Roger Kennedy went beyond convention to reach his aim of preserving the nation’s heritage. As a museum director, he put Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz on display to lure visitors into the Smithsonian. And as head of the National Park Service, he often wore his official gray-green uniform, complete with ranger hat. “Nobody messes with somebody in uniform,” he said.
Born in St. Paul, Minn., Kennedy “guided canoe trips in the Minnesota lake country” as a teenager, said The New York Times. After graduating from Yale and earning a law degree from the University of Minnesota, he ran for Congress and lost. He went to Washington anyway to work for the Justice Department and, later, as an NBC News correspondent.
Kennedy “packed a score of careers into one lifetime,” said the Los Angeles Times, becoming a bank chairman, a university vice president, and a Ford Foundation executive. He also wrote 21 books on topics ranging from architecture to the Founding Fathers.
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As director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History from 1979 to 1992, Kennedy “transformed the stodgy repository often called ‘the nation’s attic’ into a vibrant display,” said The Washington Post. His exhibits “confronted some of the most shameful moments in the country’s past,” such as the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. He took the same broadening approach as director of the Park Service from 1993 to 1997, when he established monuments to lesser-known chapters of America’s past. “I’ll teach history to anyone I can get my mitts on,” he said.
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