Would an essay like this be enough to get a Kennedy or other development case into Harvard today?
Would a development case even need to write an essay?
Obviously before he had Ted Sorenson do his ghost writing.
Because my screen shows only a limited amount of text, I read the paragraph without knowing who wrote it and only saw JFK’s name after thinking, “THIS got a kid into Harvard? Seriously?” 
@GMTplus7 Thanks for posting this, enjoyed it!!!
The development cases today would have a much deeper essay, because it would be written by a pro writer!
Back then, getting into H wasn’t that hard.
Or not that hard for the targeted segments of the SES elite.
Nope.
Lots has changed in 80 years. Heck, lots has changed in 20, and in five.
Did you notice he wrote virtually the same for Princeton?
What it is is a good example, for kids today, what not to write.
Considering who I’ve seen admitted, probably would be more than enough.
While it appears that they are looking at other schools, and I am sure that their essays are also much better developed, I would posit that Malia Obama and Malala Yousafzai could write a 5 sentence essay and be admitted.
In 2006, there was a UVA course titled Campaigns and Elections. Since there were about four students wanting to get into the course for every space available in the course, students had to apply for admission to the course with an essay. One student was admitted to the course with a three word essay, but those three words were based on a nationally reported on back story.
Choate got JFK into Princeton/Harvard back then. He wouldn’t even have needed his dad. The institutions more or less just exchanged lists of who wanted to go where. I don’t know if the universities even bothered to read the statements from prep school kids. That just isn’t how it worked.
I caught this old story on the Atlantic website and was going to post it:
I am amazed at how simple the application was at the time. There really wasn’t much space to write a long essay. My father attended Harvard at roughly the same time. He was poor and 2nd generation Irish Catholic and worked a lot of interesting side jobs. In my dad’s favor he was an honor graduate of Exeter and an athlete.
It is so vague.
I think for context we’d need to know how others filled the box. But at the very least, it’s clear from the link that @OspreyCV22 posted, this was not supposed to be an “essay” as CC’ers know them today. So it seems to be a non-issue.
Another thing to consider is that at the time JFK was applying to Harvard, his father had only came to prominence and wealth to the extent of being part of the developmental/legacy set for a decade or two.
His paternal grandfather never attended college and started working as a stevedore at 14.
Also, despite being a Harvard alum, JFK’s father was excluded from many social clubs populated with scions from wealthy influential members of the Boston/American WASP elite by virtue of his being an Irish-American and Catholic on top of what they perceived as an extremely modest social and economic background. A serious issue in an era where becoming a member of such clubs was just as and often more critical to one’s future success in various careers dominated by such elites in that period.
It also had a serious lifelong psychological effect on the rejectees as Joseph Kennedy, Sr. and FDR both admitted later in life despite subsequent successes when recounting their rejection from the Porcellian, one of the most exclusive Final Clubs at Harvard.
It’s not just the brevity of the ‘essay’. The sentence structure is stilted.
I like that the college record of one of our presidents is so open. I wish all president’s college records were public record.
Yes, which is why it’s frustrating when certain people classify everyone into “the white mainstream majority” just because they are white.
One history fun fact which is being ignored:
They weren’t considered White back then along with the Italian/Italian-Americans. However, that didn’t stop large numbers of people from both ethnic groups from going along with the then prevailing mainstream White majority when it came to racism against AAs, other racial minority groups, or European immigrants not considered “White enough” for them. Some examples in US history and anecdotes:
Many Irish-Americans in the south were part of the southern White slave-owning elite and/or fought for the Confederacy…a nation founded on the premise that owning and government protection of chattel slavery as property is a sanctified state right. One good example is Margaret Mitchell’s ancestors which formed some basis for her novel which was told from the sympathetic perspective of Southern White slaveowners.
1863 Draft Riots in NYC when large numbers of Irish-Americans made it a point to murder AAs and their sympathetic abolitionist allies and burn their homes down.
In the 1870’s, Irish-Americans like Denis Kearney were prominently involved in encouraging a wave of anti-Chinese demagoguery and violence in California.
Racist actions of Irish and Italian Americans in many areas of the country such as Boston’s Southie* and parts of Dorchester or NYC’s Bensonhurst** till very recent times.
- Countless racial incidents against AAs and other non-White minorities well into the beginning of the 21st century. Tensions were still so high in Southie and parts of Dorchester in 2000 that the local Census Bureau felt the need to send teams rather than individual enumerators to each building. Understandable considering one former supervisor from work who also worked the Census with me in the evenings/weekends had to restrain me and other non-White enumerators from responding to a young Irish-American teen who yelled racial slurs at us while we were taking the census. Supervisor himself was subjected to racial slurs as he was also visibly non-White.
** The murder of Yusef Hawkins at the hands of Italian-American teens in Bensonhurst in the late '80s for the mere crime of inquiring about a buying a used car. A few HS friends*** who were living in that neighborhood at the time and still living there now confirmed the virulent racism among many Italian-Americans in that neighborhood in that period. They said most of them moved out of the neighborhood to Staten Island and parts of New Jersey/Long Island during the '90s and now have been effectively supplanted by a growing Chinese-American and Eastern European communities.
*** They were Eastern Europeans who were also violently bullied for as they “weren’t considered White enough” by the Italian-American racists in the neighborhood while they were growing up there in the 1980’s. And when their families moved in in the '60s and '70s, they were one of only a tiny handful of Eastern European-Americans in that neighborhood.
“Many Irish-Americans in the south were part of the southern White slave-owning elite and/or fought for the Confederacy”
I have Irish ancestors who came over here (to Philadelphia) from Ireland in the mid / late 1800’s and were discriminated against when they got here (no Irish need apply).
However, since none of them ever a) went to the south, b) owned slaves, c) participated in riots in NYC, d) encouraged anti-Chinese violence in California, or e) lived in Southie, it is completely and utterly irrelevant to me that other Irish-Americans might have done “bad things.” I am not going to carry one iota of “guilt” for that when my ancestors did nothing of the sort.
It’s weird how you think we all should bear some collective guilt because people of the same race / ethnicity as our ancestors did such-and-such bad thing. I reject it completely. I’m not responsible for it.