the best thing we can do

Reading about Jacqueline Kennedy's efforts to do her best while traveling with her husband the president, in the spring of 1961, with hindsight and layers of reviewed commentary and opinion, and waves of information having come at us in the years between then and now, we have different awareness of how things went, and what it all came to.

Anyone, doing any kind of "job" always wants to do well for one reason or other, or maybe several reasons at once, take your pick.
Mrs. Kennedy wanted to dress right and have a nice image when she accompanied her husband to Paris and Vienna for several reasons --
1. to do a good job for her husband;
2. to portray her own love and respect for France and its culture;
3. to represent the United States well;
4. to be not-picked-on by the picky French fashion press...

Truth is, on one level, aside from being nervous to do a good job with the "world watching," she was also having the time of her life, in a sense, because going to Paris, and visiting with the de Gaulles and the André Malrauxs, and the lah-di-dahs of the world was -- like -- totally her thing! I mean, that's what she loved, what she was attracted to.

Asking Jackie Kennedy to
go to Paris, to
visit with President de Gaulle
about French art and culture and history
would be like --
(hello?!)

asking me to--
go to London in the 1980s, to
visit with Princess Diana
about --
the music of Bob Dylan !!

I mean, it's one of those -- ooh, it's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it! situations.

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So that visit was a brilliant success for several reasons --
wanting to do a good job for husband and country,
wanting to not-screw-up (the flip side of wanting to do well),
and -- natural native enthusiasm.

As the American First Lady, 1961 to 1963, Mrs. John F. Kennedy did an excellent job and set an example that most people in that era appreciated -- she became, in the low-brow vernacular, a star. And that's a fine line -- I don't think she wanted to be "a star" but she did SUCH a Good Job that she Became a star, like it or not, with the media becoming an aspect which had to increasingly be "managed"...and then after the assassination, the public's natural supportiveness or enthusiasm for Pres. & Mrs. Kennedy sort of over-flowed into combination of grief, outrage, shock, and the love and support people wanted to express sometimes was expressed in a way that was nice, like all the sympathy cards Mrs. Kennedy received, but sometimes it got expressed in ways that were intimidating.

The various biographies state Jackie was intimidated living in Washington after the assassination -- she said if she took the two children out, women they didn't know would just sort of mob them and try to hug and kiss the children.

Tour buses drove by the house in Washington where they lived -- "That's where President Kennedy's bereaved widow lives with her two young children" ...great. Some tourist one day peeled a piece of bark off of one of the trees in the yard, to take home as a souvenir of the fallen president's bereaved widow...(??) So then someone else did it too and soon all the bark was gone from every tree in the yard.

(That could creep you out. Wake up in the morning and see tree trunks, shiny white, barkless -- "Have grasshoppers come through here?" No just those freaky tour buses...)

For the rest of her life, she had to deal with the over-publicity, freighted with the assassination trauma felt by the whole country. The whole World. Paparazzi followed her to take her picture at unsuspecting moments, in New York City when she moved there, & all the way over to Greece.

The "stardom" stuff was made exponentially worse by the horrifying "accident" of history that was the assassination, but the star stuff began when Mrs. Kennedy committed the "transgression" of --
Doing Her Job Really Well, in the first place.

Decades later when she was working as an editor for New York publishing company, she was scheduled to visit an author in Chicago -- he asked, in preparation, Do I need to line up some security for you, maybe a couple of guards to escort you, for your protection (protection -- could be from adoring fans as well as crazy nuts -- the possibilities went on and on...!)...?

I always remember the practical, quiet courage of her cheerful answer: "Oh no! I never want anything like that! The best thing we can do is just walk fast."
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Just walk fast.

-30-