Kennedy Compound
a.k.a. Homes of Joseph P.,John F., and Robert F. Kennedy
Irving and Marchant Aves., Hyannis Port, MAThe reputation of the Kennedy Compound at Hyannis Port is known to virtually a11 Americans of political consciousness during the early 1960s. It was the home base of John F. Kennedy during his campaign for the presidency in 1960 and served as the Summer White House in 1961. Pierre Salinger in his book with Kennedy (1966) wrote, "of all the places the President went to rest, his favorite was his house at Hyannis Port." Presidential security and privacy proved difficult in its neighborhood of relatively close vacation houses, however, and President Kennedy's subsequent summer stays were in homes on nearby Squaw Island.
The Kennedy Compound also illustrates the earlier years of John Kennedy and the significant family of which he was a part. His parents first rented their Hyannis Port cottage in 1926. After three seasons in residence with his family, Joseph P. Kennedy bought the property in 1929 and greatly enlarged the house (constructed in 1904). It was in and around this house that the Kennedy children spent their summers, learning to sail and engaging in the other competitive activities encouraged by their ambitious, hard-driving father.
After his marriage, John Kennedy in 1956 bought a smaller summer house of his own close by on Irving Avenue. Robert Kennedy acquired a house adjoining his brother's property to the north and his father's to the east. The three properties together comprise the famous Compound.
The most significant of the three houses is the Joseph P. Kennedy home, for it was the center of family activity for most of the summers between 1926 and 1963, the year of the President's assassination. The other two houses, however, lend added significance and distintion to a property prominent in the public consciousness and in the political history of the 1950s and 1960s as the Kennedy Compound. While recognizing the Joseph P. Kennedy home as the central feature, therefore, the entire Kennedy Compound merits definition as a single historic property.
Bibliography
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.