The 2017 documentary This Is The House That Jack Built highlights the untold stories of John F. Kennedy.
The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics recently released a documentary on President John F. Kennedy ’35 entitled This Is The House That Jack Built. The production team for this documentary sought to uncover “untold stories” about JFK 100 years after his birth and more than 50 after his assassination. Larry Sabato, a professor at UVA, the author of The Kennedy Half Century, and a household name for those concerned with policy and government, narrates the all-too-short life story of the 35th president of the United States, and Choate’s own archivist Ms. Judy Donald made the cut for the documentary.
Before the 2017 release of the documentary, Ms. Donald was contacted by Sabato’s production team, who wished to come up to the campus of Choate Rosemary Hall and take a few photos of key buildings, such as East Cottage, Archbold, the Chapel, and the exteriors of West Wing and Hill House; however, the only glimpse of our campus that ended up making the documentary was an outside shot of the Hill House steps. The production team also spent time interviewing Ms. Donald during the day and a half that they were on campus. Ms. Donald was set up in the John F. Kennedy Collection in the basement of the library, where all afternoon was spent interviewing. The team urged Ms. Donald to dig deep and think of some little-known stories about Kennedy’s four years spent at Choate. Ms. Donald admitted that this was a “little hard to come up with after all this time –– something that hasn’t been said before.”
Ms. Donald focused on Kennedy’s lasting legacy to this school, the John F. Kennedy Program in Government and Public Affairs. Kennedy inspired this program when he came back to campus for the school’s 50th anniversary and he made a speech touching on how Choate should have a program to get young men interested in the government and public service. Instead of this detail ending up in the hour-long documentary, snippets about Kennedy’s life at school as a student and how he was a bit of a prankster were featured. Also included was Ms. Donald mentioning how John F. Kennedy was following in the footsteps of his older brother Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., who was a natural athlete and whom Jack couldn’t physically measure up to. JFK’s teachers acknowledged that he had the capacity to be a bright student, but he just didn’t apply himself enough. With regards to how the overall interviewing process was like, Ms. Donald says that it was lengthy; the production team spent nearly half a day alone interviewing her, but only around two minutes ended up being featured in the final product. Since they were working in the basement of the library, they had to deal with the constant occurrence of overhead foot traffic in the upstairs library reading room, which only made the overall interviewing process more time-consuming.
The trailer for This Is The House That Jack Built is already out, and the full hour-long documentary will be aired in Connecticut on Monday, January 22nd at 9:00 pm. The name This Is The House That Jack Built came from Jack’s and Joe’s summer spent on a ranch in Arizona, where they mended fences, herded cattle, and built a house for the owner of the ranch. Jack named this house “The House That Jack Built,” because he was the one who ended up doing most of the work on it.
Even long after his death, Kennedy’s legacy lives on all across the United States, and most specifically at Choate. He is one of our most famous alumni, with his legacy seen through the John F. Kennedy Program in Government and Public Affairs and beyond.
