For Immediate Release: May 30, 2012
Further information: Rachel Flor (617) 514-1662, rachel.flor@jfklfoundation.org
Boston, MA – The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum today announced that it has processed and made available for research the personal papers of Warren I. Cikins, who served in the White House from 1962 to 1966 during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The papers, a collection of approximately 70 cubic feet, document Cikins’ professional and volunteer work in civil rights, intergovernmental relations, equal opportunity employment, health care policy, criminal justice, and prison industries. The documents in the collection date from 1922 to 2011.
Among the many items included in this newly released collection are:
• Notes written by Cikins in the midst of the Little Rock school desegregation crisis as Arkansas Congressman Brooks Hays attempted to mediate the stand-off between Governor Faubus and President Eisenhower;
• Files on the Kennedy administration’s efforts to build relationships with local and state officials and to improve coordination of federal and state planning;
• Reports documenting the daily work of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights at the time of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964; and
• Proceedings of the ground-breaking Brookings Institution series of seminars on the administration of justice, during which members of the judicial, legislative, and executive branches talked candidly about current legal issues.
Warren Cikins was born in Boston, Massachusetts on July 5, 1930. After attending Harvard University, he moved to Washington, D.C. and served as legislative assistant to Congressman Brooks Hays of Arkansas from 1956 to 1959, experiencing first-hand the tumult over the integration of Central High School in Little Rock. During the Kennedy administration, Cikins joined the U.S. Department of State as Assistant to Hays, who had been appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Congressional Affairs. In 1962, Cikins transferred to the White House where he worked on intergovernmental relations and civil rights projects through 1966. He concurrently served as Special Assistant to the Staff Director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1963-1965); Special Assistant to the administrator for equal opportunity at the Agency for International Development (1965-1967); and later as Director of Legislative Affairs at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1967-1969). After leaving government employment, he worked as a management consultant and was elected to public office in Fairfax County, Virginia. From 1975 to 1993, Cikins was a senior staff member at the Brookings Institution, where he developed educational seminars on a wide range of political and social topics. He was also deeply involved in volunteer activities in the areas of criminal justice and prison industries, and served as vice chairman of the National Committee on Community Corrections from 1987 to 2004. In 2005, Cikins published his autobiography, In Search of Middle Ground: Memoirs of a Washington Insider. Cikins currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
The Warren I. Cikins Personal Papers will be added to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library’s Archives, which include 48 million pages of documents from the collections of over 400 individuals, organizations, or government agencies; oral history interviews with 1,700 people; and more than 30,000 books. The Audiovisual Archives administers collections of more than 500,000 still photographs, 1,550,000 feet of motion picture film, 1,200 hours of video recordings, over 7,000 hours of audio recordings and 500 original editorial cartoons.
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is administered by the National Archives and Records Administration and supported, in part, by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, a non-profit organization. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and the Kennedy Library Foundation seek to promote, through scholarship, educational and community programs, a greater appreciation and understanding of American politics, history, and culture, the process of governing and the importance of public service.
The Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is open daily from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., with the exceptions of Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. The Research Room is open 8:30 am – 4:30 pm each weekday, and is closed on weekends and Federal Holidays. Appointments may be made by calling (617) 514-1629. The Library is located in the Dorchester section of Boston, off Morrissey Boulevard, next to the campus of the University of Massachusetts/Boston. Parking is free. There is free shuttle-service from the JFK/UMass T Stop on the Red Line. The Museum is fully handicapped accessible. For more information, call (866) JFK-1960 or access www.jfklibrary.org on the Internet.