Addressing the staff in its lobby Thursday, Patrick Leary, the director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, stressed their mission, recalled Mr. Kennedy’s death in Dallas 52 years ago and thanked them for their commitment to the nation’s 35th president.
More than 80 percent of the Kennedy library’s work force is now affected by the decision, one that will almost certainly result in those affected losing their health and other benefits, and constitutes a major downsizing of the museum on Columbia Point.
Aides said the layoffs and reduced hours were necessary to address huge budget shortfalls.
But after years of lapsed maintenance to the building — as well as to the oldest bits of memorabilia some staff have supervised for two decades — the looming cuts have agitated preservationists, including the library’s longtime house curator, Betsy Corcoran, and even historians as distant as the University of Virginia.
Before the layoffs, visitors seldom had to wait more than 10 or 15 minutes to view John F. Kennedy’s interactive inaugural exhibit. Now, they stand eagerly in lines as long as a half an hour. Passing through on a chilly day late last week, a bright-eyed 22-year-old couldn’t quite believe his eyes as he neared the front: Riding the worn bottom of the escalator, which so many individuals have ascended in the library’s three decades, was President Kennedy himself, at least his iconic 35 mm black-and-white visage, superimposed over high-def.
“I can’t believe I’m close to J.F.K.,” the young man said, then smiled as he clicked the touch screen, thrusting his hand in front of him, eager to interrupt the president’s sermonic exhortations and free the country from its “profound moral chaos.”
For a long while now, the lone working escalator in Kennedy’s library has been serving a harder, more dispiriting role. It takes people down, literally and figuratively, into the lower floors, where prepared, slow-burn lectures under-attended gravitas about J.F.K.’s doubts about the war in Vietnam and taped confessions to shepherds serve as consolatory portals. But now, with the looming layoffs, more and more the escalator remains stationary as visitors, cut off from these revelatory portals, clutch each other, trying to conjure up the president.
Now, he looms over all.
But for how long is unclear.
As you thin out, life grows fuller.
How would stepping stones for this poem look like?: in a damp scough-hole, and squatted there turning savagely the tulip-flower in her hand. A lovely ladybird yet: greenish-black and brilliant with a body-shine so sharp that she seems to have been dipped in dew; engorged and repulsive with fullness, yet withal so beautiful—a total pattern so precise that is becomes incredible, and impossible to put out of mind. As lovely to the mental eye as any shape of beautiness is delightful to the bodily; and perhaps more like what some people have felt, imagination-waked, by stars of unknown names at nights when winter crashed a window and men slept, frozen, at their ease.
I ever wondering, you know” (Roe 627).
Various disagreements presented themselves while drafting the new constitution, and as a result, there were several revisions to the original draft (Article I, ‘Constitution of the U.S.’). Four months later, on this day, after a final draft had been written and approved, delegates from the Continental Congress signed their names in the Hall of Independence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the United States Constitution was ready to complete its passage into law.
And it is never meant to end. On every first Sunday in October for the duration of his administration, every American president goes on record in a proclamation stating their support of the day. So will this president.
This means that every U.S. president has witnessed, participated in, and sent out such a proclamation.
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