Kennedy, John F. Autograph manuscript on Harvard University...

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Kennedy, John F. Autograph manuscript on Harvard University Kennedy, John F. Autograph manuscript on Harvard University, 4 pages, "Birmingham, Alabama," penned on the verso of 4 pages of a 10-page speech (entire speech included) delivered by Kennedy in Birmingham, Alabama on March 21, 1957 (8 x 10 ½ in.; 203 x 266 mm.) in blue ink Kennedy pens over 400 words which would appear as his contribution to Brooks Atkinson's request for him to write a short piece on Harvard for his upcoming book. Minor soiling; staple holes in corner with surrounding oxidation. Senator John F. Kennedy's manuscript for his contribution to Pulitzer Prize-winner Brooks Atkinson's book on Harvard as seen through its famous graduates. Kennedy pens in full: "'Let us praise great men' Professor Kitteridge 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 continues 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 Kitteridge and his fellows had enduring, Harvard would have endured. For the essence of Harvard is not the buildings or the Library, however important their supporting functions may be. It is the teachers and the students and the interrelationships between them. It is the teacher not the library who over 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 young charges the true enchantment of thought to young men who were more enchanted with life itself in this spring time of youths. But one teacher stands out known to generations of Harvard men stands out - Arthur Holcombe. A teacher in American government he strives 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 progress and 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, slightly reserved, self-restrained, without illusions but idealistic, he was 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 and 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." Following Kennedy's speech concerning the problems of labor racketeering, JFK received a phone call from Brooks Atkinson (1894-1984 -- Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Harvard graduate), then at work editing a book on Harvard College as seen through the eyes of its most famous graduates. Atkinson requested that Kennedy write a short piece for the book and Kennedy agreed. This was published, almost verbatim, in College in a Yard, published a few months later.