IM Pei's JFK Library, in Poetry, Prose, And

Home , Caroline Kennedy, John Carl Warnecke, List of architects, Paul Goldberger, Ted Kennedy, William Walton (painter)

Phillip Harrington. John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Kennedy family members on the Wianno Senior sloop Victura at Hyannis Port, 1959.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 I.M. Pei’s JFK Library, in Poetry, Prose, and Meeting Minutes

EDWARD EIGEN

The moderate accomplishment of I.M. Pei’s design for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is by no means diminished by the suggestion that the most interesting thing about it, to borrow the words of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, is that “this [building] campaign came to an end.” The sentiment is from the senator’s “The Dream Shall Never Die” speech, a crowning but far from valedictory oratorical perfor- mance delivered at the Democratic National Convention on August 12, 1980, the day after his concession of the presidential nomination to incumbent Jimmy Carter. Preparing to leave the convention stage and the nominating contest, while at the same time preparing for the next contest to come, fortified by challenges already met, Kennedy delivered the following words in his distinctive Boston-accented cadence: And someday, long after this convention, long after the signs come down, and the crowds stop cheering, and the bands stop playing, may it be said of our campaign that we kept the faith. May it be said of our Party in 1980 that we found our faith again. And may it be said of us, both in dark passages and in bright days, in the words of Tennyson that my brothers quoted and loved, and that have special meaning for me now: I am a part of all that I have met Tho’ much is taken, much abides That which we are, we are One equal temper of heroic hearts Strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.1 Kennedy’s campaign had been waged in defiance of a perceived state of “paralysis,” reflected in, if not also induced by, Carter’s television address that came to be known as the “malaise speech.” Nine months earlier, on November 17, 1979, Kennedy had returned to Faneuil Hall in Boston—the site of his brother’s final, election-eve rally on November 7, 1960—to launch his own candidacy.2 Two weeks prior to that, on October 20, 1979, the Massachusetts senator had shared the ceremonial

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 stage with Carter when he presided over the dedication of the Kennedy Library. “Like a great cathedral,” Carter said, “this building was a long time coming. But it more than justifies the wait.”3 Planning for the library had begun eighteen years earlier, depending on how, or rather when, you set the clock running. The announcement of the choice of Pei as architect, on December 13, 1964, after a widely publicized, semitransparent selection process guided by Jacqueline Kennedy, was but one moment of imper- fectly sustained impetus during the “long campaign.” Another was the CBS news bulletin at 1:48 p.m. on November 22, 1963, interrupting the soap opera As the World Turns, in which Walter Cronkite announced that, in Dallas, “three shots were fired at President’s Kennedy’s motorcade.” (Nota bene: As in scripture— and what else is a presidential library and museum if not a source and repository of its profane equivalent—there is no before and after in all of this.) Carter ended his remarks at the dedication, in seemingly measured indifference to the Kennedy family’s well-known poetic sensibilities, with a passage from James Agee’s first and only book of poems, Permit Me Voyage. The purpose in what follows is not merely to mark more or less significant dates and times of day but to take up more generally the voyage and the wait, as well as the attendant question of when and how these elements of (time’s) passage become, like ostensibly finished designs, justifiable objects of study. To be clear from the outset, this article is about achiev- ing a “sense of an ending,” to borrow the title of literary critic Frank Kermode’s enduringly revelatory book on the varieties of time—chronos (clock time) and kairos (the ripeness of things)—and the necessary fiction of closure in poetry and prose, if not also in the lives we endeavor to live.4 A line crossed out in the manuscript of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses” rather complicates this prospect, like a wrinkle in rhyme: “As though to live were all the end of life.”5 As Tennyson scholar Christopher Ricks notes, this “haunting line” resonates with the searching contemplation of endings found in the poet’s “In Memoriam A.H.H. Obiit MDCCCXXXIII” (the Roman numerals spelling out the termination of his cherished friend) and the fear that one’s end (finis) may be just that—an ending, rather than the coming to fruition of a purpose or goal. Sometimes things just come to a close.6 The long, open-ended history of the Kennedy Library presents an opportunity to consider the biography of a design, the pathos of which might be reducible to the burden of seeing something to a meaningful conclusion: an onerous task.7 By virtue of its Greek etymology, design speaks of “incom- pleteness, indefiniteness, or imperfection,” but also of expectation and anticipation. It expresses, according to one student of its wiles, “the strive to capture the elusive.”8 In its infinitive construction, “to strive” was central to the poetic idiom of Kennedy family campaigns, with a culminating echo in “The Dream Shall Never Die” speech. As for the library’s finished form—about which, through this long process of design, it might

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 be said per Tennyson, “Tho’ much is taken, much abides”—it is an elemental composition of three simple shapes: a circle, square, and triangle. In the words of one perceptive critic, it is “as much a symbol of the architecture of pure Euclidian geometry as of the power and responsibility of the man to whom it was dedicated.”9 For in the history of geometry—founded and foundering on architectural legends, such as the moral tale told by Vitruvius of the shipwrecked Socratic philosopher Aristippus—the mere appearance of Euclidean forms was a source of solace and hope, signaling the possibility of homecoming.10 In conclusion, then, we will examine why the truncated pyramid originally intended for Kennedy, despite having been changed into a chamfered cube, was itself a symbol of the indefiniteness that is the organizing theme of this article. The question is: how does design—pendulating as it does between the real and the ideal, verb and substantive, act and fact—mark the time of its own making? The nature of the infinitive mood, if not specifically that of design—and what perfectly familiar outcomes are left to us in the absence of design?—is essayed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge according to Euclidian principles. In his spiritual reflections on what binds thought and actions, he explains, every line may be, and by the ancient Geometricians was, considered as a point produced, the two extremes being its poles, while the Point itself remains in, or is at least represented by, the midpoint, the Indifference of the two poles or correlative opposites. Logically applied, the two extremes or poles are named Thesis and Antithesis: thus in the line I T————A we have T = Thesis, A = Antithesis, and I = Punctum Indifferens sive Amphoreticum, which latter is to be conceived as both in as far as it may be either of the two former.11 Coleridge’s simple geometrical schema may be read, though evidently not as intended, as a set of scales suspended from the fulcrum, or rather the punctum, I, the point of indifference (amphoreticum is formed from amphóteros, “both of two”). The conceptual instrument is suspended and kept in balance according to a set of noetic operations so enumerated by Coleridge: “1. the verb Substantive = Prothesis, expressing the identity or co-inherence of act and being; 2. Substantive = Thesis, expressing Being; 3. Verb = Antithesis, expressing Act; 4. Infinitive = Mesothesis, as being either Substantive of Verb, or both at once, only in different relations.”12 From this abstruse formulation emerges another no less indecisive historical relation, that between Coleridge and G.W.F. Hegel, architect of the process of aufheben. A few words on Coleridge’s sources, and how the “activity” of reading may “give rise to something else,” must suffice here to explain the origin and possible ends of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 Coleridge’s thoughts on reconciled oppositions or, more idio- matically, his concept of “polarity.”13 In his notebooks from December 1804, Coleridge drafted a preface to his planned “Meta[physical] Works,” in which he advised his own prospec- tive reader to “read [Johannes Nikolaus] Tetens, Kant, Fichte, &c—and there you will trace or if you are on the hunt, track me.”14 Coleridge’s sense that he might be hunted betrays the self-suspicion that his writing was haunted by his reading of German idealism, which gave rise to what John Stuart Mill called a “Germano-Coleridgian” school of thought.15 But what traces had Coleridge left of his sources and heading, the minutes of his meetings with (un)like minds? As one textual hound notes, Coleridge’s small number of early marginalia (1802–1804), written before he was in the habit of “profuse annotation,” do not indicate the extent or depth of his reading of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, among the other authors Coleridge offers as clues.16 Studied more closely than perhaps any others are Coleridge’s annotations on Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic, 1813–1816), the only work of his nearly exact contemporary he read, late in the summer of 1818. The art of descriptive bibliography provides one revealing assessment of the facts: “In view of the apparently Hegelian colour of some of C[oleridge]’s terms and logical schemata the evidence of a cursory and unsympathetic reading—seen in the small number of marginalia (some 928 pages of text remain unannotated), the unopened gatherings . . . —is striking.”17 With respect to Coleridge’s writing, Ayon Roy points to a seem- ing “willed ignorance of Hegel,” while allowing that the critical consensus on the “relation” between these presumed counter- parts in dialectical reasoning seems to be “puzzlement.”18 Coleridge himself noted that the “first 40 or 50 pages” of Hegel’s book—he did not get very much further in the book than that— “seem to me bewilderment throughout from confusion of terms.”19 For a critic such as Thomas McFarland, who regards Coleridge’s logical edifice as a sort of romantic ruin, the superfi- cial similarity between Coleridge and Hegel can be “mis-leading” (viz., the track Coleridge sent his own readers on), belying marked difference in their respective “mental styles.”20 For another, the writer who had truly “profound implications” for Coleridge’s conception of logic was Moses Mendelssohn, the profusion of Coleridge’s annotations in his copy of the Morgenstunden (Morning Hours, 1790) materially threatening to cancel themselves out.21 Made in pencil, those that stand on pages facing each other are now “almost illegible,” Alice D. Snyder reported almost a century ago, “as the lead from one page has rubbed onto and nearly obliterated the writing on the page opposite.”22 Her scholarly ambition was to publish the marginalia before parts of it became “irretrievably lost.”23 These signs of internal wear lead to the object lesson Coleridge derived from Mendelssohn, a visual model of puzzlement itself. The narrative of this mental exercise in perceptual geometry cap- tures the suspected moment(s) of indecision before the logical

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 “desire for unity” has been satisfied.24 But concerning the sources, and the evidence of Coleridge’s active reading, Snyder detected the formative significance of Mendelssohn’s discussion of answerable and unanswerable questions. This problem, along with the nature of the infinitive, may itself be traced back to Coleridge’s and Mendelssohn’s mutual reading of James Harris’s Hermes; or, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar (1751). This was the same Hermes, in Homer’s account, who was so cunningly adept at covering over his tracks. Coleridge’s work came to rest, and became available to equally active readers, with the sale of his friend and literary executor Joseph Henry Green’s library to the British Museum. Libraries are not only places of safekeeping but “give rise to something else,” notwithstanding the fact that two other volumes of Mendelssohn annotated by Coleridge seem to have gone miss- ing.25 Apart from and in addition to the geometric precisions of the infinitive mood, what lends poignancy to the present story of architectural inexpediency is the expressive forms it borrows from, and gives to, an ongoing burden of care, of confronting the onerous presence of loss. To build is to accrue and to for- give debt; it is a mortgage of sorts, an obligation owed to the past and payable in future installments. And what of the inescapable experience of loss? Here again, Tennyson serves as guide. The joy of returning home after a long voyage was a sentiment dear to Tennyson and one for which he found tender expression in the words of the Roman lyric poet and elegist Catullus, himself an admirer of Sappho. In his 1893 essay “Aspects of Tennyson,” the architect and editor James Knowles, who designed Aldworth, Tennyson’s country house in Blackdown, West Sussex, attributes the hold Catullus had on “modern sentiment” to his “fraternal piety and to the singular affection with which he regarded his home.”26 From this matrix emerged Tennyson’s address to his own recently lost brother, “‘Frater Ave atque Vale’” (“Hail brother, and farewell”), written during his 1880 visit to “the peninsula of Catullus.” This was Sirmione on Lake Garda, the site of the poet’s family villa, which to Tennyson’s eye had become a “Roman ruin.” The words with which Catullus lovingly hails the place in poem 31, “Salve, o venusta Sirmio,” appear in Tennyson’s lyric, which takes its title from poem 101, an elegiac address to the “mute ashes” of the Roman poet’s own dead brother. And it was the “justly celebrated passage” of poem 31 that Tennyson recited on returning home from a voyage to Italy.27 What is happier than release from care when the mind lays aside its burden, when, weary with the labor of travel, we come to our own hearth, and rest in the bed for which we have longed?28 Putting down the burden is the rite and reward of homecoming. In Barbara R. Pavlock’s perceptive reading, Catullus,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 whom Tennyson associated with the dilemma of tempo- rality, as poet of the “pathos” and “desolation” of poem 101, has demonstrated to him that loss is final and irrev- ocable, but that it can be held in check by a kind of poetry that transforms the emptiness of death into a positive thing, a “monument”: the poem, distinct from the personal experience of loss, is a formal, ordered memorial that will endure forever.29 Monument building requires time, yes; it also transcends time. Brother grieving brother, a nation looking for a beacon on the reclaimed land of Columbia Point, the end of a journey that strives to find a way home, a passing moment of and monument to the burden of public life. For the moment, the chronological elements of the journal- ist’s chronicle-like (i.e., non-Kermodian) “tick-tock” can be held in suspension. Suitably enough, the principal moments of the drama were staged in the function rooms of prominent hotels, as if to emphasize the vain transitoriness of all ambition and the plans that give it, as it were, a local name and habitation. For though the process of selecting an architect produced a moderate degree of intrigue and suspense—with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Louis Kahn, Kenzo- Tange, Franco Albini, and Pei, inter alios, gathered for the mock election, April 11, 1964, in a Robert Adam–style banquet room at the Boston Ritz-Carlton Hotel, with various members of the family (Jackie, Bobby, etc.) entering and exiting at will—the tran- scribed proceedings have all the elements of a chamber play, with about as much room for invention. The more compelling question, the very substance of the narrative, resides with the infinitive nature of the project itself. When, several months later, the selection of Pei was announced at a news conference at the Pierre Hotel in New York, the architect indicated that “there is no design for the library and institute yet, because the program has to be formulated first.”30 Harvard president Nathan M. Pusey was on hand to discuss the evolution of the “big plan,” which would bring together, on one site and potentially in a single structure, the Kennedy Library and Museum, the Graduate School of Public Administration, and an institute of politics, what Pusey called a “new kind of institution in American life,” which “no one can describe . . . before it gets started.”31 But with nothing yet on paper, it was becoming clear that the physical and perhaps also the conceptual dimensions of the “big plan” would exceed the two-acre plot next to the Harvard Business School that had been selected for the library by President Kennedy himself, and there was already talk of moving the project across the Charles River to the site of the MBTA rail yards on Bennett Street, on the indus- trialized periphery of the Harvard University campus. With knowing understatement, Ada Louise Huxtable reported that these changes made the architect’s assignment a “nebulous one at present.”32 Something approaching a meteorology of the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 architectural project would be needed to properly interrogate this statement. But let us put an end to talk of word origins. The question is whether such a “nebulous” state of means and intentions was, or ever is, likely to consolidate into institutional form. Asked for a comment, the chairman of the project’s advisory committee adopted an expectant attitude: “From now on, we will just wait and see what [Pei] does.”33 In a 2003 oral history conducted by the Kennedy Library, Pei understandably dwelled on this moment, when the page was “still blank” (to use his description from 1964)—when the waiting began and anything was possible, except for all that was to be excluded, discarded, abandoned, or disallowed with each iteration of the design. This is how the moment ripens: with a pitted stone of contingency hardening at its core. Here is Pei in 2003: I have to say this: that the excitement of the thing is to be selected to do this. It’s probably the most exciting moment in my professional career, to be asked to do it. And there- fore, the greater that moment . . . turned out to be, the sad- der it became, when it [was] not really fulfilled [as] what it could have been. The circumstances [were] beyond my control, but not all of it beyond my control, so I [did] con- tribute a bit to that disappointment.34 Here is history not in the infinitive tense, but in the subjunc- tive mood, could have been, the contemplation of which is the rich loam of disappointment. As it happens, the library was built on a capped waste dump, and one of the preliminary technical challenges confronted by the architects was to vent the methane gas percolating from below. How to see a project through? A 1965 New York Times profile of Pei by Arthur Herzog—in a draft, vetted by Mrs. Kennedy, it bore the title “The Happy Architect,” evidently referring to Pei’s temperament— Herzog matter-of-factly reported that the timetable Pei had in mind was six months for the acquisition of a site, “six months for design, another year for working drawings, and two-and- one-half years for actual construction—if all goes well.”35 Big plans depend on a big “if.” Better were it that Pei had adopted from the outset “so it goes,” the mock or perhaps neo- Ecclesiastian refrain of Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), who had come “unstuck in time.” Here is one example, from the novel’s kaleidoscopic final chapter: “Robert Kennedy . . . was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.”36 It had been Robert Kennedy, in fact, with a fine sense of occasion, who had concluded the proceedings at the Pierre Hotel with a “Good luck, Mr. Pei,” offer- ing the architect a needed encouraging grin.37 Let us now turn to “Ulysses.” The JFK archive contains the text of the speech that then Senator Kennedy delivered at a Democratic dinner in Yakima, Washington, on June 21, 1959. In a touching moment of Homeric like-mindedness of husband and wife, while waiting his turn at the podium, Kennedy was

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 inspired to close by invoking Tennyson, but was apparently at a momentary loss for words. “Give me last lines from Ulysses beginning, ‘Come my friends,’” he hastily scribbled on the back of his typescript. Mrs. Kennedy supplied the rest, near fault- lessly, in her unaffected cursive handwriting. In his canonical discussion of the perceptible “countermovement” within “Ulysses,” Tennyson scholar Christopher Ricks speaks of the “reluctance—in a poem of such an adventurous setting forth . . . to use the future tense.”38 The future recedes. The indefinite remains; it hovers, suspends things in possibilities, of both adventure and disappointment, fitting for the Kennedy brothers who were fond of quoting the line from Lord Tweedsmuir’s memoir, Pilgrim’s Way, that defines politics as “the most exciting of adventures.”39 For Tennyson’s Ulysses, who having returned home finds a living end in the ongoing affairs of state, the imagined voyage out unmakes the newly familiar limits of space and time: Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move.40 Registering the elasticity of poetically metered time, Matthew Arnold wrote of this passage from Tennyson, “these three lines by themselves take up nearly as much time as a whole book of the Iliad.”41 In the most pervasive of the poem’s “insidious enervations,” as Ricks calls them, the infinitive serves as the ambiguous equivalent of the suppressed future tense. Hence Ulysses’s curiously tentative, “my purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset” (not “I shall sail”). The monologue concludes with a crescendo of these equivalents that “stand in for the future tense but also stand out against it: To strive, to seek, to find, Aerial view of an architectural model of 42 and not to yield.” a proposed design of We may give a geometrical form—indeed, apply Euclidian the John F. Kennedy geometry—to this “aspiration without an object,” this form of Library by architect I.M. Pei, 1973. John F. Victorian longing whose great cause is “often vague and some- Kennedy Presidential times nonexistent.”43 As Tennyson scholar David Shaw shows, Library and Museum. in its balance of heroic and elegiac sentiment, the passive grammar and repeating syntax of “Ulysses” produce a self- retarding movement within a poem about a returned adven- turer who is “for ever” about to set sail (again). President Kennedy gave the name Victura to his lifelong pleasure craft, a twenty-five-foot Wianno Senior sloop now parked on a mani- cured lawn on the sea-facing side of the library. Quoted in Sports Illustrated, Kennedy said that Victura was Latin for “about to conquer.” Seeking the linguistic origin and destina- tion of the name, the ship’s historian consulted not a sibyl but an academic authority on Latin language and literature, Ariane Schwartz, who indicated that victura, the feminine form of victurus, comes from the perfect passive participle of both to live (vivo) and to win/conquer (vinco). Thus, the name may be interpreted as “the ship will last for a long time—it will fare well and outshine others.” The ship is on blocks indefinitely;

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 its captain is permanently lost.44 As a point of contrast, say along the boom-like line between T(hesis) and A(ntithesis)— the timeless infinitives that lend “Ulysses” its cadence are “poised between verb and substantive, between finite acts and endless questing.”45 Here, again, we are at the logico-geometric point of the infinitive, and in terms of historical moorings, at Columbia Point, at the Dorchester edge of Boston Harbor. There the sloop was and still is parked on the grassy verge of the Kennedy Library, a setting relatively far removed from the site originally selected by the living president, adjacent to the Harvard Business School on the Charles River. Always latent in the pliancy of the amphoteric infinitive are other nonmutu- ally exclusive outcomes. As for Ulysses’s voyaging, Ricks hears another line “rippling underneath” the final line of Tennyson’s

poem, “almost identical and yet utterly different: ‘To strive, to seek, to yield, and not to find.’”46 Is it too late to start anew, advancing prosaically? Much of the story, some of it moderately interesting, is still left to be said. But in the interest of time, let us again defer to Pei, in an interview with Paul Goldberger, soon after the library’s dedication: The library is a sad story: It was originally to be a pyramid of glass near Harvard Square, but local opposition to the influx of tourists expected led to a decade’s delay, and finally to the redesigning of the building as a simple, understated masonry structure—a building that related so much to its context that it hardly did anything else. That did not manage to go into construction either, and finally the project was relocated to the campus of the University of Massachusetts at Columbia Point.47

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 The alternative site had little intrinsically to recommend it; it was a last refuge. “All landfill,” said Pei. “The whole thing was made up by man, a complete landfill. I think that pretty much exhausts it! That’s the story, isn’t it?”48 But is that how stories end, with exhaustion, with methane fumes? The family was convinced by the site when the project architect, Pei partner Ted Musho, took them to the far edge of the reclaimed promon- tory and pointed, between two outlying islands, to the light- house that separates the Atlantic Ocean from Massachusetts Bay. With this calculated gesture, establishing a visual pyramid made of hopeful lines of eradiation, the site was finally decided on. So, again, we ask: How did Pei bring this building campaign to an end? In part, it was by tempering the brand of idealism he learned from Kahn, the architect he “admire[d] most,” who was also among the competition to design the library. “From him I learned that it is not just a concept,” Pei told Goldberger, “but the way that concept is executed that is important. His is the architecture of ideas, and I worry that ideas and professional practice do not intersect enough.”49 If Pei learned anything in the long, disappointed history of the library, it was that there were in fact lessons in a project’s inevitable peripeteia. Pausing, Pei then added, in the interview, “Maybe my early training set me back. Maybe it made me too much of a pragma- tist.”50 The pause in Pei’s project narrative is what registers, the matter of keeping things and ideas and circumstances mutually in suspension. The very idea of it—the pause—is intrinsic to all but the most unreflecting approach to design, which is not pragmatic at all; according to one robust formulation, pragmatic experience calls for both doing and undergoing. This lesson might be seen to take objective form in the geometry of Pei’s design, based in seemingly immutably rational forms, immune to time. By one account, it all came out right, if not also just alright. “Two sites, four schemes and 16 years later his tribute is now finished, as much a symbol of the architecture of pure Euclidean geometry as of the power and responsibility of the man to whom it was dedicated on October 20, 1979.”51 Yet the question remains: How to go from Α to Ω—and beyond and before—even, or perhaps especially, during a fateful time of potentially fatal stand offs and suspense? Without getting mired in the depressingly familiar sociology of patronage—at one point in the selection process, Mies suggested that Mrs. Kennedy be cast in the role of Mies’s own tutee-patron Phyllis Lambert—this question may be addressed in terms of the logic that connects and differentiates answerable and unanswerable questions. The demonstration depends on a geometric figure, a pyramid, which was meant to be housed and unsettlingly stabilized in Pei’s initial designs for the library. The reference here is to a thought experiment conceived by Mendelssohn and reconsidered at length by Coleridge in his Logic, itself an exceedingly long-form essay on the act and art of contemplation, which informed John Dewey’s interpenetra-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 tive notion of doing and undergoing.52 The thought experiment, as first presented in Mendelssohn’s Morgenstunden, makes clear that the answers to questions appear in time, or rather that it takes time to arrive at them, however simple or multi- plex they be.53 In biographical terms, and with respect to the ripeness of time (per Kermode), the title of Mendelssohn’s work refers to the beginning of the day, when the ailing philosopher was still “clear and cheery.” At noon, there are no shadows to contemplate, and as evening descends, darkness settles in. And indeed, in his reflective writings Mendelssohn, the so- called German Socrates, stages a spectacle, itself the occasion for an internal dialogue on what is afforded by or lost according to differing angles of view. In the Logic, Coleridge restages

Moses Mendelssohn’s suspended polyhedron. From Moses Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden; oder, Vorlesungen über das Daseyn Gottes (1785). the experiment, adding his own perspective: Let a four-sided pyramid A be supposed to float in the air so as to receive the light equally on all sides and conse- quently not suggesting the notion of its solid figure and contents to the eye of the spectator. We will suppose eight or nine spectators in different positions, and the question afterwards arises what shape the phenomenon had.54 Mendelssohn’s simple polyhedron, and by adaptation Coleridge’s thought experiment, bring to mind—one possibility of a thought experiment—the “ponderously immobile” yet “precariously poised” rhombohedron that occupies so notable a place in Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514).55 The demand the solid places on the beholder, Mitchell B. Merback writes, is not to

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 solve a puzzle but rather to resolve chaos into order, “to exercise one’s powers of discernment and interpretation in an open- ended fashion.”56 But if Melencolia is left alone (bereft?) to inwardly contemplate the polyhedron at her feet, Mendelssohn and Coleridge populate the scenario with spectators taking in the suspended pyramid A. The duration of the thought experiment is the time it takes to enumerate their varied perceptions. Per Coleridge, the spectator who stood just underneath at C . . . declares it was a proper square; a second who stood just on the one side, vide B, assures them that it was a triangle that they had seen, whether equilateral or otherwise according as he had contemplated it more perpendicularly or from the point downward.57 And so on and so forth through I, “who declared himself to have seen three unequal triangles.” But that is still not the end of it. “The student in perspective is aware that many more positions might be imagined.”58 The lesson? Coleridge says, Now let us suppose the question to be, assuming no known difference in the competence and integrity of the eight contending evidences, which of these was the true figure. It is evident that in each the answer might be either “this” or “not this,” and, to all collectively, “all and none.” How, then, should we proceed?59 How to proceed? The first step is to see the problem for what it is. Even while appropriating his thought experiment to his Photograph of an architectural model own ends, Coleridge is critical of Mendelssohn’s tendency to containing a glass view such controversies as a sort of “logomachy.” The imputa- pyramid, part of a pro- tion is drawn from Mendelssohn’s own statement that “it posed design of the John F. Kennedy would not have been the first famous subject of controversy Library by architect over which people have fallen out, indeed have hated and I.M. Pei, 1973. John F. persecuted one another, and which in the end resulted in an Kennedy Presidential empty quarrel about words.”60 But Coleridge resisted this form Library and Museum. of negation. He believed a larger and more significant interpretation was possible in the case of most such “unanswerable” questions, an interpretation that makes them significantly answerable.61 Thus he reframed the question, instructed by his reading of Immanuel Kant, the “founder of the Critical Philosophy,” to use the epithet he coined in his Biographia Literaria, which characterization has ever after vexed and pro- vided philosophical entertainments for students of both Kant and Coleridge. The question leading to the final answer must be, “What figure is that which, being taken objectively, though different from any of the figures seen, will yet account for them all as the necessary consequences of the real figure under each particular relation?” And this, though in reality it might never have been, or be capable of being, an

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 object of immediate vision for any human being, as, for instance, the true magnitudes of the sun, Jupiter, and the fixed stars, is yet not only an object of human experience, distinguishing it from mere images, and the fleeting stream of impressions connected with the sensation of their outwardness.62 We are ever merely given access to the vestibule to inner reasoning. But what is so impressive about Coleridge’s formulation is the suspension of ideals, the elapse of (rather than lapse in) contemplation of the possibilities, present, past, and never to be: And this, though in reality it might never have been. What might have been? This is the question both of Kennedy’s arrested presidency and of the succession of designs

proposed by Pei. Placed amid the Fraktur type of the Morgenstunden are outlines of the geometric forms perceived by the spectators, so many simply rendered retinal images of a more complex and perhaps imperceptible polyhedral reality. A sort of objective correlative, staged for the press, is to be found in the photograph of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and Caroline Kennedy inspecting Pei’s model of the library, with its subsequently abandoned vitreous truncated pyramid. It was the Kennedy family who ultimately decided on Pei as their architect and the lineaments of the institution he was chosen to design. This selection process takes us back to the beginning(s) of the library and the many faces it presented to the form-seeking architect. It also raises the question of what sort of burden was placed on Pei and how it was not sublime rhetoric but the rather more prosaic, and indeed leveling, work of committees that led to the recommen-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 dation of Pei as the architect of the library. His final selection depended on another partially articulable rationale. The work of this advisory committee goes toward the burden of articula- tion—of being made the spokesperson, the articulator of a vision. Thus we return not to the beginning but to some point in medias res, into the meetings and deliberations meant to determine how an architect would be chosen. Or, as the advisory committee’s chairman, William Walton, described it, “a fascinating debate among the architects themselves, about what architectural expression these ideas could take.”63 The front page of the New York Times on December 14, 1964, heralded a new beginning in the end of the necessary and non- straightforward preliminaries: “Kennedy Family Announces the Selection of Pei to Design Library.” While the project was indeed a family affair, at the press conference convened at the Hotel Pierre Senator-Elect Robert F. Kennedy spoke, while Jacqueline Kennedy, according to some script, “did not say anything.”64 She was, however, central to the process, here in the sense of a trial or ordeal. Pei, Ada Louise Huxtable reported, was chosen unanimously by a subcommittee of an international advisory committee of architects after Mrs. Kennedy and the subcommittee had spent several months vis- iting architects’ offices and studying their work. Compounding the inaugural state of indetermination reflected in Pusey’s comment that “no one can describe the institute before it gets started,” the Harvard president further explained that precedent was lacking for what the family hoped and strived to achieve.65 Yet as Robert Kennedy suggested, there was something transcendent in the ambition, the ideal and material satisfaction of which it was the architects’ burden to bear. “We all feel,” Kennedy said, evidently filled with feeling, “that he [Pei] will be able to capture the spirit and style that we wish to express in this building.”66 The project was an extended act of captivation. The history of the library had but one definitive before and after, the rest of its design and development occupying a seemingly endless building campaign. Five days after the assassina- tion, Kennedy family architectural adviser John Carl Warnecke met with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had overseen the library project until then, to discuss how “the program will now have to be changed.”67 As one metric, Warnecke offered that the presidential papers will be “approximately 40% of those originally contemplated,” referring to the 1,037 days of Kennedy’s administration in relation to the 2,922 days he would have served during two full terms of office (the expectation of his reelection was prefigured in the equation). But on a more sym- bolic and rhetorical register, the “nature” of the library had changed. Stranded in an unimaginable present tense, Warnecke further elaborated, “It will now be far more of a memorial than heretofore considered. The structure will become a memorial to his life, and so in the design more emphasis should be placed on displaying a record of his achievements and aspirations.”68

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 It was to be a record and projection of what Kennedy did and what was forever left to be done. On whom would the burden of honor of designing such a memorial fall? In the wake of irremediable loss, Warnecke planned a path forward in a “memorandum on architectural alternatives,” submitted to Schlesinger and Walton.69 In it he advocated for an advisory committee model able to “recognize” the following: 1. The evolutionary nature of the design process; 2. The evolution of the program itself which defines that which is to be built; 3. The continual evolution of the design itself which is a creative response to the problem posed by the program; 4. The value of bringing many creative minds to bear upon the problem; 5. The need to protect the client’s interests through close and constant communication.70 What Warnecke envisioned was only too fully realized in the changes of site, changes in the nature of the library’s purpose and institutional affiliation, and changes in approach to design, which both beset and defined the library. But the mutability of the idea and form of the library—if not the pace and tempo of these changes, which included long periods of hiatus— might also be seen to result in this ongoing process of mutual recognition. “The nature of the relationship,” Warnecke wrote, “is a synthesis of views which eventually results in the complete integration of the ideas of the client and the architect, the best of both, better than either could produce alone and which represents a clear statement of this synthesis which is somewhat unique.”71 In the way that something can be said to be somewhat unique, the answer to a problem might also be nearly perfect, or far from the worst. Warnecke’s memorandum served as an outline for the preliminary meeting of the Committee on Fine Arts and Architecture for the Kennedy Library at the Washington, DC, home of Senator Edward Kennedy, in the final week of December 1963. Two groups were present: the Building Committee (or “client,” as it is identified in the meeting minutes), composed of members of the Kennedy family and loyal retainers such as Schlesinger; and the Advisory Committee on Arts and Architecture, chaired by Walton, which included Hideo Sasaki, Pietro Belluschi, Benjamin Thompson, Kahn, Pei, Mies, Warnecke, Paul Thiry, George Nelson, and Harvard professor and former special assistant to President Kennedy, John Kenneth Galbraith. After a presentation by Galbraith on the still recent history of presidential libraries, dating back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Walton introduced the general discussion among the architects, which he prefaced by saying, “No commitment has been made to any style or to any architect.” Thus the meeting’s principal concern was “how we are to operate; how best we may organize so that we can give the best advice to the Trustee.”72 The first to speak was Kahn, who offered that

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 “buildings are based on beliefs—that is the material you need to know, to know how to express it. This is the most important thing.”73 Mrs. Kennedy readily concurred with Kahn on the immanent transcendence of matter and form. “You are so right,” she replied, the design must “express the beliefs that Jack gave his life for. For example, we want people to enter the memorial part, and see what Jack was.”74 What the library was to become was an embodiment of what the president had been. How to attain that ideal—and there was certainly no single conception of it in the room, just as a pyramid seen from so many obtuse and acute angles—immediately became a source of more or less amiable dispute. The question was whose point of view was to take priority or finally predominate. The next and semidecisive initial step in the planning of the library was taken three months later, during two days of meetings, April 11–12, 1964, held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston and at the Hyannis Port home of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. The roster of advisory architects had expanded to seventeen, with international representation from Sven Markelius, Sir Basil Spence, Tange, Albini, Lucio Costa (represented at the meeting by his daughter), and Aalto, who, while not present, had his opinions read to the assembly. But with all this input, and the mounting possibility of a confusion of tongues, a convening and moderating voice emerged. Said Senator Edward M. Kennedy to the assembled architects, “You are going to have a group of Kennedys that will be arriving and disappearing for the whole weekend,” rather like a deus ex machina in the unfolding semiprivate drama of the weekend’s well-publicized events.75 A crowd gathered in Harvard Yard during the Saturday evening dinner reception at Robinson Hall, which then housed the Graduate School of Design. Most in the crowd wished to catch a glimpse of Mrs. Kennedy, who rode to the reception in a limousine with Thompson, head of the architecture department.76 But what was of consequence took place in camera, specifically in a Ritz-Carlton meeting room following the dinner reception.77 Robinson Hall, a school of architecture, was no place to make such decisions. In these Abendstunden (to recall by polarity Mendelssohn’s morning mental exercises) the process of selecting the architect was urgently discussed. For his part, Pei was realistic about the objectivity and/or the generosity of those gathered to confer the honor and duty of the commission. “I think architects are individually rather blind to the possibilities of other architects. Architects collectively are even worse.” He would rather that the small group of the committee who were “nonarchitects” (i.e., Sasaki, Raymond Loewy, Henry Dreyfuss) but nevertheless “actually quite well informed in what is going on in architecture” should be the ones to advise the Kennedy family on the selection.78 About what it was they were recommending, Pei said he leaned toward Mies’s “feeling,” which was that “we are not looking for a brilliant idea; we are looking for something that is very sound

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 for a long time and a sound building.”79 His words are unwit- tingly prophetic, as is borne out by the comments of Hugh Stubbins, who was among the last to speak that evening. Stubbins offered that he had had the “privilege of sitting almost next to Mrs. Kennedy at dinner and to hear her say what her concern was about this. And maybe you should know.”80 Privilege does indeed confer discursive privileges, validated by proximity itself. But the scenario imagined by Stubbins was that of exiting the conversation. “She says what would I do with an architect who if I said I don’t like this, would tear up his papers and throw them down and walk out of the room? And she is afraid of this kind of thing.”81 The task was to find an architect who embraced, or rather impersonated, the essence

Voting tally for the architect of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. of design: To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. The extended scenario reviewed in this article began with Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s exit from the stage of the 1980 nominating convention, the candidate said to be “haunted” by his family’s past and incidents of cruelly arrested promise. By one contemporary account, “like Odysseus [Ulysses], Ted has lost his shipmates; poor judgment has caused him to wreck his boat more than once,” and, in a tragically literal sense, his July 19, 1969, car wreck left a fatal blot on his public reputation.82 We conclude with the “secret ballot” conducted by Walton to select a short list of architects to recommend to the Kennedy family. The election was to take place in the morning hours of April 12, 1964, as the assembled architect advisers were about to board Caroline—a Convair 240 aircraft purchased by Joseph P.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 Kennedy for use by his son during the 1960 presidential campaign—for their brief trip to Hyannis Port, for full immersion in the Kennedy milieu. Dreyfuss wittily suggested that the plane ticket serve as the ballot, though they were not traveling by commercial airline.83 A Kennedy family chronicler aptly describes the terms of carriage: “Walton exacted a ‘price’ of their flight up there,” in the form of the architects’ nomina- tions.84 A seat at the table, or in the private plane, came with its own costs and reputational benefits. Further anxieties about the process, veiled in jest, appear in Loewy’s comment that the identity of the secret ballots could be ascertained by means of fingerprints.85 And while Walton responded in kind that the tally would “be a part of the archives,” Dreyfuss added, “I hope the minutes of this meeting will be part of the archives.”86 (This supplemental material was not likely factored by Schlesinger into his estimation of the 40 percent of the library’s anticipated total.) Keenly alive to the situation, the architects were made to be spectators of their own collective judgment. Walton dra- matized his revelation of the results, which he had tallied in a hangar at the airport on sheets of American Airlines printed memo forms. Assuring the assembled that he had burned the individual ballots, Walton announced the “habitum [sic] archi- tectum,” playfully adapting the formula employed by the proto-deacon of the College of Cardinals to announce the election of a new pope, habemus papam.87 So it might be said, Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, or a tiara, for that matter. But what the ballot produced was not a single name but six: Mies, Kahn, Pei, Warnecke, Paul Rudolph, and Philip Johnson. The purpose of presenting a slate of candidates was the same as that of opting for a ballot rather than an open competition—to ensure that the wishes of the Kennedys be respected. On the first day of the meeting, Warnecke, who was most inti- mately familiar with their desires, explained that what the Kennedys had wanted was an informal type of competition— that is to say, balloting among the selected architect advisers— while still allowing the family to “pass judgement according to what their likes were.” The effect of a more general competition, he explained, would be that of “negating the client.”88 The balloting complete, Belluschi used the same terms to clar- ify the sort of negative liberty enjoyed by the client: “It should be understood that this is a list that comes from a committee as a group, and [Mrs. Kennedy] has a freedom to negate from that at her own risk.”89 The final gesture the advisory committee made toward establishing the burden of proof respecting its collective judgment—or rather its onus probandi, from the legal maxim ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat (the burden of proof lies on the one who declares, not on one who denies)—consisted of specifying a dossier of evidence on which Mrs. Kennedy could base her affirmation of negation. The final candidates were asked to provide a selected portfolio of their work, but the crucial test was establishing a rapport between architect and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 client. The question was not what but how. On this point, Sasaki—who as a landscape architect identified himself at the meeting as a “nonarchitect”—advocated a “pragmatic sort of approach” to establishing and subsequently maintaining a rapport between client and architect, in which the Kennedy family “visit several projects that the architect has done and have the architect go along to explain really the concept and how the problem was solved.”90 A probative examination of this sort would allow Mrs. Kennedy to “understand the nature of the person and the nature of his work”—of, that is, the architect who would give form to the ideas of the fallen president.91 While a work of logic might imagine spectators gathered to contemplate a suspended pyramid, Mrs. Kennedy’s final selection of an architect was an exercise in unknowing. To begin with, at the time Pei was comparatively unknown. As recounted by Herzog in a March 1965 profile published in the New York Times Magazine soon after his selection, “he is not famous either, in the way of some, and so when the announcement was made that Pei had been chosen to design the John F. Kennedy Library at Harvard, there was a long pause and people asked who and why.”92 Mark the pause. In an exercise in prolepsis that also expressed confidence while recognizing violent, cat- astrophic loss, the incalculable truncation of potential, Mrs. Kennedy explained, “People say, why didn’t you find someone more established? We felt that Pei’s best work, as John Kennedy’s was in 1960, is yet to come.”93 What was yet to come was a pause, in and by design and circumstance. It was culminated as much by the inauguration of the library as by the writer Gerry Nadel’s assessment, symptomatic of Carter’s age of malaise, that the “library is in disjuncture with the times. It is a temple to an institution people no longer deify.”94 But disjuncture is perhaps too stark a term, the sort of misalignment revealed by sovereign logic. Time advances and recedes; it is gibbous rather than angular. How had things looked a decade earlier? “Two years from now,” the Boston Globe wrote, “the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library will begin to rise from what is today the 12-acre Bennett Street transit yards in Cambridge and from what was, before 1892, marshland often awash when flood tides surged up the then undammed Charles River.”95 For Mrs. Kennedy, the selection of Pei was merely the beginning of a voyage into indetermination. “At first I had some idea what the library might be like,” said Mrs. Kennedy, “but as I see the problems more clearly I know less and less. Now it’s up to the architect. The one thing I am sure of is that Pei’s work is growing. The library will grow too.”96

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 Notes 1. Official Report of the Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention: Madison Square Garden, New York City, New York, August 11 through August 14, 1980, ed. Sandra P. Perlmutter and Elizabeth C. Burke (Washington, DC: Democratic National Committee, 1980), 356. The poetic passage quoted by Senator Kennedy is from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” 2. Hedrick Smith, “Kennedy Declares His Candidacy, Vowing New Leadership for Nation,” New York Times, 8 November 1979, 1. 3. “Remarks at Dedication Ceremonies for the John F. Kennedy Library, October 20, 1979,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter, bk. 2, June 23 to December 31, 1979 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1980), 1,979. 4. See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1967). 5. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes, ed. Christopher Ricks (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1987), 1:617. 6. Christopher Ricks, Tennyson, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 215 n. *. 7. For a “tick-tock” of the library’s development, see Michael J. Hogan, The Afterlife of John Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 128–56; and Dan H. Fenn Jr., “Launching the John F. Kennedy Library,” American Archivist 42, no. 4 (October 1979): 429–42. 8. Kostas Terzidis, “The Etymology of Design: Pre-Socratic Perspective,” Design Issues 23, no. 4 (2007): 69. 9. Charles Knevitt, “USA: Pei’s Tribute to the President,” RIBA Journal 87, no. 7 (July 1980): 35. 10. Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), preface to bk. 6, 167. “It is related of the Socratic philosopher Aristippus that, being shipwrecked and cast ashore on the coast of the Rhodians, he observed geometric figures drawn thereon, and cried out to his companions: ‘Let us be of good cheer, for I see the traces of man.’” 11. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 9, Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 179–80. 12. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, 179–80. 13. Lisa Jardine and Anthon Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present, no. 129 (1990): 30. 14. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 2, 1804–1808, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merton Christensen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 2,375, quoted in Thomas R. Simons, “Coleridge beyond Kant and Hegel: Transcendent Aesthetics and the Dialectic Pentad,” Studies in Romanticism 45, no. 3 (2006): 465. 15. [John Stuart Mill], “Coleridge,” London and Westminster Review 33, no. 2 (March 1840): 279. 16. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 12, Marginalia, pt. 2, Camden to Hutton, ed. George Whalley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 594. 17. Editor’s commentary, in Coleridge, Marginalia, pt. 2, 988. 18. Ayon Roy, “The Specter of Hegel in Coleridge’s ‘Biographia Literaria,’” Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 2 (2007): 279. 19. Coleridge, Marginalia, pt. 2, 990. 20. Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 294. 21. Tim Milnes, “Coleridge’s Logic,” in Handbook of the History of Logic, vol. 4, British Logic in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Dov M. Gabbay and John Woods (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2008), 58.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 22. Alice D. Snyder, “Coleridge’s Reading of Mendelssohn’s ‘Morgenstunden’ and ‘Jerusalem,’” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 28, no. 4 (1929): 503. The annotated volume is Moses Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden oder Vorlesungen über das Daseyn Gottes: Erster Theil (1790). 23. Snyder, 503. 24. McFarland, 339. 25. Snyder, 503. 26. James Knowles, “Aspects of Tennyson,” Nineteenth Century, no. 33 (March 1893): 449. 27. Knowles, 449. 28. “O quid solutis est beatius curis / cum mens onus reponit, ac pere- grino / labore fessi venimus larem ad nostrum / desideratoque adquiescimus lecto?” 29. Barbara R. Pavlock, “‘Frater Ave atque Vale’: Tennyson and Catullus,” Victorian Poetry 17, no. 4 (1979): 375. 30. Ada Louise Huxtable, “Kennedy Family Announces the Selection of Pei to Design Library,” New York Times, 14 December 1964, 1. 31. Huxtable, 1. 32. Huxtable, 1. 33. Huxtable, 1. 34. I.M. Pei, interview by Vicki Daitch, 18 March 2003, John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program, JFKOH-IMP-01. 35. Arthur Herzog, “He Loves Things to Be Beautiful,” New York Times, 14 March 1964, 100. 36. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade (New York: Delacorte Press, 1969), 210. 37. Huxtable, 1. 38. Ricks, Tennyson, 116. 39. Jack Newfield, Robert Kennedy: A Memoir (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 332. 40. Tennyson, 1:617. 41. Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861), 75. 42. Ricks, Tennyson, 117. 43. Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 291. 44. James W. Graham, Victura: The Kennedys, a Sailboat, and the Sea (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2014), 19. 45. W. David Shaw, Tennyson’s Style (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 94. 46. Ricks, Tennyson, 115; emphasis added. 47. Paul Goldberger, “Winning Ways of I.M. Pei,” New York Times, 20 May 1979, 16. 48. Pei, interview by Daitch. 49. Goldberger, 16. 50. Goldberger, 16. 51. Knevitt, 35. 52. See Kathleen Wheeler, “Coleridge, Dewey, and the Art of Contemplation,” in Coleridge and Contemplation, ed. Peter Cheyne (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 67. 53. Moses Mendelssohn, Morning Hours: Lectures on God’s Existence: Studies in German Idealism, vol. 12, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom and Corey Dyck (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), xix. 54. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 13, Logic, ed. James Robert de Jager Jackson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 117. See also Moses Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden; oder, Vorlesungen über das Daseyn Gottes (Berlin: Christian Friedrich Voß und Sohn, 1785), xviii.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 55. Mitchell B. Merback, Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (New York: Zone Books, 2017), 62. 56. Merback, 62. 57. Coleridge, Logic, 117. 58. Coleridge, Logic, 117. 59. Coleridge, Logic, 117. 60. Coleridge, Logic, 121 n. 1. 61. Snyder, 507. 62. Coleridge, Logic, 118. 63. “Panel of Experts Picks Architect Pei to Build $10-Million JFK Library,” Washington Post, 14 December 1964. 64. Huxtable, 1. 65. Huxtable, 1. 66. Huxtable, 1. 67. John Carl Warnecke to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 29 November 1963, in Subject Files, General (6 of 7 folders), William Walton Personal Papers, WWPP-003-016, John F. Kennedy Library (WWPP). 68. Warnecke to Schlesinger Jr., 29 November 1963. 69. John Carl Warnecke to William Walton, 19 December 1963, in WWPP- 003-016. 70. John Carl Warnecke, “Memorandum on Architectural Alternatives,” 13 December 1963, in WWPP-003-016. 71. Warnecke, “Memorandum on Architectural Alternatives.” 72. “Summary of Preliminary Meeting of Committee on Arts and Architecture for the Kennedy Library,” n.d., in WWPP-003-016. 73. “Summary of Preliminary Meeting.” 74. “Summary of Preliminary Meeting”; emphasis in original. 75. Transcript of the meeting of the JFK Library Advisory Committee, 11 April 1964, in WWPP-004-003. 76. Gloria Negri, “Library Planners Tour Site,” Boston Sunday Globe, 12 April 1964, 58. 77. The hotel itself was a study in compromise, the architectural firm Strickland, Blodget, and Law having tried to “harmonize the Ritz type of hotel with the architectural traditions of Boston” by cladding its fifteen-story block of rooms in “Harvard red brick.” “Boston to Have a Ritz-Carlton,” Boston Globe, 31 August 1926, 2. 78. Transcript of the meeting of the JFK Library Advisory Committee, 11 April 1964. 79. Transcript of the meeting of the JFK Library Advisory Committee, 11 April 1964. 80. Transcript of the meeting of the JFK Library Advisory Committee, 11 April 1964. 81. Transcript of the meeting of the JFK Library Advisory Committee, 11 April 1964. 82. Steven Roberts, “Ted Kennedy: Haunted by the Past,” New York Times Magazine, 3 February 1980, 56. 83. Roberts, 56. 84. Laura Bergquist, “Jacqueline Kennedy Goes Public,” Look 30, no. 6 (1966). 85. Transcript of the meeting of the JFK Library Advisory Committee, 11 April 1964. 86. Transcript of the meeting of the JFK Library Advisory Committee, 11 April 1964. 87. Transcript of the meeting, Hyannis Port, 12 April 1964, in WWPP-004- 004. 88. Warnecke, “Memorandum on Architectural Alternatives.” 89. Transcript of the meeting, Hyannis Port. 90. Transcript of the meeting of the JFK Library Advisory Committee, 11

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00317 by guest on 02 October 2021 April 1964. 91. Transcript of the meeting, Hyannis Port. 92. Herzog, 34. 93. Herzog, 34. 94. Gerry Nadel, “Johnny, When Will Ye Get Your Library?,” Esquire, January 1975, 130. 95. F.B. Taylor Jr., “Decision on Design Awaited: Architect Studies Kennedy Library,” Boston Globe, 24 October 1965, 53. 96. Herzog, 34.

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