------------------ [excerpts from Camera Girl, The Coming of Age of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy] ------------------------------
1951.
She 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. ...A Harvard University graduate and a Catholic, he was running for Congress when he met Charlie in 1946, and they became friends the next year when he was a freshman congressman and Charlie was a Washington newspaper correspondent....
When she arrived at the May dinner, Jackie Bouvier knew more about the congressman's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, than about him. Joseph Kennedy had been in the papers and on newsreels since she was a child.
...Jackie wrote later, "When I met Jack Kennedy, that strange laughing, amused and intelligent inquisitive - rather irreverent face - I remember him so well that nite at the Bartletts - I knew that man would have a profound and disturbing effect on my life.
I was rather frightened of him - because I knew if he came towards me, I wouldn't have the power to run away - though it would probably be better if I did. He didn't look like someone who wanted to get married and I pictured heartbreak but it seemed worth it. . . . That is how we met and parted."
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{Camera Girl, by Carl Sferrazza Anthony. Copyright 2023. Gallery Books, An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.}
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