REMEMBERING JFK
The Harvard Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral Society had long been booked to perform at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. on Sunday Nov. 24, 1963.
But, after the president’s assassination, the concert acquired a new significance almost overnight.
As the two choirs, accompanied by the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, got back on the highway and headed to Washington, mourners were beginning to flock to the president’s casket on display in the Capitol Rotunda.
“It quickly became a concert dedicated to the president,” remembered Curll.
As the Harvard performers tried to place their emotions aside—a task Curll admitted was difficult—producers from the nation’s major broadcast outlets jumped on the president’s connection to Harvard. As the networks showed images of mourners around Kennedy’s casket, some mixed in audio from the Harvard concert to replace the silence.
The Glee Club, the RCS, and the HRO were not the only groups that had to carry on shortly after the tragedy. The Harvard football team, back in Cambridge, spent another week practicing for the Bulldogs. But when The Game was played on Nov. 30, Yale came out charging and upset the heavily-favored Crimson 20-6.
“We were a little flat,” quarterback Michael H. Bassett ’64 remembered.
But The Game—and the anticipation leading up to it—was an afterthought, largely devoid of the usual anticipation. Trope remembered the scene at the Yale Bowl that Saturday as “like a tomb.”
Meanwhile, students and administrators in Cambridge were at work deciding how to honor the fallen president. At the time, various ideas were floated around, including building Kennedy’s presidential library next to the Harvard Business School—a plan eventually derailed by legal troubles and objections from the City of Cambridge—and naming what would eventually be called Mather House in honor of Kennedy.
Still, it did not take Harvard long to recognize its tragic alumnus. In 1966, the Graduate School for Public Administration was renamed the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
—Staff writer Matthew Q. Clarida can be reached at matthewclarida@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattClarida.