Milton S. Gwirtzman ’54, a former Crimson editorial chair, says that he and Culver went to Kennedy’s home in Hyannis Port, Mass. on the weekends during the 1962 campaign to help prepare the candidate for his speeches and debates.
There was enough free time during the weekend prep sessions for Kennedy to teach Gwirtzman how to waterski—even though, as Gwirtzman recalls, “it took about 14 times falling down.”
Kennedy’s college friends also joined him in the more traditional water sport of sailing.
The first time Culver was ever on a sailboat, he recalls, Kennedy took him to a race on Nantucket in his brother John’s sailboat, Victura, which barely survived a boat yard fire this past December.
“We had stormy weather going over, just the two of us. We got over there after several hours and slept on the boat and raced the next day, all afternoon,” Culver recalls.
The plan had initially been for Kennedy’s father to tow Victura back from Nantucket after the races, but Culver says that the weather was too stormy. So he and Kennedy sailed back themselves, arriving after midnight.
“It was quite a baptismal fire for a first time sailboat experience,” Culver says.
While Kennedy was willing to take risks and challenge his friends on the field and in the water, Gwirtzman says that Kennedy does not let undue aggression interfere with politics.
At one point during the campaign, Gwirtzman recalls, he and Kennedy were driving to speak to Kennedy’s classmates in Harvard Square, which was then overpopulated with bicycles—one of which presumably belonged to one of Kennedy’s opponents, left-leaning Gurney Professor of History and Political Science H. Stuart Hughes. Gwirtzman recalls that Kennedy’s driver, Jack Crimmins, asked Kennedy to point out Hughes’s bicycle so Crimmins could “take the air out of the tires.”
Gwirtzman says that Kennedy responded that he would not support attacking bicycles—at least not when it would interfere with his message.
“That’s negative campaigning,” Gwirtzman recalls Kennedy saying. “I’m running as a good guy.”
Kennedy beat both Hughes and his Republican opponent, George Cabot Lodge ’50, in 1962 and has since been re-elected to seven full terms.
Though football friends have become Kennedy’s Senate colleagues as well as his friends and advisors, the Class of 1954 alumni network is hardly Kennedy’s only tie to Harvard.
Since his brother John’s assassination led to the founding of the Institute of Politics (IOP) in 1966, Kennedy has been closely involved with the IOP as a member of the Senior Advisory Committee (SAC).
“It’s one of the absolute top priorities and interests of the senator,” says Culver, who now serves as SAC chair. “He comes to every meeting and is extremely well-informed about the work of the institute...and stays abreast of the activities and the students that are involved.”
Gwirtzman, also a member of the SAC, says that Kennedy’s involvement in the IOP comes not just from its history with his family but from a deep attachment to its mission.
“The extraordinary thing about his relationship with the IOP is his commitment to the program—and really one aspect of it, which is the student program,” Gwirtzman says.
—Staff writer Joshua D. Gottlieb can be reached at jdgottl@fas.harvard.edu.