How much does it cost to house Robert F. Kennedy’s private papers and records?

More than GW was willing to pay, apparently.

According to an article in the New York Times, Kennedy’s widow, Ethel Kennedy, approached then-President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg in 2004 to discuss moving the senator’s archives to GW after financial woes struck the Washington-based Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation.

Trachtenberg was sold, he said to the Times, on the idea but said GW was unable to front the costs. In an attempt to secure funding, Trachtenberg asked the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., to earmark just “a few million dollars” for the project, but the senator refused citing his desire for Robert Kennedy’s papers to remain in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.

Sixty-three boxes of Robert Kennedy’s papers will open to the public in his brother’s presidential library this year, but many in the family are still convinced RFK’s history needs a home of its own.

The Kennedy camp hasn’t finished shopping around for a partner to help honor the senator’s life.

“There are other institutions and organizations that may well have an interest,” Joseph Kennedy, Robert Kennedy’s son, told the Times. “Wherever they end up being housed, there will be an insistence by my family that the public and scholars have access to the original documents.”