intensity packed

Janet [Lee Bouvier Auchincloss] lived by the credo -- shared by many women of her class and period -- that men disliked women who had their own intellectual interests and opinions.

{excerpt, Mrs. Kennedy, by Barbara Leaming}
Frequently she repeated that the worst thing a woman could do was permit a man to see she had serious interests.

...Certainly, Janet had been wrong in another respect. Far from being put off by Jackie's intellectual interests, Kennedy was delighted by them....Like Jackie, his great obsession was history. While her specialty was French history, his was English, but they shared a particular taste for the eighteenth century. He was thrilled that they seemed to fill in each other's intellectual and cultural gaps in dozens of ways. He was as curious to learn from her about art history and design as she was to share his knowledge of the movies.

While he had read every word of Churchill, she was an admirer of de Gaulle. They both loved poetry and competed in memorizing each other's favorite poems. His idea of a present was a book he loved, and he was much given to snatching away the books Jackie was reading if they looked interesting.

Jackie...was captivated when, early on, Jack gave her two of his favorite books as a way of explaining to her who he really was. None of the young men touted by her mother had ever done anything like that. One of these books was John Buchan's Pilgrim's Way (Memory Hold the Door in the U.K.), from which Jack had derived the credo that public life is "the worthiest ambition," politics "the greatest and the most honorable adventure."

...Jack, so much older, was clearly the more learned, worldly partner, but Jackie prized the fact that he sought information from her as well. With Jack, no part of her curiosity about the world had to be concealed. Fully accepting the superiority of her knowledge of France and prepared to trust the reliability of her reports, he soon asked her to read and summarize articles on contemporary French politics to assist him in his work.

...Jackie complained that in these years [1956 to 1960] she rarely spent two days in succession with Jack.

He would spend those years constantly on the road. He would speak to every group that would have him and charm the local political bosses in the hope that by election time he would have established himself as a national figure. ...

...During days and nights alone, she read rapaciously, stuffing her mind with information with which to divert and intrigue her husband when he came home. She consciously stored up her energy and excitement for the moment of his return, and the better she became at maintaining focus on those hours of his that belonged to her, the more intensity she packed into them and the more vibrant they became. Even as her visible participation in Jack's public life became rarer, she operated more and more as his secret weapon, a source of ... images and ideas....She translated portions of de Gaulle's memoirs and read them aloud to him. In his own speeches about America, he was soon re-working the general's marvelous evocation of the image of France. ...
----------- {end excerpt}
[Mrs. Kennedy, by Barbara Leaming. Copyright
2001. Simon & Schuster, New York.]

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"She operated more and more as his secret weapon...."

secret.

weapon.

: )

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