Joseph Kennedy Sr. rented a cottage on the Hyannis Port waterfront in 1926 and bought it two years later. His children acquired the neighboring properties over the following decades, and three houses on six acres became the place the family gathered to wait out the 1960 election returns. From 1961 to 1963, it served as the summer White House. Kennedy had spent childhood summers on this same Cape, and in 1961 he signed legislation protecting nearly 40 miles of its Atlantic coastline as the Cape Cod National Seashore. After the assassination, the citizens of Barnstable commissioned a memorial on Ocean Street — a stone wall facing Lewis Bay, a reflecting pool, a line from his own words about a country that should sail and not lie still in the harbor. The compound is private now. The water is the only honest vantage point.
