Posted on 11/21/2003 4:54:38 PM PST by Pedantic_Lady
WASHINGTON — Not long after that terrible day in Dallas — no one knows exactly when — a brown paper box arrived at the National Archives. The return address was on O Street, the Georgetown home of Jacqueline Kennedy’s mother. Packed inside was the pink Chanel suit first glimpsed Nov. 22, 1963, when the first lady joined JFK at a Fort Worth breakfast, and which, covered in his blood, she still wore the next morning to escort the slain president’s casket into the White House.
THERE IN THE Archives, the suit remains. Stored in a custom-designed corrugated board box, it rests on a gray steel shelf in a secured area of a suburban warehouse. It has never been cleaned. The wool skirt and jacket lie flat, with a suggestion of human form created by acid-free tissue paper folded inside the sleeves.
Only recently was a deed of gift obtained from the Kennedys’ sole surviving child, Caroline. But one hundred years will have to pass before the suit can again come before the American public. This condition is consistent with Mrs. Kennedy’s determination to balance her obligations to history with her family’s privacy. Archivists’ interests, moreover, are not only the past and present, but the future.
“Once it can be displayed it will really bring the ’60s to the present — whatever that present is,” said Steven Tilley, who oversees the Archives’ JFK Assassination Records Collection.
The Archives also has JFK’s jacket, shirt and tie — exhibits in the Warren Commission investigation of the shooting. But aside from the Brooks Brothers overcoat Abraham Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865 — the lining embroidered with an American eagle and the words “One Country/One Destiny” — perhaps no clothing in American history carries the iconic power of that pink suit.
Even out of sight, it is an indelible image in public memory. The first lady made sure of that. She purposefully bore the horror and brutality of the president’s murder for a shattered nation to see. Had she changed or shielded her appearance, Americans’ experience of the assassination would have been fundamentally altered.
“Everybody remembers the pink suit,” Tilley said. Mrs. Kennedy brought nothing new to Texas, her press secretary, Pamela Turnure, recalled in Carl Sferrazza Anthony’s book, “As We Remember Her.” She took two suits, a cocktail dress and a day dress already in her wardrobe. Her clothes stole the show on foreign trips; on a domestic political trip, Turnure said, she didn’t want to deflect attention from the president.
A VISION IN PINK
The morning of Nov. 22, a crowd gathered at the president’s Fort Worth hotel. “Where’s Jackie?” admirers shouted when JFK appeared. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself,” the president replied. “It takes longer. But of course she looks better than we do after she does it.”
Two-thousand Texans roared their approval when a vision in pink — JFK had picked the suit — finally walked into the Chamber of Commerce breakfast. Then it was on to Dallas. At 12:30 p.m., shots were fired at the motorcade, which then sped to Parkland Hospital. The Secret Service hurried Lady Bird Johnson out of her limousine, but not before she glanced over her shoulder. She described the scene to the Warren Commission: “I ... saw, in the president’s car, a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying on the back seat. I think it was Mrs. Kennedy lying over the President’s body.”
In her autobiography, Lady Bird recalled the scene aboard Air Force One while accompanying the casket to Washington: “Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. 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.”
FIRST LADY UNWAVERING
Mrs. Kennedy repeatedly rebuffed suggestions, beginning in the chaos outside Parkland’s trauma room, that she change clothes. In “The Death of a President,” William Manchester chronicled how tensions on Air Force One grew with “the feeling that something must be done about her appearance.” Mrs. Johnson tried; so, later, did Mrs. Kennedy’s own mother, Janet Auchincloss.
But she didn’t waver. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith had admired the first lady’s “excellent sense of theater” during a triumphant 1962 visit to India. What the fashion industry dubbed “the Jackie look,” the first lady saw as her “state wardrobe.” Through elegantly simple lines and a dazzling rainbow of strong solid colors — ice blue, leaf green, lemon yellow — she conveyed the youth, grace and style of President Kennedy’s New Frontier. Pink ran throughout, from a shell pink sequined chiffon evening gown to what Galbraith called a “radioactive pink” rajah-style coat.
With the president dead, that sense of theater turned to a new and determined purpose. “Keeping that clothing on was completely consistent with her realization that clothing is a medium of expression, and she wanted to say something to the world,” said Wake Forest University art Professor David Lubin, author of “Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images.”
‘WHAT THEY HAVE DONE TO JACK’
Mrs. Johnson never forgot the essence of that message, or the fierceness in the 34-year-old widow’s voice as she refused all entreaties to change her clothes. “I want them to see what they have done to Jack,” she said.
In that suit she stood at Lyndon B. Johnson’s side as he took the oath of office on Air Force One, “a silhouette from another world,” as Manchester put it. At Andrews Air Force Base, a proposal was made to exit the plane on the starboard side to avoid news photographers. She rejected it. One of the last pictures of her in the suit is in the East Room. Her shoulders hang heavily. Smeared blood covers a leg, and her gaze is fixed on the casket being lowered onto the catafalque.
At every sight of her, the nation’s grief deepened. In the private quarters of the White House, sometime around dawn on Nov. 23, she finally shed her bloodied clothing.
It’s hard to imagine, with her acute appreciation of history, that Mrs. Kennedy made no provision for the pink suit. Her maid later told Manchester that, while Mrs. Kennedy bathed, she “packed the clothes and hid the bag.” But there is no known record in the Archives explaining who later sent the box or why. There is only the return address, and in it, one small clue: an old postal zone used before zip codes, which began that July. So archivists speculate that it came to them not long after Nov. 22, 1963.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.com ...
Funny you should mention that. MSNBC had a special on JFK the other nite. Chris Matthews was interviewing Hilary. She said something to the effect of "blah blah blah, I'll never forget when..." and then quoting Jackie, " I want them to see what THEY did to my husband." I believe Hilary repeated that quote, and with emphasis. She was getting her right wing conspiracy point made.
Leni
The theory is that Jackie's mother donated it to the National Archives.
I wasn't around for the Kennedy assassination, but if it was anything close to the level of the emotion and fear on 9/11, I'm especially glad to have missed it.
She did it to give a Secret Service agent a hand onto the back of the limo. If you see all of the footage and photographs taken of the assassination, it's obvious what she's doing...but the excerpts don't make her look good. When she did that the car was speeding up and the agent was breaking into a full run to make it onto the limo.
I agree; she was a hard act to follow and in my opinion, nobody has come close to matching her for style, class, and grace...though Pat Nixon's determination to remain dignified as her husband's presidency disintegrated was impressive.
It's horrifying anytime an elected leader is stolen from the public by an assassin, no matter what party he's from.
It's entirely possible!
I think people are reading way too much into her use of the word "they."
I've always been told she was giving a secret service agent a hand onto the limo; the photos and films seem to support this.
Now that you mention it, I'd heard rumblings about that myself...that she didn't really like the Kennedy clan as a whole and didn't want her kids hanging out with them. Can't say she succeeded with JFK Jr., but she did a bang-up job with Caroline.
For an answer -- and an indication of what the Kennedys thought about the assassination -- read Farewell America: The Plot to Kill JFK (partly based on the investigation Daniel Patrick Moynihan did of the assassination for RFK).
Didn't John Connally say out loud, "They're going to kill us all"? I assume Jackie would have heard that.
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