A glimpse into the restorative respite the Kennedys found in the New England summers.

Summer is the most “American Dream” of seasons. Its warmth and days of relaxation and leisure activity permeate the notion that anyone can make it here so long as they work hard and exercise creative ingenuity. After long winters of toil, summers promise a grand reward. Country club scenes, yacht clubs, and the surf cultures of California, the Outer Banks, and the National Seashore all contain pieces of that ideal—but nothing has captured the Great American Summer the way John F. Kennedy and his family did during his short years as president of the United States, the now-mythical era that his wife Jackie called “Camelot.”

America, and indeed the world, first became familiar with the Kennedy Compound and Hyannis Port during the campaign that would land JFK in the White House. He used his family home for a base—in part because he was so comfortable there. He led a somewhat nomadic-cum-cosmopolitan life, and the compound was the place where he looked to center himself, to recharge, and to nurture the spirit. For a president closely associated with the Civil Rights Movement, it’s perhaps fitting that discrimination led the Kennedy family to Hyannis Port. Joe, the patriarch, had investigated other locales, such as Cohasset, but those doors remained closed to Catholics. By contrast, Hyannis Port welcomed their faith. Father Michael Fitzgerald of St. Francis Xavier Parish in Hyannis told WBUR in 2017, “The fact they would come and worship like everyone else, it’s a grounding point. Because they did not come here to be worshiped, they came here to worship.”

John F. Kennedy’s place in time, and in the evolution of technology, also factored into his overall success and to the creation of the Summer White House. He quickly became the first president to really take advantage of television—his famous 1960 debate with Richard Nixon helped propel him to victory; according to the National Constitution Center, “It was watched live by 70 million Americans and it made politics an electronic spectator sport. It also gave many potential voters their first chance to see actual presidential candidates in a live environment, as potential leaders.” Now, ordinary citizens could have access to the first family like never before. The fact that they were so photogenic and telegenic only added to the mythmaking. In 2013, CBS This Morning ran a story called “Cape Camelot,” which covered an exhibit at the JFK Hyannis Museum that focused on the final summer of Camelot. Anchor Anthony Mason noted that “Following Kennedy’s presidential victory speech in Hyannis, the family’s summer hideaway was put on the national map. Historian Douglas Brinkley said, ‘The Kennedys exploded on the scene and Hyannis Port became a place that everybody wanted to see. The political pros knew to start promoting this compound. And we are getting all these personal shots of a president on the beach, on a boat, with his kids, playing touch football. It was the beginning of packaging a president, of allowing your personal life to be part
of a narrative.’” 

Neither before nor since has the private life of a US president so openly mixed with the public, and while some important policy took place from the lawn—including the interview with Walter Cronkite when the President said, of Vietnam, “In the final analysis, it’s their war. They’re the ones who have to win it or lose it”—most memories and images of JFK summers are idyllic and joyous. Americans watched first daughter Caroline, only three years old in 1960, grow from toddler to first-grader in scenes from Hyannis Port. They also witnessed JFK Jr.’s first three years. The Kennedy Compound spans six acres, right on the beach of Nantucket Sound, and includes three houses. It’s cozy and somewhat insulated but large enough that JFK would drive his children around in a golf cart. This cart featured in a 1962 cover story for Look Magazine, where the President, smiling broadly, is driving with about ten little kids clinging onto him. In 2014, the JFK Library in Boston spotlighted these summers, and included the cart in their exhibition. Curator Stacey Bredhoff said at the time, “It really wasn’t used for golf. It was really just for him zipping around the compound. You’d see him giving these really rollicking rides, going up and down the hills, just for the fun of it.”

Even today, fascination with Summer Camelot continues to ignite popular imagination, and in 2023, Kate Storey’s White House by the Sea shot up the best-seller lists. In 2017, for what would have been JFK’s 100th birthday, WBUR ran a story in which Deborah Becker reported that, “The helicopter landing on the Hyannis Port lawn or seeing the family around the Cape are stories that are retold seemingly no matter where you are on the Cape. Several people—although they were very young at the time—recall seeing the President or other Kennedys at some of the family’s favorite haunts—like Baxter’s Boathouse or Four Seas Ice Cream.” 

But it was always the waters of Nantucket Sound, and sailing aboard Victura, JFK’s Wianno Senior, that seem to most perfectly encapsulate those magical summers. As Becker states, “Dozens of photos show the family enjoying the beach or sailing. An often-mentioned JFK quote is: ‘I always go to Hyannis Port to be revived, to know again the power of the sea.’” 

Chris White is a freelance writer for Cape Cod Life Publications.