Classic Chronicles

"Almost nobody who looks at this photograph knows that it was taken just three days after one of the most talked-about moments in American celebrity history, because on the nineteenth of May nineteen sixty two, Marilyn Monroe had stepped to the microphone at Madison Square Garden in New York in a dress so formfitting she had been sewn into it, and delivered a breathy, shimmering rendition of Happy Birthday to the President of the United States in front of fifteen thousand people, while Jackie Kennedy was conspicuously and very deliberately not there, having chosen instead to attend a horse show in Virginia rather than witness a spectacle the whole world was already gossiping about; and then three days later, on the twenty-second of May, Jacqueline Kennedy appeared at the White House beside her husband to greet delegates to the Campaign Conference for Democratic Women, and she reached over and took his hand, and someone photographed it, and the image is so quietly powerful that it has outlasted almost everything else from that entire presidency; because whatever was complicated between them, whatever was difficult and unspoken and painful in the private architecture of that marriage, this gesture said something that no speech or press conference ever could, which was that she had chosen to stay, chosen to stand there, chosen to be the woman beside him in the one house in America where everything was watched and recorded and remembered; JFK had created the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women the previous year, with Eleanor Roosevelt as its chair, and had issued an executive order prohibiting s*x discrimination in federal hiring, and would sign the Equal Pay Act the following year, meaning that the man in this photograph was in many ways more quietly progressive on women's rights than history has given him credit for, and the woman holding his hand had spent two years transforming the White House into a cultural landmark, winning an Emmy for her televised tour of it, and being described by the historian Arthur Schlesinger after meeting her as possessing tremendous awareness, an all-seeing eye, and a ruthless judgment, which is perhaps the most accurate description of Jacqueline Kennedy ever committed to paper. "

"What most people do not know about Jack and Jackie Kennedy is that the autumn of nineteen sixty three was the closest they had ever been in their entire marriage, because the loss of baby Patrick just months earlier, the tiny boy who had lived only thirty-nine hours and fought with everything he had in that hospital in Boston, had done something to both of them that no amount of political success or public adulation ever could, and Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who was there for all of it, said plainly that prior to Patrick's death they had been much more restrained and less willing to express their close, loving relationship in public, and that it was their shared grief over their son that changed everything between them; Jackie confided to a close friend just days before Dallas that she believed they were finally going to make it as a couple, that she had won, and those words landed differently once you know what happened next, because the last thing JFK said to the world before the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza was not a speech or a declaration but the most ordinary possible remark, telling Nellie Connally no, you certainly cannot say the people of Dallas haven't given you a nice welcome, and then the world cracked open; Jackie recalled in her own words what happened in that limousine on the way to Parkland Hospital, saying that all the way there she was bent over her husband asking him Jack, Jack, can you hear me, I love you, and those words are the truest thing in this entire story, not the mythology or the Camelot narrative or the eternal flame at Arlington but a woman on a moving car in Dallas saying the most human sentence in the English language to the man she had finally, after ten complicated and painful and beautiful years, truly found her way back to, and the cruelest thing history ever did to Jacqueline Kennedy was give her that closeness and then take it away on a sunny Friday afternoon in Texas before she ever got the chance to keep it. "

"When you know what was about to happen, this photograph becomes almost too much to bear, because the woman standing beside her son at the re-dedication of the JFK Library in the spring of circa nineteen ninety three was only months away from the moment her doctor would find a lump near her groin after she fell from her horse, and the diagnosis that would follow, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, would move through her body with terrifying speed, reaching her spinal cord and brain and liver within months, and Jackie Kennedy Onassis, who had survived the assassination of her husband, the assassination of her brother-in-law, and thirty years of the most ferocious public scrutiny any woman in American history had ever endured, would be gone by the following spring; but standing in this photograph she does not know any of that yet, and neither does her son, who told the New York Times that very year when asked about his father's legacy that it was hard to talk about a legacy or a mystique because it was simply his family, his mother, his sister, his father, they were a family like any other, and that sentence contains more grace than most people ever manage in a lifetime; what almost nobody knows about this mother and this son is that Jackie had extracted a solemn promise from John that he would never learn to fly, because she had recurring nightmares that he would die in a plane crash, and the fear was so visceral and so specific that she made him swear to it, and he kept that promise faithfully for every year she was alive, and then three months after she died he went and obtained his pilot's license, and five years after that his plane went into the ocean off Martha's Vineyard at night, and Jackie Kennedy, who had somehow seen it coming in her dreams long before it happened, was not there to grieve him, which is perhaps the only mercy in the whole unbearable story. "

"What most people do not know when they look at this photograph is that the house in the background represents something far more profound than a weekend retreat, because Wexford was the only home that John and Jacqueline Kennedy ever designed and built together from the ground up, and Jackie had poured everything she had into it, designing every room herself on yellow legal pad paper, writing detailed handwritten notes about where each piece of furniture should go and how the light should fall through the French doors onto the flagstone terrace, all while keeping the entire construction project secret from the American public because she knew there would be an outcry over the cost, which had begun as a promise to Jack to stay under forty thousand dollars and quietly climbed past one hundred and twenty seven thousand before it was finished, with Joe Kennedy Sr. secretly covering the bill; Jack had initially resisted the whole idea and only gave in after Jackie wore him down with what those close to them described as persistent pouting, but the house won him over, and after his last visit there in early November of circa nineteen sixty three, Jackie confided to her close friend the artist Bill Walton words that land like a whisper from another world, saying I think we're going to make it, I think we're going to be a couple, I've won; she had designed a bedroom for little John Jr. to share with baby Patrick, who had lived only thirty-nine hours and never saw the house at all, and in the weeks this photograph was taken those same rooms held a three-year-old boy who was running and laughing across the Virginia countryside with his father, and who would practice in those very fields the gesture that would freeze time at the funeral twelve days after Dallas, the small raised hand, the perfect military salute that a toddler had been playfully rehearsing at Wexford without the faintest idea that history was quietly preparing him for it. "

"Jackie Kennedy once said something that stopped people cold when they heard it, which was that if you bungle raising your children, she didn't think whatever else you did in life mattered very much, and what makes that statement almost unbearably moving is knowing the extraordinary lengths to which she went to honor it, because she was doing this impossible balancing act inside the most scrutinized address on earth, setting up a kindergarten in the White House solarium so Caroline could have something resembling a normal school morning, giving strict instructions to the Secret Service that both children were to be permitted to fall down, get back up, and figure out their own problems without adults hovering, and somehow managing to keep two small children laughing and playing and feeling loved inside a building where every single moment was historical and photographed and dissected by the entire world; Caroline's pony Macaroni, a gift from Vice President Lyndon Johnson, received so many fan letters from the American public that the White House had to manage the correspondence separately, and during one official tour of the grounds with the Empress of Iran, the pony attempted to eat the daffodils right out of the Empress's hands, prompting Jackie to say with absolute composure, he is going to eat you, your majesty, a line that says everything about who she was under pressure; and then there is the extraordinary fact that a young, broke songwriter named Neil Diamond once saw a photograph of little Caroline in her riding gear beside Macaroni on the cover of Life magazine, and was so moved by the pure innocent joy of that image that he wrote one of the most beloved songs in American pop history, Sweet Caroline, keeping the inspiration entirely secret for nearly four decades until he performed it via satellite for Caroline's fiftieth birthday and finally told her the truth, and she had no idea, which means that every stadium that has ever erupted singing those words was unknowingly singing a love letter to a little girl in the White House whose mother had decided, above all else, that her children would know they were cherished. "

"There is something almost unbearably poetic about the timing of this photograph, taken on the last day of a year that had begun with the greatest triumph of Joseph Kennedy's extraordinary life, because just twelve months earlier his son John had stood on the steps of the Capitol and delivered one of the most electrifying inaugural addresses in American history, the culmination of everything Joe Sr. had schemed and sacrificed and invested and willed into existence over five decades of relentless ambition, and yet here on New Year's Eve the man who had built an entire dynasty with his bare hands was lying in a hospital bed at St. Mary's in Palm Beach having lost almost every power he had ever possessed, struck down by a massive stroke just days earlier while playing golf at the Palm Beach Golf Club, carried back to his house in a golf cart by his niece, taken to his bedroom where he issued one last command in the voice that had once moved nations, which was simply do not call any doctors, a command his family ignored entirely; the stroke paralyzed his entire right side and reduced the vocabulary of one of the most powerful men in twentieth century America to a single word, a long drawn-out sound that those who witnessed it described as Nooooo, and what made this almost impossible to absorb was that his mind remained completely intact behind that single syllable, every thought and memory and grief fully present and unable to reach the surface, and in this condition he would spend eight more years watching history happen to his family, watching John be assassinated in Dallas, watching Robert be shot in Los Angeles, watching Ted carry the weight of everything that remained, and he could not say a word of comfort or warning to any of them, the architect of Camelot locked inside the house he had built, and JFK and Jackie walking out of that hospital on the last evening of nineteen sixty-one understood something the rest of the world did not yet know, which was that the era of the father was over, and everything that came next belonged entirely to the sons. "

"Nobody could have told the little boy sitting on a wall in the Menteng Dalam neighborhood of Jakarta in the late nineteen sixties that he would one day be President of the United States, partly because nobody on that street had ever seen an American child before, and partly because at that precise moment he was flapping his arms like a giant bird and making cawing noises at the Indonesian kids on the other side of the fence, which was his six-year-old strategy for making friends across a language barrier, and apparently it worked, because Barry Soetoro, as he was registered in his school records under his stepfather's surname, became beloved in that neighborhood for exactly the kind of warm, unself-conscious, joyful humanness that would one day fill arenas on the other side of the world; the house his family moved into in that first year had no electricity, the streets outside were unpaved, and the backyard was home to two baby crocodiles alongside chickens and birds of paradise, a detail that sounds invented but is documented, and his mother Ann Dunham, the brilliant anthropologist from Kansas who had followed her Indonesian husband Lolo Soetoro to one of the most turbulent cities on earth just two years after Suharto's violent rise to power, still managed to wake her son before dawn most mornings to give him English correspondence lessons before he walked to the Catholic school around the corner, where the enrollment register listed his religion as Islam because of his stepfather's faith, but every morning began with Christian prayers, and during Quran readings at a second school he attended he reportedly got laughed at by classmates for his hilariously wrong pronunciation, and he laughed along with them; Obama later wrote in his memoir that those Jakarta years were a joyous time when he ran the streets with the children of farmers and servants and tailors and clerks, and when he returned as the 44th President of the United States decades later and stood in that city that had made him who he was, he said simply, I barely recognized it, though the boy on the wall would have recognized everything. "

"There is almost no way to look at this photograph without your chest tightening, because the man smiling and waving from that motorcade route in San Antonio had no way of knowing that the plane standing behind him on that tarmac would carry his body home the next day, and the woman beside him in that image was at that very moment being handed a bouquet of yellow roses by a student at the University of the Incarnate Word as the motorcade slowed along its twenty-six-mile route through a city where more than a hundred thousand people had lined the streets just to catch a single glimpse of them, and witnesses who were there that day used one word above all others to describe the atmosphere, which was electric, a word that does not even begin to contain the feeling of standing on a Texas sidewalk in the final hours of Camelot without knowing it was the final hours; the trip to Texas had been planned as a political peace mission of sorts, because feuding factions within the Democratic Party were threatening to fracture the state ahead of the upcoming nineteen sixty-four election, and Kennedy had come not only to unite his party but to do what he always did best, which was to stand in front of ordinary people and make them feel that the future was something worth fighting for, and his last official act in San Antonio was dedicating the Aerospace Medical Health Center at Brooks Air Force Base, a facility devoted to understanding what the human body could withstand beyond the boundaries of Earth, which feels almost unbearably poetic now; the full itinerary stretched ahead of them still, Dallas the next day, then Austin, then a stay at Lyndon Johnson's ranch, and then home to Washington in time for little John Jr.'s third birthday on the twenty-fifth of November, a birthday his father never came home to celebrate, and the aircraft visible in this frame, SAM 26000, a Boeing VC-137C known to the world as Air Force One, took off from Texas carrying a president and landed in Washington carrying a nation's grief, and nothing was ever the same again. "

"Most people who study the Kennedy dynasty begin the story with the glamour of Hyannis Port or the tragedy of Dallas, but the real beginning is almost incomprehensibly far from any of that, because it starts with a barrel maker named Patrick Kennedy who stepped off a boat in Boston Harbor in the late eighteen forties with nothing but the clothes on his back, having fled the Irish famine that was consuming County Wexford and killing everything around him, and he settled in the grim working-class docks of East Boston where he built a quiet life making whiskey barrels with his hands, married a woman named Bridget Murphy who had made the same desperate ocean crossing, and then died of cholera just nine years after arriving on American soil, leaving behind five children and a wife who ran a small grocery store to keep them alive, and the youngest of those children, Patrick Joseph Kennedy, known to history simply as PJ, quit school at the age of fourteen to work as a longshoreman on the very same docks where his father had toiled, saved every coin he earned until he could open a small saloon in Haymarket Square, and then turned that saloon into three bars and a whiskey-importing company, and turned that business success into political capital so genuine and so rooted in the suffering of his community that the poor Irish immigrants of East Boston sent him to the Massachusetts State Legislature in circa eighteen eighty four, making him the first Kennedy ever elected to public office; his son Joe Kennedy went to Harvard, declared himself the youngest bank president in America at twenty five, built one of the greatest private fortunes of the twentieth century, and then watched his own son John Fitzgerald Kennedy stand before the world as the thirty-fifth President of the United States, all of it springing from a famine refugee who died unknown in a Boston tenement and never once imagined what his bloodline was quietly becoming, which is perhaps the most breathtaking three-generation arc in the entire history of American democracy. "

"Nobody who was there that day at the Los Angeles Police Department in the summer of circa early nineteen seventies would have called what happened extraordinary, because to the officers on duty it was simply the next thing that needed doing, and yet the photograph that landed on the front page of the Los Angeles Times stopped readers cold in a way that decades of crime stories and political headlines never quite managed, because it showed something that no one had ever really thought to look for inside a police station, which was tenderness so pure and so instinctive that it made the whole idea of authority feel suddenly, unexpectedly human; a nine-month-old baby girl had been found alone and screaming in a downtown hotel room, the manager having finally called police after hours of complaints from other guests, and when officers arrived they found no food, no crib, no parent, nothing but a small person in desperate need of someone to step up, and that someone was twenty-eight-year-old policewoman Pat Johnson, who did not have a nursery or a feeding kit or any of the equipment one might reasonably expect for a situation like this, and so she fed the baby milk and Jell-O and cottage cheese from whatever was available and then looked around the room for somewhere safe and warm for the child to sleep, and her eyes landed on a filing cabinet drawer, which she lined and transformed into an improvised crib with the same matter-of-fact resourcefulness that defines people who choose service over comfort as a way of life; in nineteen seventy-one female officers in the LAPD were still largely confined to cases involving women and children, considered unsuited by their male colleagues for the harder edges of the job, and yet here was proof that the hardest edge of all, the edge where human fragility meets human need, was exactly where a woman's instinct and a police officer's duty became the same single impulse, and the baby, who never knew any of this, slept soundly in that drawer. "

"There is a letter that most of the world has never read, handwritten in the weeks after the shots rang out in Dallas, addressed to the archbishop who had delivered her husband's eulogy at her personal request, and in it Jacqueline Kennedy wrote words so raw and so honest that they strip away every layer of the polished, composed widow the cameras believed they were seeing, because she told him that she no longer believed in a child's vision of heaven, that there was no way now to commune with Jack, that it would be so long before she herself was dead and even then she did not know if she would ever be reunited with him, and she ended the letter by apologizing for writing this way and asking him please not to try to convince her just yet, and that phrase, just yet, contains more grief than most human beings will ever be asked to carry, because it is the grief of someone who has not given up entirely but simply cannot be reached right now; and what the public never knew was that just days before writing that letter she had done something so quietly devastating that it went almost entirely unnoticed, quietly arranging for the reburial of two of her lost children, the stillborn daughter she had named Arabella and the baby son Patrick who had lived only thirty-nine hours, so that they would rest in the earth beside their father at Arlington, because she could not bear for Jack to be alone there, and she told almost nobody; biographer Sarah Bradford would later describe her state in those months as a catatonic grief that marked her for life, writing that no one would ever be able to react normally to her again and that she could never, however hard she tried, escape the golden cage that tragedy had built around her, and she tried very hard, filling her days with purpose and culture and the raising of two children under the most impossible scrutiny imaginable, and if she sometimes seemed absent or unreachable to those around her, it was because part of her never fully came back from that motorcade in Dallas, and perhaps it was never supposed to. "