#Jacqueline sitting next to Jack in the springs like an hour later:

[lmelodie]

PRESIDENTIAL ALERT! THE GIRLS ARE FIGHTING!

Disclaimer that is NOT The Breakup Fight, this is more like An Attempt at Reconciliation Gone Wrong fight. Because they’re LEGENDS and LEGENDARY FISTICUFFS ARE AWSOME. You don’t start shit with either one of these two unless you are confident that you can finish it. Or survive.

[seniorbrief]

This Was Jackie Kennedy’s Incredible Mark on History

AP/REX/Shutterstock

This article was originally written by Carl Sferrazza Anthony and first appeared in the June 2001 issue of Reader’s Digest.

“I’m sixty-two now, and I’ve been in the public eye for more than thirty years,” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis told a friend in 1991. “I can’t believe anybody still cares about me or is interested in what I do.” How wrong she was.

When she stepped into our lives, she was just 31, the youngest First Lady of the 20th century. She lived in the White House only from 1961 to 1963, yet re­mained an object of admiration, and even obsession, until the day she died. Part of the fascination with Jackie was due to timing: television exploded as a mass medium at the precise moment she and JFK and their beautiful children became the First Family. We could see them on TV, we loved what we saw, we wanted to see them again. Later, after the assassinations of JFK and RFK, she provided a place to focus the national grief.

She was more, though, than a pretty face on the small screen or the queen in a sad fairy tale. As a modern Supermom, she raised Caro­line and John into exemplary adults, avoiding the potholes many of their cousins hit. Just as feminism ar­rived, she went to work as a book editor, brown-bagging her lunch and sitting in a windowless office until she earned her way up the corpo­rate ladder. She kept on trying at romance, too, marrying Aristotle Onassis and, after he died, settling into a comfortable relationship with financier Maurice Templesman. This spring a tribute to Jackie Ken­nedy— modern American woman­ plus some spectacular clothes she wore in the White House—will be on ex­hibit at New York City’s Metropoli­tan Museum of Art, before traveling to Boston. “It’s an opportunity,” says guest curator Hamish Bowles, “to ex­plore the style and the substance of a woman who defined a generation.” Here, a fresh look at Jackie, and why we still admire her.

Underwood Archives/UIG/REX/Shutterstock

Although she called it Camelot only after JFK’s assassination, Jackie began working on an image for the Administration the moment she and the President moved into the White House. She thought everything through­, especially how things looked.

Take, for instance, the many pho­tographs of the family at play, which appeared in magazines like Life, Look and The Saturday Evening Post. Seem­ingly casual, some of them were in fact professionally lit, and the peo­ple in them styled, made-up and posed. Photographer Richard Ave­don shot a breathtaking series of photographs of Jackie and baby John. The pictures are as crisp and allur­ing as the fashion-magazine covers for which Avedon is best known. “She was aware of what the camera did for the children, and for the fam­ily,” says Jacques Lowe, another pho­tographer who worked with Mrs. Kennedy.

All of her efforts at creating a Kennedy image came together in the 1962 television tour of the White House. One-third of the nation was watching that night—56 million peo­ple. The special, which won Jackie an Emmy Award, displayed her meticulous restoration of the Execu­tive Mansion. But it was the First Lady, not the glorious Empire style of the revitalized Red Room, that riveted the nation. “I remember watching and listening to Mrs. Kennedy more than thinking about the White House,” Barbara Bush later said in an interview. See these rare photos of John and Jackie Kennedy.

Creating Camelot also meant that bad habits were discouraged, at least in public. A lifelong smoker (Marl­boros, Salems), Mrs. Kennedy did her best to veto photos that showed her with a cigarette in hand. Her press policy was “minimum infor­mation given with maximum po­liteness.” Her unavailability, in the end, only heightened her mystique.

Palmieri Tony Machalaba Nick Traina Sal/Penske Media/REX/Shutterstock

“I feel as though I have turned into a piece of public property,” Mrs. Kennedy told an acquaintance in early 1961. During the Presidential campaign the previous summer and autumn, the press and the public focused intently on the young Mrs. Kennedy. And small won­der: no candidate’s wife in living memory had looked so good. The blunt cut of her hair, the clean, sim­ple lines of her brightly colored cloth­ing—American women craved the Jackie Look.

Partly it was the sheer novelty of her. Jackie was a new woman for a new time—the ’60s. She waterskied, she danced the twist, she listened to the bossa nova on her White House hi-fi.

Department stores began using models and drawings in ads that looked like Jackie. A movie maga­zine offered advice on “How to Be Your Town’s Jackie Kennedy,” with penny-wise advice on copying her look. The subject of all this atten­tion left her somewhat bewildered. “What does the way I wear my hair have to do with my husband’s abil­ity to serve as President?” she asked.

The scrutiny became so intense that Jackie realized she needed help from a professional. She turned to New York designer Oleg Cassini, a family friend who had once been one of Hollywood’s top costume designers. As she wrote him, “I re­fuse to have Jack’s Administration plagued by fashion stories of a sen­sational nature—or to be the Marie Antoinette of the 1960s.” Cassini re­called his initial meetings with Mrs. Kennedy, when they worked out what she would wear at her hus­band’s swearing-in:

“She asked me to come meet with her in her Georgetown University Hospital room just days after she gave birth to John], two months be­fore the Inauguration. All the other women [ would be wearing] furs, looking like bears. My concept was to make her look divinely simple­ in a beige coat and hat. She came out, and was instantly distinct.

“Immediately a style was established. It was not a French look, not an American look, but a Jackie Look. She said to me, ‘You dress me per­fectly for the role.’ For the role! And what was the role? First Lady of the country. And First Lady of the world, really, at that moment.”

(You’ll want to steal these 7 timeless fashion tips from Jackie Kennedy.)

CONSOLIDATED NEWS SERVICE/REX/Shutterstock

On Friday morning, November 22, 1963, Jackie put on a Chanel suit in the rooms she shared with the President at the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth. The President, Mrs. Kennedy told friends later, had chosen the suit for her. Within hours, the pink wool jacket and skirt had become a part of his­tory. Mrs. Kennedy wore the suit through LBJ’s swearing-in ceremony, on the long, sad flight back to Wash­ington, and finally for the return to the White House.

On the plane coming East, she began to reflect on how she wanted the White House prepared for the return of the President. As White House usher Nelson Pierce recalled: “That afternoon was spent looking up the details so that we could have things as near as possible the way they were at the time Lincoln was assassinated. It was 4:20 Saturday morning when Mrs. Kennedy came with the President’s body, and at 4:10 we had finished putting up the last pieces of crepe.”

Everyone had an opinion about the funeral details. Catholic Church officials in Washington wanted her to hold the ceremony in the grand Shrine of the Immaculate Concep­tion. She held out for St. Matthew’s, which was smaller—but was where the President had often attended church. Some members of the Presi­dent’s family wanted him buried in the Kennedy plot in Massachusetts. She decided on Arlington National Cemetery. The Secret Service ques­tioned her decision to walk behind the caisson from the White House to the church.

Jackie stood firm. Familiar as it is, footage of her long walk behind the riderless horse, Black Jack, a pair of boots tucked backward into the stirrups, has lost none of its awful majesty. Recalling Mrs. Kennedy, and the dignity she showed, French Presi­dent Charles de Gaulle said, “She gave the whole world an example of how to behave.” This is the last thing JFK said to Jackie before he died.

Traina/Penske Media/REX/Shutterstock

Even while attending her husband’s burial, Jackie never forgot her obligation to Caroline and John. Just hours after the funeral, the widowed former First Lady hosted her son’s third birth­day party at the White House.

From the time they were toddlers until they left home, Mrs. Kennedy’s children were her priority. Caroline and John drew nearly as much cu­riosity as their parents. “I think it’s hard enough to bring up children anyway, and everyone knows that limelight is the worst thing for them. They either get conceited or else they get hurt,” Jackie said. “They need their mother’s affection and guidance, and long periods of time alone with her. That’s what gives them security in an often confusing new world.”

She relished the role of everyday mom. For Caroline and her class­mates, Jackie managed to get ahold of a pregnant rabbit so that the chil­dren could all anticipate the arrival of a litter of bunnies. Recalled Kennedy friend and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “On Halloween evening in 1962, the doorbell rang. When my fourteen-year-old daugh­ter opened the door to the trick-or­-treaters, she found a collection of small hobgoblins leaping up and down. After a moment a masked mother in the background called out that it was time to go to their next house. It was, of course, Jackie.”

After the assassination, Mrs. Ken­nedy and the children moved into a house in Georgetown. To her dis­may, crowds of gawkers still showed up daily for a glimpse of John and Caroline at play or on their way to school. The next year Jackie moved to New York, hoping the big city­ and an apartment high above Fifth Avenue would offer a refuge. “I want them to know about how the rest of the world lives,” she told the New York World Journal Tribune in 1967, “but also I want to be able to give them some kind of sanctuary when they need it, someplace to take them into when things happen to them that do not necessarily hap­pen to other children.”

Through the ’60s and ’70s, Jackie made JFK as much a part of her children’s lives as she could. They visited some of his favorite places, such as the ranch of an Argentine family friend, where JFK had spent a spring vacation as a teenager. On that trip, John Jr. was too young to grasp what the visit was about, but Jackie said she believed it would all fall into place for him later. “I want to help him go back and find his father,” she said.

Said family friend Fred Papert: “She raised her kids so that all three locked onto each other in a way that families almost never do. They needed one another. They all came through for one another. She really liked them as friends, and they her.”

AP/REX/Shutterstock

Many people reacted with astonishment when Jackie married Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis in October 1968, just four months after the assassination of Robert Kennedy. She was 39. He was in his sixties. What was she thinking?

In fact, Onassis had been a Kennedy family acquaintance for years. Rose Kennedy, JFK’s mother, gave Jackie her blessing. As she later wrote, “I told her to make her plans as she chose to do, and to go ahead, with my loving good wishes.” Jackie later said: “When I married Ari, she of all people was the one who en­couraged me—who said, ‘He’s a good man. ‘”

One thing Onassis also offered was security. “He was a source of refuge and protection,” said her brother-in­-law Sen. Edward Kennedy. “I think she felt safe with him.” Jackie mar­ried Ari on his private island, Skor­pios, and had at her disposal homes in Paris and Athens, helicopters, a yacht and Olympic Airways—all of it heavily guarded.

Transformed from the Widow Kennedy to Jackie O, she became a sort of irreverent, naughty figure in the American imagination. She with­drew, but people still wanted to see what she was up to. Paparazzi from all over the world obliged, once even photographing her sunbathing with no suit on.

The marriage grew cooler as the years went on, and Onassis went into a slump after the death of his son, Alexander, in 1973. Two years later, he was dead. Jackie and Ari were together for just seven years. For her, it was a healing interlude. ”Aristotle Onassis rescued me,” she said, “at a moment when my life was engulfed with shadows.”

Peter Simins/Penske Media/REX/Shutterstock

The period that began in September 1975 was perhaps the happiest time of Jackie’s life. She was doing exactly what she wanted––and not what parents, husbands, family, friends, and the public expected. Now 46, she took an editing job at Viking Press. She had no previous professional editing experience. She was assigned a tiny office, which was what she also got when she moved to Doubleday as an associate editor in 1978. “Like everybody else,” she said, “I have to work my way up to an office with a window.” She finally got a view when she was promoted to senior editor in 1984.

She was an intense, hands-on ed­itor. Colleagues could tell when she was pleased—she would rub her hands together and say, “Hot spit!” Variety was the only consistency of her projects: photography books like Egyptian Time by Robert Lyons and Allure by Diana Vreeland, biogra­phies of Czar Nicholas II and Jean Harlow, recollections by friends of Fred Astaire and George Balanchine, and even a collection of articles from Rolling Stone. Says Doubleday colleague and friend Lisa Drew:

“Part of the joy of publishing is that you learn from every book. Much was made in the press about how she got her own coffee and did her own xeroxing. It wasn’t a big deal, but it was written about as if a mira­cle had occurred. It amused us how people outside were dazzled by this celebrity. Brighter, funnier, nicer than many, yes—but she was just another person.”

In February 1994, when she was 64, it was announced that the former First Lady had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, often a treatable form of cancer. Five years earlier, she had re­sponded to my written questions and then corrected the manuscript for one of my books, First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents’ Wives and Their Power, 1789-l990. Judging from her notes, I sensed she was able to view the notion of being the world’s most famous woman with detach­ment. In the middle of a sentence that read “If there was one sphere where Jacqueline had great influence, it was fashion,” she scribbled, in blue ink, ‘Much to her annoyance!’”

She was pleased with the book because she felt it would move peo­ple’s opinions of her beyond mere style: “I hope now that people will realize,” she said, “that there was something under that pillbox hat.”

Now, take a look at these rarely seen photos of Jackie Kennedy.

Original Source -> This Was Jackie Kennedy’s Incredible Mark on History

source https://www.seniorbrief.com/this-was-jackie-kennedys-incredible-mark-on-history/