John F Kennedy Hyannis Museum

My family, and I really enjoyed this museum. My 10 year old did a scavenger hunt that the museum provided, and that was pretty fun to him. He enjoyed finding all of the answers to it, and he was excited about his prize of Kennedy for President stickers that he got for completing it.
I think enjoying this museum is really about what your expectations are. We were spending the day on Cape Cod, and our only agenda was Kennedy. So this museum was a must for us. The museum is basically a timeline of JFK’s life leading up to, and during the presidency, but centralized around Hyannis. There are lots of family photos, and quotes around that are all enjoyable to see, and read. My favorite part was how well they captured the bond between JFK, and RFK.
If you are coming here for a Smithsonian type of experience, you will be underwhelmed. It is a small museum that you can see all of it in an hour or less. For us, that was okay. If you want more of a detailed Kennedy museum, maybe the JFK Library in Boston would be better.
We enjoyed ourselves. It’s not a museum that I would need to visit a second time, but I’m glad I’ve been there.

I would like to know, if the cost of admission is $ 10, what they are doing with the money if not upgrading the facilities? I mean, don’t tell me you aren’t busy, because there were people there in October loooong after tourist season. What am I talking about? Apparently, Ted Kennedy is still alive according to one of the captions that sit right outside the gift shop. I don’t know how long he’s been dead… four? five years? But it’s time to change the sign. Otherwise, it’s a very cool little museum. Pictoral to be exact. Showing the family changing through the years. Kind of depressing when you realize that almost all the people in the pictures are dead. I enjoy this museum much more than the bigger library. Also, if you are a Hyannis resident, the cost of admission for you and a guest is free! I would like to have seen something… I don’t know… more? To be fair, it is a small building. The JFK museum is upstairs from the cape cod baseball league museum, and is much, much better than the cape cod baseball league museum. The baseball museum seems to be thrown together, with no rhyme or reason. I didn’t know what I was looking at and neither did my cousin. We found ourselves guessing a lot. More signage would have been great. Heck, any signage would have been great! I think that this museum is perfect for people obsessed with the Kennedys, otherwise, skip it.

This museum is located on Main street in downtown Hyannis in a smaller building on pretty grounds. It is a great place to go if you are a Kennedy fan and a baseball fan, interested in a little history of the game. The Cape Cod Baseball League’s Hall of Fame is housed in the basement of the building. Having the museum and the Hall of Fame in the same building is really a nerd’s dream come true.
The JFK museum is a history in pictures of the Kennedy clan and covers the politics as well as the family. There are pictures of Jackie and the kids in nearby Hyannisport, there is a family tree, timelines, videos and recordings of speeches. This year, they’ve added an exhibit focusing on the relationships, both personal and political, between Jack and Bobby. If you know about the Cuban Missile Crisis and Bobby’s tenure as Attorney-​General, you will find this fascinating. There may be no «living history» here, but what there is speaks volumes about American history. The museum is extremely well-​curated, and I always leave wondering what would be happening in the world had Jack and Bobby lived. I wasn’t alive to see Jack and Bobby in action, but I really do miss them. And Teddy.
The Cape Cod Baseball League has been home to many major league players, such as Chuck Knoblauch, Robin Ventura, and Red Sox MVPs Jason Varitek and Nomar Garciaparra. You can easily spend about an hour down here checking out all the artifacts and pictures. The Hall of Fame is a little small for everything that it houses, but it will move into a larger space in the fall.
The museum is a great place to go and spend part of an afternoon getting some culture in between all that time sunbathing, sailing, fishing, etc. The museum has a small gift store with mostly books on the Kennedys and JFK’s own «Profiles in Courage». Sorry, no baseball gifts. The museum is open until 5pm.

Staff was very nice. The museum was really cool, though has others have mentioned was mostly photographs and reading materials. If you mostly want to look at objects or artifacts it might not be your place, but if you are okay with doing some reading and watching some videos I would recommend it! Cheap if you are under 18, military, student, or a senior. Even if you aren’t, $ 10 isn’t bad. Fun place to spend an hour!

Fascinating history of Jack’s and the Bobby’s life pre and during the White House years.
Pictorial life with video’s of his life and times with family and friends on Cape Cod and the Kennedy Compound.
Well done.

Great new exhibit «Jack & Bobby, Brothers First» just opened for the 2015 season. Lots of events & educational programs scheduled too. Don’t miss this gem of a museum on Main Street, Hyannis.

The JFK Hyannis Museum is certainly not a must-​visit if you’re on the Cape, unless you’re a huge Kennedy fan or a baseball nerd. The Cape Cod Baseball League (CCBL) Hall of Fame is currently housed in the basement of the building, but it will be moving in October 2015.
The CCBL is one of the launching pads for professional baseball players. 1 in 7 players in Major League Baseball (MLB) have played on the Cape. The Hall of Fame features many artifacts, and baseball fans could easily spend 30 minutes to an hour looking at everything. Unfortunately, the museum has outgrown the basement of the JFK Hyannis Museum and will be moving as I mentioned earlier.
At the ground level, you’ll find the JFK Hyannis Museum. The museum is mainly a video room (playing a DVD that you can also buy) and a lot of blown up photos on the wall. I’ve come to appreciate the museum as a necessary preservation of the Kennedy legacy. But, I wish there was more. I hope when the CCBL Hall of Fame leaves that the museum figures out how to utilize the basement space. There HAS to be more artifacts or something more they can do with the space, right?
If you’re a baseball fan and slightly interested in the Kennedys, plan on spending about an hour at the museum. Even for the rare history buff/​baseball fan combo, I would estimate a max of 1.5−2 hours here.

Four rooms with blown up photos, a video, and a family tree does not an $ 8 museum make. Granted, parking was free behind the building and we could also visit the Cape Cod baseball hall of fame, but I would not recommend this to anyone but the most diehard Kennedy buff, and even then you might wanna pass.

A museum focused on the timeline of JFK’s family to his ascent to the US presidency. Lots of pictures with captions. Nice to see a different side to the Kennedys, especially their love of sailing and any water-​related activities. A must-​try for any history buff if you are in the area. And please don’t forget to do the Legacy Trail. The view from the Kennedy bust overlooking Lewis Bay is so pretty.

EERIE. Short, sweet and to the point, but it gives you the chills. Expensive, but I felt it was worth it. Hyannis is the heart of the clan. The museum gives an inside glimpse of Camelot, and you can only leave wondering how this family has endured and survived so much tragedy. Love them or hate them they are AMERICANA. They are history. They are New England.

For those of you who are military & planning to visit here they offer a military discount. Our experience was superior. We visited with our parents. I recommend you to take a tour of the Kennedy’s memorial museum if you are a history buff & enjoy learning the background of the Cape & all it has to offer!

Not enough history for $ 9/​person.
Lots of photographs on the wall.
No restrooms inside the museum.
Personally, the museum would be more intriguing to visit if it can focus on one topic JFK or baseball, not both.

Kind of disappointing. This is pretty much a timeline of JFK’s political career and a collection of Kennedy family photos. If you skip the videos, take a good look at all the photos and read all their captions, you can walk through the entire exhibit in about 15 – 20 minutes.
Like Georgie M. says, «there are no pieces of living history here.»
Also, the hours are annoying. 10 – 4, Mon-​Sat., 12 – 4 on Sunday.
I suppose it might be worth the $ 9 if you care to see the baseball museum downstairs as well, but not me. At least you can take photos.

We were so looking forward to coming here and couldn’t believe how totally lacking it was as a museum.
I rarely, if ever write One Star reviews. I tend to view them as a waste of time, yet this place really made the two of us angry.
There are no pieces of living history here. No scraps of paper, no bomber jackets, no physical mementos of the Kennedy family.
The most galling exhibits are two high school-​ish dioramas.
One was a time-​line of President Kennedy’s term in office, against the backdrop of the events going on in the world. Like what he was doing, when The Johnny Carson Show first appeared on NBC. it’s massive. Nearly twenty feet long.
The other diorama was of the genealogy of President Kennedy’s parents along with his brothers and sisters, which was about fifteen feet long. The the only original piece of memorabilia, is a letter sent by Sen. Ted Kennedy concerning some photos to his mother on Senate stationary (photo).
The rest of the exhibits are blown-​up reprints of famous photos we’ve all seen before. All this for $ 8.00; while the Presidential Library charges $ 12.00 to see the real thing. It took us less than twenty minutes to see everything.

We visited this «museum» over the Memorial Day weekend and found it to be a disappointment.
For the most part the «collection» is nothing more than a few rooms with enlarged photographs of the Kennedy family hanging on the wall. In one room there is an interesting family tree of the family but if that’s what you’re interested in just look on the Internet.
It is not at all worth the $ 8 admission.
Would we go again? No.

Not bad. You must appreciate the Kennedy’s though or you’ll just walk right through in 2 minutes. Many pictures to look at, films are running around you too. There is a knowledgeable person to ask questions to, and the price was right. Parking isn’t easy, we were waiting for the Duck boat tour to start and had time to kill while we were walking around town and came across this place. The day before the nice lady where you pay said if we waited until the next day it would be a bit cheaper, that they were running a special, so we came back the next day. That was nice of her. Gift shop is decent. There is no tour, you walk through at your own pace.

The JFK Museum is a great way to spend a rainy afternoon on the Cape. I’m a museum nut, and once I learned that there was a museum about the Kennedys in Hyannis, it was a priority on my vacation to do list (while everyone else’s was to go to the beach).
Growing up, I had an incredible fascination with the Kennedy family, and the allure did not really wane as an adult. This museum is chock full of pictures and interesting facts about this famous family and replicas of some of the clothes Jackie Kennedy Onassis wore. The museum also played rare video footage of the family, which I found fascinating. It’s definitely worth a visit, even if you don’t spend a good few hours there reading every last thing like I did.