Jackie
She was the first lady of TV politics, her style transformed the White House, she helped hold a grieving nation together and, despite her sorrow, she lived her life her own way to the very end
During the summer of 1960, in the midst of John Kennedy's presidential campaign and while she was pregnant with John Jr., Jacqueline Kennedy retreated to her in-laws' compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., and read Henry Adams's novel Democracy--a cynical portrait of the mixing of love and power in 19th-century Washington. One of the passages she commended to others was this: "The old is going; the new is coming. Wealth, office, power are at auction. Who bids highest? who hates with most venom? who intrigues with most skill? who has done the dirtiest, the meanest, the darkest, and the most political work? He shall have his rewards." At times Jackie added a fillip of her own: "What? Nothing about the press?"
Adams's Washington did not seem far away from the Washington over which she was soon to reign. What the latter part of the 20th century added to the picture was a quenchless yearning to probe the lives of the powerful. When she died last Thursday in New York at age 64 from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was the most famous and most mysterious woman in the world. The two traits fed each other. But her meaning to Americans far exceeds her fame. She was an instrumental player in one of the great social transformations in history: the shift to an instant mass media culture.
The arrival of Jack and Jackie Kennedy on the national stage perfectly coincided with the growing ubiquity of television. Together, these two new forces--a technology of intimacy and a glamorous, cosmopolitan, handsome, young couple worthy of fascination--fused and redefined politics and culture. If Kennedy was elected, wrote Norman Mailer after the 1960 Democratic convention, "myth would emerge once more, because America's politics would now be also America's favorite movie, America's first soap opera, America's bestseller."
In control. At first, the couple's relation to the new fame-making machinery was relatively happy. Although Jackie loathed publicity and feared its potentially malevolent impact on her children, the media's portrayal of the family was so saccharine that she had little ground for complaint. She controlled the things that mattered most to her--her exposure, her image and the privacy of her children. But the assassination of John Kennedy tore away everything that could protect her, 6-year-old Caroline and 3-year-old John Jr.
Racked with grief, many citizens felt almost as vulnerable as Jackie as they communed at their television sets during that awful weekend in November 1963. It was at her moment of rawest exposure and emotional devastation that Jacqueline Kennedy performed a miracle. At the astonishingly tender age of 34, she held a wounded nation together with her transcendent dignity and grace. Without uttering a word in public, she lifted up the nation by not breaking down herself. The hands she held at the funeral were her children's, but they might as well have been those of the hundreds of millions who grieved with her.
The widow followed this extraordinary feat with one of the greatest public relations triumphs of all time. Days after John Kennedy was buried, Jackie sat down with author Theodore White and set about defining what her husband's legacy ought to be. The results were published in the next issue of Life magazine. "For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote," White quoted her in the story. But Jack had a "hero idea of history, the idealistic view." And Jackie believed her slain husband fit that mold. White wrote of how she was transfixed by the thought that one of the president's favorite songs at the end of his life was from a Broadway show. She recited:
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