While the future of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts plays out in the courts, WTOP is looking back on the art center’s past.
This month marks 55 years since the Kennedy Center opened its doors, but calls for a national cultural center began more than 170 years before Kennedy was president.
“That really comes back from the time of George Washington,” former Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter told the White House Historical Association in 2020. “He was actually with Pierre L’Enfant, designing this new capital.”
President Dwight D. Eisenhower made it a federal project, signing legislation in 1958 to create a National Cultural Center.
President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy later became major advocates, helping raise money to make it a reality. During the White House years remembered as Camelot, the Kennedys also made the arts part of life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
That enthusiasm was on full display in November 1962, when 5,000 guests packed the National Guard Armory for “An American Pageant of the Arts,” staged to raise money for the planned cultural center.
Leonard Bernstein, himself a future Kennedy Center honoree, served as master of ceremonies. Performers included fellow future honorees Marian Anderson, Harry Belafonte and 7-year-old Yo-Yo Ma, as well as Robert Frost and Bob Newhart, who would later receive the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
Kennedy used the occasion to explain why the arts mattered.
“Art knows no national boundaries,” Kennedy said. “Genius can speak at any time, and the entire world will hear it and listen.”
He also tied the arts to freedom: “The mere accumulation of wealth and power is available to the dictator and the democrat alike. What freedom alone can bring is the liberation of the human mind and spirit.”
Kennedy would never see the center built. Following his assassination in 1963, Rutter said Congress asked his family how he should be remembered.
“Jackie Kennedy said, ‘I want a living memorial to remember my husband, and I want it to be the National Cultural Center,” she said.
Congress renamed the project for Kennedy in 1964.
Seven years later, on Sept. 8, 1971, the Kennedy Center opened with a gala featuring the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
CBS News archival footage from opening night shows Kennedy’s mother, Rose Kennedy, and his brother, Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy, reflecting on what they hoped the center would become.
“Young people will come here and they will see this cultural center,” Rose Kennedy said. “They will carry some of these ideas back to their different communities.”
“To really serve his memory, it has to be available to the people and exhibit the best in American culture,” Ted Kennedy said. “And I think that’s what the trustees want to achieve.”
Until recently, more than 400 Kennedy Center events and performances were free to the public each year, while nearly 1.5 million students took part in its programs annually.
Source
