This Day in Presidential History (Jackie Kennedy, Conservator of Culture and Camelot, Dies)

May 19, 1994—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who made the White House a center of style with her fashion sense and interior in decoration, then carefully tended to the memory of John F. Kennedy after his assassination, died in her New York apartment of non-Hodgkins lymphoma at age 64.

Five years after JFK’s murder, his widow remarried, to Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis, and in her last decade she lived quietly but contentedly with diamond importer Maurice Tempelsman. 

But the public associated her with her first husband, and she would be buried next to him (and their stillborn child and baby son) at Arlington National Cemetery, with the Eternal Flame burning nearby.

The flame is most appropriate as the symbol of her post-White House life, not only because she chose this as her final resting place (as she planned all aspects of JFK’s funeral, patterning it after Abraham Lincoln's), but because she was the keeper of the flame when it came to his reputation, as the most famous and fascinating widow in Presidential history.

The Kennedy administration was celebrated as a font of culture, with events like inviting Nobel Prize winners to the White House. But the First Lady deserved that reputation far more than her husband. 

JFK had earned considerable cachet as a Harvard undergrad with While England Slept and as a U.S. Senator with Profiles in Courage. 

But as Herbert S. Parmet showed in his account of the President’s pre-White House years, Jack, Kennedy received so much editorial assistance (from New York Times columnist Arthur Krock for the first title, and speechwriter Ted Sorensen for the second) that his listing as sole author is questionable. 

As for his reading matter, though Jackie recalled him reading while walking around and he loved to recite verses that reminded him of his military service, much of his taste ran toward the more pedestrian James Bond.

In contrast, Jackie read both more deeply and widely: cutting-edge new fiction (Jack Kerouac), as well as such poets as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Byron, Frost, Langston Hughes, and Constantine Cavafy. 

Nor was English her only language for reading: she was fluent in French and Spanish while also knowing some Italian, German and Polish. 

That was a boon to her husband both as he governed and campaigned, since she was as adept in translating for him research papers on French involvement in Indochina as in speaking to ethnic blocs in their native languages. 

After her husband was inaugurated, Jackie wielded her cultural influence widely, as she:

*invited writers, painters, poets, and musicians to perform at the White House;

*used the Executive Mansion to promote such performing arts organizations as American Ballet Theater, the Metropolitan Opera Studio, Opera Society of Washington, Interlochen Arts Academy, and American Shakespeare Festival.

*created the “Concerts for Young People”; 

*began discussions with Senator Claiborne Pell that led to the formation of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts; 

* advocated for a national center for the performing arts (which, after his assassination, ended up being named for her husband).

Yet her advocacy for the arts may have been most visible in her February 1962 TV special, “A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy.” The effect was threefold, in that it:

*mobilized support for preserving the White House as a piece of architecture (“Never before had White House interiors been so affectionately hailed by the public,” wrote historian William Seale in The President’s House);

*helped create a formal mechanism for fostering this appreciation through the White House Historical Association; and

*transformed, through her breathy voice, immaculate coiffure and red suit, a deeply shy woman into a superstar every bit a match for her husband, as she was watched that night by 56 million Americans. (A still from that special accompanies this blog post.)

The effect was equally striking abroad. No matter where she traveled—Europe or Latin America—Mrs. Kennedy was received rapturously. 

In a perceptive blog post on the Web site of USC’s Center on Public Diplomacy, Madison Jones observes that Mrs. Kennedy will be remembered “for creating a dominant soft power dynamic in American politics, and proving to foreign audiences everywhere that knowledge, appreciation and understanding of other cultures can forge a lasting bond between nations that improve foreign relations immensely.”

Mrs. Kennedy used her standing as an icon—now infused with Pieta overtones as the woman who cradled the body of the martyred President in Dallas—to mold Americans’ memory of the administration as “Camelot.” 

Her four-hour interview with reporter-historian Theodore H. White for Life Magazine, conducted just a week after the assassination, evoked how Jack loved to listen to the soundtrack to the Broadway musical about the wise, just and gallant English ruler. 

It also spawned among Kennedy devotees a desire for a “future king” who would pick up where Jack left off—first brother Bobby, then youngest brother Ted—with all kinds of twists nobody could have anticipated. 

Moreover, as noted in James Piereson’s 2013 blog post for the Daily Beast, she created an image of Jack as a liberal idealist and peacemaker not only somewhat counter to Kennedy’s daily practice as a politician, but also virtually impossible for his successors to equal.

Other than that, in the years after the assassination, Mrs. Kennedy largely maintained her silence—not entering into partisan political warfare or even writing her memoirs. 

Some of her reluctance to comment publicly involved trying to protect the two young children she now had to raise alone; some of it resulted from coping with what would now be regarded as post-traumatic stress syndrome, as she sought answers to her grief from a priest and a psychotherapist.

But at least some of her reticence derived from aristocratic instincts. Jack and Jackie Kennedy lived among the very rich, which involved the wife refusing to dignify rumors of a husband’s infidelity or other trespasses. 

Time correspondent Hugh Sidey noted that JFK liked Lord David Cecil’s biography of a Regency rake, Young Melbourne, because it described “a society of young, wealthy aristocrats who devoted themselves honorably and tirelessly to service to their queen and empire—and on their weekends to themselves and their pleasures.”

The upshot of it was that if the rumors weren’t publicly acknowledged, they would fade out of consciousness—for all intents and purposes, disappearing. 

In a nation without royalty—fought, explicitly, against royalty—Mrs. Kennedy’s decades-long taciturnity about her husband’s dalliances enabled her to maintain her own queenly mystique. 

Whether reserve, class, desire for privacy, or some combination of these, that attitude led many to remain stoutly loyal to her, perhaps none more so than the Secret Service personnel who guarded her and her husband.  

It wasn’t until after her death, three decades after Dallas, that several on this detail opened up about Jack’s constant, reckless White House trysts for Seymour Hersh in The Dark Side of Camelot—or how some, like Clint Hill, thought the President had made it far more difficult to protect him against snipers in Dallas by riding in an open motorcade.