Dick Donahue ’48 always figured he might be headed for Hanover. But he never could have assumed that he was headed for Washington, D.C., as a player at the White House. “I grew up with my father [Joseph, class of 1913] singing, ‘Men of Dartmouth, give a rouse!’ all that stuff,” he says in the easy, friendly patter that comes after years of hard-fought success, well-earned respect and a bit of “screw-it-I’m-86” attitude. “My two older brothers were ’44 and ’46. I was raised to feel fondly about Dartmouth.”

He is talking in the library of his fine, longtime home in his native Lowell, Massachusetts, where everyone knows about Dick and his community-minded wife of 60 years, Nancy. “Dick was in the Irish Mafia,” some of the old-timers will tell you. “He was with J.F.K.”

Before J.F.K., however, there was Dartmouth, with classwork wrapped around a year in the Navy. “I was in there for about a half-hour—about a year. No PT-109,” he says. Back in Hanover, “I really had a good time. I was a history major,” Donahue recalls. “I was a member of the roundly condemned Alpha Delta Phi, which I guess our new president was in. I’m sure we were much more notorious in my day.”

Donahue was, even then, ready for his future life. “Athletics? Not really,” he says. “But I was a great talker. I won a couple of oratorical contests over in the library. We had ‘Great Issues’ at the time, and that got me involved in a lot of stuff I enjoyed because John Dickey would bring in a lot of his Democratic friends to present to us. Dickey would preside at our ‘Great Issues’ classes.” Donahue recalls confronting the College president over the College’s quota on Jews. “I got mixed up with him on it,” says Donahue. Dickey denied it existed.

When Donahue returned to Lowell after Dartmouth and Boston University law school, he was ready for a bigger game. He was a politically inclined, eager-beaver barrister who was amused by the rough-and-tumble traditions of Massachusetts politics.

He is entertaining a visitor on the day the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library will bestow its annual Profile in Courage Award on Gabrielle Giffords. Although he has served on the board of the library’s foundation since its inception, he’s planning to step down that evening. “It’s time,” he says. Donahue today walks with the aid of a cane, but he is as sharp and sly and wry as they all must have been in the late 1950s, when sparkling satellites from various New England colleges coalesced in an orbit around the sun that was John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

“I started with him right here in Lowell when he was a congressman,” Donahue says. “I was one of the local leaders in the campaign against Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. [for U.S. Senate in 1952]—a race Kennedy won when he wasn’t particularly well known. I was recruited. What had happened was, I had just won a tremendous victory—in the school committee.” Donahue pauses here, acknowledging the humor with a half smile. “It was the result of a drunken wedding, with everyone telling me I should run and I said, ‘Yes, I think I should.’ And they said, ‘Well, the election’s Tuesday.’ At the time Kennedy had people out looking for people to work for him. I heard from them, and with this guy being Irish Catholic and all, I was anxious to get on board.”

Donahue’s recruiters and his two future friends/mentors/bosses in the Kennedy camp were Larry O’Brien of Springfield and Kenny O’Donnell of Worcester—“they were sort of my godparents in politics”—who would remain with J.F.K. until the end. They were with him in Dallas, a trip O’Donnell helped arrange. This Hibernian faction, which included Dave Powers, later the coauthor with O’Donnell of Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, warred with another group in the Massachusetts Democratic Party in the 1950s. To hear Donahue tell it, both sides relished the battle. “I got involved in the fight for control of the state party, and we won. Of course they accused us of cheating and all that, but anyway that eventually went away and it all kept me in closer contact with Kennedy.”

Was Kennedy a friend?

“Sort of,” Donahue says, then pauses. “He was a great guy to be friends with, but he wasn’t a friendly guy. Does that make sense? He was very thoughtful. Later he took almost all the people who worked for him to Ireland. A wonderful time.”

Donahue got involved with Kennedy’s presidential campaign. “Before that he had had that untoward campaign, which I did not participate in, for vice president [in 1956],” Donahue says. “It would have been a terrible thing, because they weren’t going to win, and they would have said the whole thing was sunk because Kennedy was an Irish Catholic. But he didn’t get to run anyway. Then he started to run for president seriously, and Larry was sort of the architect of it—and that I worked on.”

Donahue remembers in particular going to Wisconsin and then West Virginia during a primary season that was quite different from today’s extended, nationwide, multimillion-dollar campaigns. “There was one primary that we wanted to win. We went into [Hubert] Humphrey’s back yard and we won [Wisconsin].”

“There are all kinds of mysterious stories about West Virginia, but what I’ll tell you is the truth. We went down to West Virginia with a certain assurance that we were gonna blow ’em away, because we’d had a poll done by the illustrious pollster and it said we were way ahead. But he hadn’t asked about the Catholic thing, and when that landed it landed like a lead balloon.

“It was a relatively short campaign—five or six weeks. I would get a call, ‘They’re murdering us here with the Catholic stuff.’ And I would say, ‘Hit ’em with the 109.’ West Virginia had the greatest percentage of gold-star mothers, really proud of what their sons had done in the service. That started to help.

“The greatest speech I ever heard [Kennedy] give, and I have said this before, was on television in West Virginia. It doesn’t exist, because in those days they erased the tapes. He said that he was not disqualified for the presidency because of his baptism. He was not disqualified from being an American because of his baptism. Kennedy was magnificent that time. You could really feel his greatness.”

Kennedy’s forthrightness in addressing the religion issue carried the day and led to a big blowout for the stalwarts. “When we won I still think it was my biggest thrill in politics. Everyone there cut loose.”

Donahue returned home, briefly. “I left West Virginia and I had to come back and practice law. I saw the debate with Johnson. That was pure Kennedy: wanting to tell the world how important it was that Lyndon continue to lead the Senate. He always used a silky knife, not a sloppy knife. Everyone knew exactly what he meant.

“And then I was a delegate to the convention. I was not involved in any of the discussions that led to Johnson being put on the ticket, and anyone who says they were is lying, because we had such bitterness against Johnson. That [decision] was all Jack. Bobby was so against it. But Jack knew he needed the Southern Democrats and he made the decision himself. He was a smart politician.” Donahue goes on to say later, in circling back to Johnson, “After the assassination some of our people just destroyed themselves. They blamed Johnson, which was nuts. He didn’t pull any trigger. They faded away in their anger. I unfortunately saw a lot of guys I had great respect for lose it. There was a lot of drinking going on and they fell apart as a group.”

Before the team split in remorse and recrimination there would be triumph—the greatest triumph. “When he was elected I was at what they called ‘Bobby’s House’ at the Cape. Bobby, Kenny, Larry, Sargent Shriver. And it was long ago, so very different than today. We had a television in what was called the family room and we had a phone on the sun porch. We knew it was close. Finally [Jack] said, ‘Well, I’m going to bed and you all go home,’ and we did. The next day, when things sorted themselves out, when Kennedy came into the room we all stood up. Well, we never stood up for the guy. But now we did.

“I was getting my introduction to the way Washington government works. That morning this fellow, who suddenly shows up, says to me, ‘Good morning, Mr. Donahue.’ He was with the Secret Service, and I’m thinking, ‘How does this guy know me?’ ”

Kennedy had given Donahue a job. “I was put in charge of appointments and I was doing that with Kenny O’Donnell. Instead of coming back to Lowell I had to go back to Washington,” Donahue says. “My role never really changed. When Kennedy found you were being tasked with something, he thought about you that way. Oh, this needs to be assigned, that’s Donahue. I soon learned: You did what the president thought you were doing.”

Donahue was not in Dallas. He had handed in his resignation to return to Lowell and his law practice one week before; the gracious letter from the president respecting Donahue’s wishes, framed on a wall of the Donahue house along with other mementos, is dated November 19, 1963. It refers to working together again in the future.

“They had a nice goodbye party for me on the boat, the Honey Fitz, just a week before he died,” says Donahue, who would go on to a successful career as a lawyer and as president and chief operating officer of Nike. He retired from practicing law in 2010.

On November 22, 1963, Donahue was in Lowell. “I was having lunch at the Yorick Club with Kenny O’Donnell’s brother. Some reporter from The Boston Globe was in town looking for me for a story on what’s it like to be back in Lowell after being in the White House. The Yorick Club did have a TV screen. That’s where I heard.

“I have to say, in retrospect, I was lucky to have just resigned. I had the luxury of weeping by myself and with my family.”

Robert Sullivan is the managing editor of LIFE Books. This story is adapted fromThe Day Kennedy Died by the editors of LIFE, published in October 2013 by LIFE Books, an imprint of Time Home Entertainment Inc. Copyright © 2013 by Time Home Entertainment Inc.