THE KENNEDYS - Their Place in the Sun

FOR JFK AND HIS FAMILY, HYANNIS PORT WAS MORE THAN A SUMMER VACATION - IT WAS WHERE THEY LOVED, LAUGHED & LIVED FREELY

- Katie Bruno

If the Kennedy myth is a modern-day incarnation of Camelot, then the family compound in Hyannis Port, on Cape Cod, Mass., was their castle. In the pictures taken there of John F. Kennedy, his wife, Jacqueline, and their kids and extended family, they always appear sun-kissed, relaxed and happy, whether playing touch football on the lawn, reading to their children, or sailing on Nantucket Sound. “I always come back to the Cape and walk on the beach when I have a tough decision to make,” JFK once said. “The Cape is the one place I can think and be alone.”

Jack ’s ties to Hyannis Por t stretched back to when his parents bought a local cottage in 1928. The home — now a three-house compound — is where JFK spent summers as the Kennedys became a part of the close-knit community. “It had an enormous impact on him,” Kate Storey, author of White House by the Sea: A Century of Kennedys at Hyannis Port, tells