“We choose to go to the moon,” John F. Kennedy declared in one of the most electrifying speeches of his presidency. On September 12, 1962 at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the President challenged the country to land a man on the moon “in this decade, . . . because that goal will served to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
Today, in that spirit, the Kennedy Library has launched the most far-reaching project that it, or any other presidential library, has ever undertaken. The staff of the Library is working on the cutting edge of information technology to assure that President Kennedy’s legacy will be preserved for countless future generations. To do so we are building a unique digital archive of the entire holdings of the Kennedy Library. This enormous project will take a decade to complete, and will guarantee world-wide access and permanent preservation of 50 million pages of presidential records and papers of the Kennedy Administration and mid-20th century American history, 9,000 hours of audio recordings, 7.5 million feet of motion picture film, 1200 hours of video recordings, and more than 400,00 photographs.
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this project. For the first time people all over the world will be exposed to the record of a presidency that in many ways set the stage for the kind of future all can aspire to. The Kennedy years launched the modern era of science and technology, defined a new role for governments in promoting human rights, projected the strength of a market economy in a free society, and held out the prospect, as the new president proclaimed in his Inaugural Address, of a “grand and global alliance against the common enemies of man, tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself . . . that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind.”
The world-wide accessibility and preservation of President Kennedy’s legacy has been made possible by an unprecedented public-private partnership. At the heart of this partnership is the generous commitment of the Massachusetts-based EMC Corporation to provide the far-reaching technology and expertise necessary to build this first-ever digital archive of an entire presidency. Working closely with the Kennedy Library Foundation, EMC joins a pioneering group of major donors who earlier helped expand the Kennedy Library’s presence on the internet. We are enormously grateful for what they have done to take the Library to this latest outpost of President Kennedy’s ever-expanding New Frontier.
Another New Frontier for the Kennedy Library Foundation is the pursuit of peace in the Middle East and Northern Ireland. Because of the Foundation’s ability to convene people from all over the world in the name of President Kennedy, in September we hosted a private dialogue among journalists from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ramallah, Gaza, Beirut, Dubai and Belfast to discuss the professional challenges of covering the conflicts around them. This four-day conference brought together Israelis and Palestinians who have little or no opportunity to communicate with each other at home, and it resulted in a commitment by the participants to continue their professional dialogue on the internet with the assistance of the Kennedy Library Foundation. This represents another new direction for us, and another example of the relevance of President Kennedy’s legacy to the world in which we live.
John Shattuck
Chief Executive Officer
John F. Kennedy Library Foundation