don't bring your wife

The hulking Mercury with Jackie in the rear seat pulled up to the terminal at Palm Beach International Airport twenty minutes after it left the Kennedy estate.  Here, to greet her, was another reminder of how her life had changed.
----------[excerpt:  Mrs. Kennedy, Barbara Leaming]------------  In addition to press, a small crowd had gathered on Southern Boulevard to watch her departure.  Wherever she went, it would be like this.  She was merely boarding a plane, yet here were people calling out "Hey, Jackie!" and assessing her with the same critical glare....

The public was intensely curious about Jackie, so young and so different from her conservative, grandmotherly predecessors, Mamie Eisenhower and Bess Truman.  A great many people had yet to decide whether they liked the stylish new First Lady....

As Jackie stepped out of the Mercury to confront the crowd, a faint trace of what an agent later called the "deer in the headlights" look appeared on her face....Jackie climbed the steps and disappeared inside the small cabin, but even now, of course, she was not alone.  Her Secret Service detail, the only other passengers, would share the flight to Washington.

As the plane took off that January afternoon, Jackie was at a turning point.  Its signs were everywhere:  in the crowd at the airport, but also in in the gun-toting men in the cabin....

Aware that by the very nature of things history would afford her no real privacy, she had nonetheless taken steps to limit her public life dramatically....She presented herself now as a reluctant public figure.  she issued a statement that she would not be an active First Lady, and that as much as possible she would pursue a private life devoted to the priorities of her husband and her children.

Determined to limit access to that private life, with all its mortifying complications, she ruled out press interviews and photo opportunities.  In the interest of further secluding herself, she even attempted to limit her duties as hostess during state visits by directing the Chief of Protocol to encourage foreign leaders to leave their wives at home.----------------------------- [end excerpt]

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{Mrs. Kennedy, by Barbara Leaming.  Copyright, 2001.  The Free Press; Simon & Schuster, New York.}

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