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Harvard Releases Earliest Known Recording Of JFK
![John F. Kennedy, in his junior year at Harvard University, is shown at Harvard's Winthrop House in Cambridge in 1939. (AP)](https://wordpress.wbur.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/AP_390124015-1000x784.jpg)
Harvard University says it has uncovered what it believes is the earliest known recording of the late President John F. Kennedy.
The crackling recording was restored by a Harvard archivist from a 1937 aluminum disk recording made by Kennedy's professor in a public speaking course. It's part of an exhibit at the Harvard Archives on Kennedy's ties to the school.
On the recording, a 20-year-old Kennedy speaks about President Franklin Roosevelt's appointment of Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. It became a controversial appointment after it was revealed that Black had ties to the Ku Klux Klan.
The university has known of the recording since it arrived a few years ago as part of a collection related to Kennedy's professor, Clifton Packard. He had been recording students in Harvard's Holden Chapel since the 1920s.