Boston, MA – The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum announced today that it has processed and made available for research the personal papers of Dan H. Fenn Jr., educator, government official and first Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. The papers, a collection of approximately thirty-five feet, primarily consist of material related to Fenn’s position as a Special Assistant to President John F. Kennedy, his appointment to the United States Tariff Commission, and his work as a consultant and a professor of business-government relations. The collection spans from 1952 to 1986.
Dan Fenn served as a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Business from 1955 to 1961. In 1961 he served briefly as a special assistant to Senator Benjamin Smith of Massachusetts before becoming a staff assistant to President John F. Kennedy, a position which he held until 1963. As an assistant to the President, Mr. Fenn was charged with recruiting individuals to fill executive government positions within the Kennedy Administration. Fenn was then appointed to the United States Tariff Commission, where he served as a Commissioner from 1963 to 1967. Fenn was president of the Center for Business-Government Relations in Washington, D.C. from 1969 to 1971, during which time he also taught a seminar on business-government relations at American University. In 1972 he became the first Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Fenn also returned to the Harvard Business School as a faculty member and lecturer. He retired from his position as Director of the JFK Presidential Library in 1986. Dan Fenn currently lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he has been active in town politics for over fifty years.
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library’s Archives include 48 million pages of documents from the collections of 340 individuals, organizations, or government agencies; oral history interviews with 1,300 people; and more than 30,000 books. The Audiovisual Archives administers collections of more than 200,000 still photographs, 7,550,000 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.