[VIDEO] Dec. 2, 1964 | Kennedy Center Groundbreaking

Dec. 2, 1964 - President Johnson broke ground with a gold‐plated spade today for a national cultural center that will keep alive the memory of President Kennedy and fulfill one of his dreams.
Gathered on the banks of the Potomac at the ceremony for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts were witnesses from what Mr. Johnson called “the worlds of poetry and power.”
Sir John Gielgud read in his famous, mellifluous voice from Shakespeare's “Henry V.” Jason Robards Jr., who had forgotten his notes on the plane that brought him to Washington, quoted President Kennedy from memory on artists and the arts.
Senator‐elect Robert F. Kennedy told of his brother’s belief “that America is judged as every civilization is judged — in large measure by the quality of its artistic achievement.”
And President Johnson said the center “will symbolize our belief that the world of creation and thought are at the core of all civilization.”
The spade the President thrust into the earth with his left foot was first used by President William McKinley in 1898 to plant a scarlet oak on the front lawn of the White House. In 1914, President William Howard Taft broke ground with it for the Lincoln Memorial. In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used it at the site of the Jefferson Memorial.
Construction of the marble, glass, and bronze Kennedy Center is scheduled to begin next summer. The $31 million building, containing an opera, concert hall, two theaters, and a cinema, is scheduled for completion by late 1967. Its architect, Edward Durrell Stone, has called the site, upstream from the Lincoln Memorial, “one of the most exciting and glorious settings for a public building in the world.”
In his readings, Robards quoted extensive passages from a speech President Kennedy made 27 days before his death. It was during the dedication of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst, Mass. President Kennedy called any great artist “a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover’s quarrel with the world.”
Robards commented: “I would like to say of John Fitzgerald Kennedy what he once had to say of [André] Malraux.
“In his own life, he has again demonstrated that politics and art, the life of action and the world of thought, the world of events and the world of imagination, are one.”

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