Mem­o­ra­bilia from John F. Kennedy’s brief stint as a Prince­ton stu­dent and items from his polit­i­cal career– includ­ing a 1935 Christ­mas card depict­ing Kennedy with his Prince­ton room­mates dressed in top hats and suits in homage to Fred Astaire from the motion pic­ture Top Hat (which opened ear­lier that year), and pho­tographs and doc­u­ments from the War­ren Commission’s inves­ti­ga­tion into the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion– are part of a new exhi­bi­tion in the Wiess Lounge at the See­ley G. Mudd Man­u­script Library. Run­ning through Sep­tem­ber 2, 2011, John F. Kennedy: From Old Nas­sau to the New Fron­tier com­mem­o­rates the 50th anniver­sary of the elec­tion of our 35th Pres­i­dent and his Prince­ton connections.

This exhi­bi­tion show­cases the rarely-seen Prince­ton­ian side of Kennedy, who attended the Uni­ver­sity late in the fall semes­ter of 1935 despite his father’s desire that he attend Har­vard Uni­ver­sity. Unaware of his future in pol­i­tics, Kennedy had declared his intended pro­fes­sion to be “bank­ing” on his appli­ca­tion and stated that the cam­pus envi­ron­ment of Old Nas­sau was “sec­ond to none.” Kennedy was admit­ted to the enter­ing fresh­men class in 1935 and shared a dor­mi­tory with his for­mer Choate high school class­mates Kirk LeMoyne Billings and Ralph Hor­ton, Jr. in #9 Reunion Hall South. How­ever, after a brief few weeks as a mem­ber of the Class of 1939 he left Prince­ton due to health rea­sons and later grad­u­ated from Har­vard with the Class of 1940. The other pres­i­dents to have attended Prince­ton were James Madi­son and Woodrow Wilson.