---------- [excerpt from Camera Girl, by Carl Sferrazza Anthony] ----------------
She [Jackie Bouvier] accepted an invitation from Charlie and Martha Bartlett to an informal Sunday supper on Mother's Day, May 13, in their narrow 3419 Q Street house. They promised her that another guest would be there whom they insisted she just had to meet, whom Charlie had tried but failed to arrange her meeting earlier in the year. He kept trying....
In fact, Charlie Bartlett had first tried to introduce them at his brother David's 1947 wedding, where they were both guests. His friend was the war hero, author, and Democratic congressman John F. Kennedy, known to his family and friends as Jack.
A Harvard University graduate and a Catholic, he was running for Congress when he met Charlie in 1946, and they became close the next year when he was a freshman congressman and Charlie was a Washington newspaper correspondent.
As she joined the other guests in the small garden of the Bartlett home, the college senior was unintimidated by the presence not only of Congressman Kennedy but also of Senator Albert Gore and his wife, Pauline. "She was the odd young lady and a beautiful one," Albert Gore remembered. "He, the odd young man and surely a dashing one. It was a most enjoyable evening." ...
When she arrived at the May dinner, Jackie Bouvier knew more about the congressman's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, than about him. Joseph P. Kennedy had been in the papers and on newsreels since she was a child. Now sixty-two, he was a millionaire former U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James's and a movie studio mogul with connections to the nation's media and business leaders, and also a father of nine children, with expansive properties at Cape Cod and Palm Beach as well as a New York residential hotel suite.
Even the most superficial facts about Jack, however, made immediately clear their substantive similarities, despite their generational difference; Jack would turn thirty-four three weeks after their meeting, while Jackie would be twenty-two in July. He'd lived and studied in London and explored Europe with passionate curiosity. His first ambition was to write, for which he also had a genuine talent.
After publishing a book in 1940, Why England Slept (about the British government's failure to recognize the global threat posed by Hitler), and his heroic wartime service in the navy, he briefly pursued a career in journalism, for the Hearst newspaper syndicate.
Working in Europe the summer after the war ended, he reported on England's failure to reelect Winston Churchill as prime minister, observed the personal interaction between American president Truman and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, and also covered the first session of the United Nations in San Francisco.
In later examining a diary Jack kept during his time as a journalist, historian Fredrik Logevall was struck by two significant qualities that were likely apparent to Jackie at the May dinner, because they also defined her: an "inquisitive mind" and "curiosity about the world." After a year as a journalist, Kennedy had determined to make news, not write about it, whereas Jackie Bouvier hoped to make news by writing about it. A mutual interest was clearly sparked.
Mummy had met Jack Kennedy at a Washington dinner without Jackie, declaring him a "purposeful young man," but she didn't consider politics a dignified profession for a potential husband for her daughter. As Jackie was always eager to defy Mummy, it may have even made Jack Kennedy more appealing to her. "My mother used to bring around all these beaus for me," she later observed, "but he was different."
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