In the photo, the pink pillbox hat is pushed back and her hair falls in a perfect auburn flip. She is wearing pale-pink lipstick and holding a bouquet of red, red roses. The president walks beside her.
So much power resides in that photo, taken at Dallas’ Love Field and 50 minutes before everything changed. But it is Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy at whom people stare, as if trying to look past that impenetrable field that would only grow stronger.
On that day, she would become almost mythological. “When the moment turns, (those) images of her in that suit supersede reality and thrust her into a mythological role, which is ironic because she was a person who fully understood mythology,” said Carl Sferrazza Anthony, author of “The Kennedy White House: Family Life and Pictures, 1961-1963.” “The photographs of her and the assassination itself … hit on so many levels, and one of those is the most primal. It is the reason for our perpetual fascination.”
Even in the chaos and trauma that followed the gunfire, she almost instinctively began shaping images, orchestrating movement. She noticed details.
“All the seat was full of blood and red roses,” she would recall later.
When the limo arrived at the hospital, Jacqueline Kennedy sat in shock, but she was still aware enough to protect her husband from indignity. “She would not let go,” Secret Service agent Clint Hill recalled in his book, “Mrs. Kennedy and Me.”
” ‘Please, Mrs. Kennedy,’ ” he pleaded. ” ‘Please let us get him into the hospital.’ She looked up at me … her eyes were looking, but not seeing. And then I understood: She doesn’t want anyone to see him like this. … Nobody should see the president like this.”
Hill took off his suit coat and put it over the president’s head and chest. “As soon as my coat was covering the president, she released her grip.”
She famously refused to change from the pink suit.
“Everyone kept saying to me to put a cold towel around my head and wipe the blood off,” she later told Theodore H. White, a writer for Life magazine. “I saw myself in the mirror; my whole face spattered with blood and hair. I wiped it off with Kleenex. … Then one second later, I thought, ‘Why did I wash the blood off?’ I should have left it there; let them see what they’ve done.”
On Air Force One, Vice President Lyndon Johnson waited for her and the casket. As Johnson took the oath of office, Jacqueline Kennedy was still in the suit.
“I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood,” Lady Bird Johnson wrote in her diary. “One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked, it was caked with blood — her husband’s blood. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights — that immaculate woman exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.”
Still in her blood-stained suit
Jacqueline Kennedy was still in the suit late that night, arriving at Andrews Air Force Base, holding the hand of Robert Kennedy. Blood still clung to her skirt and stockings. Her face was stoic.
“She was present at a scene of martyrdom and an intimate witness, vulnerable to that moment, escaping death herself,” said Wayne Koestenbaum, author of “Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon.” “It sealed her fate as part of a tragic, fascinating spectacle that played in millions of minds.
“The worst thing in her life that could possibly happen, happened. And it happened in broad daylight in front of everyone. It was always happening in front of everyone, a ghastly carnival replay of the worst thing that can happen.”
In first-ladydom, Jacqueline had begun to assert herself, ushering in an era of social graces, French haute couture and the restoration of a White House that, she said, “looked like it’s been furnished by discount stores.”
She hired a curator and restored the mansion with 19th-century furniture, invited cultural giants to elegant state dinners, all the while blossoming into a fashion icon, reshaping the role of first lady.
No longer a political liability to her husband, she became wildly popular, an asset. Although she did not “adore” politics, she agreed to accompany him on her “first real political trip” to Texas.
There, she would become caught in a film reel from which she would never fully escape, “except to become more radically private,” Koestenbaum said. “It is as if that moment she learns the consequences of being famous, being the object of a stranger’s attention.”
The way she managed it: She took control. Because she coveted privacy for herself and her family, and because of the public’s hunger, she carefully doled out images.
“My press relations will be minimum information,” she told her press secretary, Pamela Turnure, “given with maximum politeness.”
“It is a contradiction, but in that contradiction lies the secret of her poise and lure,” Koestenbaum said. “She did not want to be looked at, but she was in a position where she would be looked at. She was very good at being looked at.”
Jacqueline became “the outsider”
Five years after the assassination of John Kennedy, and four months after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis, a multimillionaire shipping tycoon, who owned the yacht on which she spent time after the death of her baby son, Patrick.
The tabloids began calling her “Jackie O.” On Onassis’s arm, she traveled Europe in sleek miniskirts and bouffant hair. She had become “the outsider” that the public had once accused her of being, and the public was not pleased.
“She had been sacred as a widow,” Koestenbaum said. But after the remarriage, “there was such bad publicity. She had fallen in stature. … She moved to an island. She married a pirate.”
For the most part, the American public thought she could have done better.
“It was part xenophobic,” Koestenbaum said. “He was like this short millionaire whose money was earned in disreputable ways. People thought, ‘Why would she be attracted to a man who looked like that?’ “
She said the move was to protect her children. “If they’re killing Kennedys, then my children are targets,” she said, according to “After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family, 1968 to the Present.” “I want to get out of this country.”
Onassis died in 1975. Jacqueline Kennedy’s mystique endured, even as she returned to New York and became a book editor, first at Viking Press, then at Doubleday. She climbed the editorial ladder, closing book deals with celebrities, including Michael Jackson for “Moonwalk.”
According to the book “The Eloquent Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Portrait in Her Own Words,” she was asked by poet Stephen Spender at a 1979 dinner party to name her proudest accomplishment. She told him, “Well, I think my biggest achievement is that, after going through a very difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane.”
Jacqueline Kennedy died in 1994 in her Fifth Avenue apartment in New York. Outside, crowds mourned her death. Her funeral was private.
