the quiet shaping of a life long before history arrived to claim it. The Victura was not a symbol of escape. It was return.

The next room turned toward Jackie. 

The gallery warmed in color and tone, shifting into the domestic and artistic world she built around their family. Here she was not ornament beside a leader, but the interior stillness that made the outer life livable. Photographs showed her painting at the Cape and reading with her children before the world ever labeled her an icon.

The path through the museum then circled back into his early life, his studies, and his travels.

 These were not framed as precursors to power, but as the shaping of character beneath it.

His first run for Congress in 1946 was shown less as ambition and more as inheritance after the loss of his brother. Nearby was a photograph of the family standing outside St. Francis Xavier Church, the very parish I had visited earlier that morning. 

The panel explained that when news of Joe Jr.’s death reached Hyannis Port in 1944, they came to this church seeking solace, and the family later dedicated the main altar in his memory.

The text noted that after Joe Jr.’s death, Jack became the family’s standard bearer, responsible for the hopes and unfinished intentions of the brother who could not return.

The presidency section followed, grounded in nearness. 

A video played of the Inaugural address, but the photographs surrounding it showed not motorcades or statecraft, but evenings by the sea and barefoot steps across Cape grass. 

One quote from Jackie read, “It was really the happiest time of my life. It was when we were the closest... I did not realize the physical closeness of having his office in the same building and seeing him so many times a day.”

As the story arrived at 1963, it appeared not as closure, but as a legacy that still inspires. 

Nearby stood a small statue concept of Jack walking beside his young son, a life paused in motion, inscribed only with the words what could have been.

After the unfinished path, the gallery opened into the life of the brother who stepped forward to carry what could not continue. The exhibit was titled RFK: Ripple of Hope, which widened into the story of Robert F. Kennedy. 

His gallery did not move with lineage but with conscience.

Photographs of his brother as companion gradually gave way to the weight he chose to carry forward, not as heir to a mantle, but as answer to suffering. There was a tenderness in those images, a man carrying sorrow not just for himself, but for others.

There was also a short film playing on loop and former Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III appeared on the screen speaking about the legacy of his grandfather. 

When I saw Joseph III on the screen, I remembered meeting him at the JFK Library years ago.

Upstairs was a special exhibit titled “We Remember John F. Kennedy Jr.” 

As soon as the elevator doors opened, I was met by a life-sized bronze statue of John F. Kennedy Jr., saluting as a child of three, forever mid-gesture. I was not expecting it. Its smallness, its human scale, caught me by quiet surprise. 

The panels that followed returned him first to childhood, lifted into his father’s arms on the tarmac, small against a window before the world learned his name. 

Some I had seen before. Others were unfamiliar and disarmingly tender. 

It felt less like an exhibit and more like a window into a life that had been fully human before it was ever iconic. His adulthood appeared not through office but through voice, the founding of George as authorship rather than imitation. 

Next to it hung the photograph of his wedding, joy without foreshadow, a moment permitted to stand without the weight of what would come after.

The final artifact was the smallest pair of shoes, worn in summers when the future was still unbroken.

The exhibit did not tell the story of an ending. It left open the longing of a life still becoming. I want to close this entry with the voice of the one who loved him most in public life, his uncle Ted Kennedy, delivered on July 23, 1999, in his eulogy. His words captured both the loss and the lingering light of who John was becoming.

"He and his bride have gone to be with his mother and father, where there will never be an end to love. He was lost on that troubled night, but we will always wake for him, so that his time, which was not doubled, but cut in half, will love forever in our memory, and in our beguiled and broken hearts.

We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side. But like his father, he had every gift but length of years.

We who have loved him from the day he was born, and watched the remarkable man he became, now bid him farewell.

God bless you, John and Carolyn. We love you and we always will."