The group has formed a nonprofit organization, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate, and is planning an aggressive fund-raising campaign that aims to raise at least $50 million and will be spearheaded by prominent Boston businessman Jack Connors.
Designs are still being drafted, but planners hope the institute will include classroom space, research rooms, exhibits, and, most prominently, an exact replica of the US Senate chambers.
The center will be a shrine to the Senate, with homage to Kennedy, just as the building next door is a showcase for the presidency, with the focus on his brother John.
Plans for the institute have been in the works for several years, but kicked into a more aggressive phase recently, in part because of Kennedy's brain cancer diagnosis in May. Kennedy has been in Hyannis Port as he undergoes cancer treatment and is hoping to return to the Senate in the fall.
"It is the single most important thing, other than family and health, that Senator Kennedy is focused on," said Paul Kirk, a former Kennedy aide and chairman of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. "He will be gratified if things go forward as a salute to him and an institution he loves, at a place he loves."
The institute will also have museum and exhibit space that will showcase excerpts from great US Senate speeches, videos of historic hearings, and a broadcast of the US Senate floor in real time.
Actual designs have not been drawn, but officials envision a 40,000-square-foot building, with construction beginning as early as spring 2009.
"The United States Senate is one of our forefathers' most brilliant democratic inventions," Kennedy said in a statement provided to the Globe. "To preserve our vibrant democracy for future generations, I believe it is critical to have a place where citizens can go to learn first-hand about the Senate's important role in our system of government. . . . I'm looking forward to getting the institute up and running soon."
Planning for the institute is being coordinated with the Kennedy Library and the University of Massachusetts. It will be housed on a 4-acre plot on Columbia Point that is owned by UMass.
Kennedy, who has spent 45 years in the Senate, wanted to house the center at UMass-Boston because its students are mostly from working class backgrounds, advisers said. He ruled out other interested universities, including Harvard, where he was an undergraduate and where his family has close ties.
The center, expected to have closer links to UMass-Boston than the presidential library, will help boost the stature of a campus that has long sought to establish a distinct identity, apart from its reputation as a commuter school.
(...) Kennedy is planning to give his papers to the Kennedy Library, but some of them will be on display at the institute. He is currently participating in an oral history of his life that is being conducted at the University of Virginia, where he went to law school. The results from that project will be housed in Virginia, as well as the institute in Boston.
Connors said that in the spring, about two weeks before the senator's cancer diagnosis, Kennedy called and asked him to head up a fund-raising effort. Connors has held several meetings to identify about two dozen "precinct captains" who will raise money. (...)
Connors said the group is also considering tapping Kennedy's colleagues in the US Senate, asking them to call key political donors in their home state to raise money for the institute.
(...)
"Everybody wants to see this go forward," Mayor Thomas M. Menino said. "It really is a model about government, the presidency of John F. Kennedy, and the Senate career of Edward M. Kennedy. This will be a model in perpetuity that will remember the short time we had President Kennedy and the many years we've had with Senator Kennedy."
Go to:
No comments:
Post a Comment