When he wasn’t in Cambridge, Kennedy stayed abreast of Harvard events, either by reading The Crimson—which he had delivered to the White House—or by listening to a Harvard football game on the radio.
“Occasionally, you might get a note from the White House saying, ‘The president liked your story. The president liked this or that,’” Russin remembered.
‘HE WAS OUR LEADER’
As details of the tragedy in Dallas reached New England, many Harvard students were already on the road. Those that had their radios turned on heard the news first.
“[W]e were somewhere in New Haven when another car of glee clubbers pulled up next to us, rolled up the window, and said ‘Turn up the radio!’” remembered Daniel B. Curll ’64, a member of the Harvard Glee Club who was carpooling to Yale with the Radcliffe Choral Society for their annual Harvard-Yale concert.
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“That was the first we heard,” Curll said.
Back in Cambridge, reports in The Crimson detailed empty restaurants, people gathered around transistor radios and in cars listening to the news, and a female student breaking out in tears in Widener Library. People clustered around the Harvard Square newsstand, waiting for the national papers to deliver extra editions of the day’s record.
“Even today it seems surreal. You were sitting there writing these things [about the assassination], and you’re writing them and not believing them,” Paisner, who led The Crimson’s coverage of the assassination, remembered.
By dusk, even the best-laid weekend plans—The Game in New Haven and associated concerts, gatherings, and other Harvard-Yale events—had either been called off or postponed. The University also cancelled classes scheduled for Saturday and Monday, and even pushed back some exams.
The changes were fitting—a cloud of shock and sadness had descended over the campus.
“You could feel it all over Cambridge,” recalled Jonathan D. Trobe ’64, a former Crimson editor. “There was disbelief. It didn’t seem possible. Kennedy had a certain quality. You didn’t think that this could happen to a person like him.”
In lieu of classes, memorial services at Memorial Church and around the Boston metro area were scheduled almost daily for the next week.
“People were depressed, and felt like life was over,” Trobe said. “He was our leader.”
