the lines he loved to hear

Don't let it be forgot

That once there was a spot

For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot -- and it will never be that way again.


Mrs. John F. Kennedy said these words, quoting from a then-current musical comedy, in an interview with the LIFE magazine journalist Theodore H. White.

The interview took place a week after the assassination, at one of the Kennedy houses at Hyannis Port, by the ocean, on a dark and stormy night -- the young widow chain-smoking throughout.

She doesn't want White mentioning the cigarettes, in his article:  "I don't smoke," she says, in the 2016 Pablo Larraín film, Jackie.


The movie brings to the viewer the chaos, shock, and grief in the immediate aftermath of the assassination.  Or -- maybe it brings the viewer to the chaos, shock, and grief -- I'm not sure....

It illuminates the chaos, actually, of grief itself:  part and parcel of Grief are frustration, stress of trying to make the correct decisions, anger, regret for what might have been, and gazing into the past and present and future, trying to put together puzzle pieces of experience and see Meaning.

Portraying Jacqueline Kennedy, Natalie Portman got the voice and accent exactly right.

_______________________

--------------- [excerpt, White's LIFE article] ---------- She remembers how hot the sun was in Dallas, and the crowds -- greater and wilder than the crowds in Mexico or in Vienna.  The sun was blinding, streaming down; yet she could not put on sunglasses for she had to wave to the crowd.


And up ahead she remembers seeing a tunnel around a turn and thinking that there would be a moment of coolness under the tunnel.  There was the sound of motorcycles, as always in a parade, the the occasional backfire of a motorcycle.  The sound of the shot came, at that moment, like the sound of a backfire, and she remembers Connally saying, "No, no, no, no, no ..."


She remembers the roses.  Three times that day in Texas they had been greeted with the bouquets of yellow roses of Texas.  Only, in Dallas they had given her red roses.  She remembers thinking, how funny -- red roses for me; and then the car was full of blood and red roses....


--------------------- ... "At night, before we'd go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record.  The lines he loved to hear were:  Don't let it be forgot / that once there was a spot / for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.

...There'll be great Presidents again...but there'll never be another Camelot again.


...For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote.  But then I realized history made Jack what he was.  

You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough.  

For Jack, history was full of heroes.  


And if it made him this way -- if it made him see the heroes -- maybe other little boys will see.  Men are such a combination of good and bad.  Jack had this hero idea of history, the idealistic view."

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