Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie Kennedy - The Modern Role of the First Lady

Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie Kennedy took quite different directions when they were the First Ladies of America. However, they both had a lasting impact on the role. David M. Huff explains.

Jackie Kennedy at the Taj Mahal in 1962.

Jacqueline Kennedy once said, "Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there. It would be sacrilege merely to 'redecorate' it — a word I hate. It must be restored, and that has nothing to do with decoration. That is a question of scholarship."

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "You must do the thing you think you cannot do". 

The modern view of the president's wife in American political life was intrinsically shaped by two extraordinary women: Eleanor Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy. Astute, engaging, and well-educated, both women left an indelible imprint on the American cultural, social, and political consciousness. Eleanor championed social and humanitarian reform and Jacqueline taught a nation about culture and distinction by combining a unique sense fashion with a commitment to the preservation of the arts and humanities.

Although they were different stylistically, both First Ladies shared similar characteristics. Both Eleanor and Jacqueline were born into wealth and privilege. Each woman experienced an unsettled, turbulent, and lonely childhood. Both loved books, history, and leaned toward introspection. Eleanor's mother died when she was eight and Jacqueline endured the tragic ordeal of divorce. In addition, both emerged as enlightened patricians, whose fundamental aims, motivations, and personal convictions differed from their contemporaries. Moreover, Eleanor and Jacqueline married men who suffered not only from life-threatening illnesses (FDR was stricken with polio and JFK suffered from a failed back and Addison's disease), but whose acts of infidelity served to crystallize a renewed sense of self-awareness and direction within each woman. Each was also private; neither wanted to live initially in the White House. Yet, both women summoned an inner resolve that enabled them to carve out a role, to create a voice, separate and distinct from their husband's.

Differences

Notwithstanding common similarities, differences also existed between these two women. Eleanor displayed an eagerness to embrace Democratic politics and actively engaged with the press. A woman of considerable intelligence, perception, and personal conscience, she traveled throughout the country during the Great Depression delivering speeches and writing her own column, "My Day," which was published five days a week. With insight and understanding, Eleanor wrote about the poor, the dispossessed, those who had been left behind in American society. She was Franklin Roosevelt's "eyes and ears" in regard to the impact that FDR's politics had on the American people.

On the other hand, Jacqueline preferred to avoid the contentious field of politics and the press. Underneath her soft-spoken voice, however, was a woman who possessed a depth of intelligence and a subtle wit along with a passionate conviction for the cultivation of the arts and humanities, particularly among youth. To the role of First Lady, Mrs. Kennedy brought grace, beauty, intelligence, and cultivated taste. Her avid interest in the arts, publicized by press and television, inspired an attention to culture never before evident at a national level. Mrs. Kennedy originally felt the restoration should focus on the White House's early style (it was completed in 1802, then rebuilt in 1817 after being burned to the ground by British troops during the War of 1812). Yet her goals soon expanded to have the restoration reflect the whole history of the presidency.

Art and history

To highlight her artistic and historic accomplishments, Mrs. Kennedy invited artists, writers, Shakespearean actors, ballet groups, musicians, opera singers, and poets to the White House, who spoke with politicians and statesmen. An eclectic, multicultural, and strong-minded individual, Mrs. Kennedy spoke Italian, French, and Spanish fluently. She not only advocated youth concerts to encourage the next generation of musicians, but also felt that the White House rooms were furnished with pieces of furniture that lacked distinction and the history they should, in a place as special as the Executive Mansion. As a result, Mrs. Kennedy created The Fine Arts Committee with Henry Francis du Pont as the chairman.

Furthermore, she requested Congress to declare the White House an historic landmark, founded The White House Historical Association to protect, preserve, and provide public access to the rich history of the White House and wrote and edited the first White House guidebook, which was sold to tourists. The proceeds from the book were used to help finance her restoration of the White House with historic antiques. To that end, on February 14, 1962, Mrs. Kennedy took America on a televised tour of the renovated White House. In addition, working with Rachel Lambert Mellon, Jackie also supervised the redesign and replanting of the Rose Garden and the East Garden, pushed for the creation of a National Cultural Arts Center (now known as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), urged President John F. Kennedy to create a national department of culture in America and collaborated with architect John Carl Warnecke for the historic restoration of Lafayette Square and Pennsylvania Avenue.

To that end, shortly after moving into the White House in 1961, Mrs. Kennedy became intensely interested in plans afoot to redevelop Lafayette Square, opposite their new address at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Several architectural firms, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, and the General Services Administration were the principal players, and talks centered on the style of new office buildings to be built there. Some camps favored a Beaux Arts structure, others, more modernist. Mrs. Kennedy favored the winning plan that would create a seamless facade of nineteenth-century residences on Jackson Place, the western side of the square. The New Executive Office Building, built during the renovation, is set back from the square and rises unobtrusively above the row of town houses.

Perhaps the greatest difference between these two First Ladies, however, came at the end of their husband's administrations: Franklin slipped away from Eleanor as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage, while Jackie endured the horror of her husband's brutal assassination.

Lasting impact

Eleanor and Jackie were movers and shakers who played a critical role in the political, social, and cultural times in which they lived. Their extraordinary, yet turbulent lives, brought forth a determined, intriguing, and passionate curiosity that shaped their public persona and actions. Their lives brought meaning to the phrase that adversity builds character. Through tragedy and sorrow, these women learned to adapt, to endure, to develop a will of iron that enabled each woman to bear the burdens that fate dealt them with an uncommon grace. Rather than retreat, they rose to the occasion to create, to summon creative impulses that they saw within themselves and in turn, utilized them to benefit American society.

Eleanor and Jackie also represented an evolving change in the role that women played in politics. Instead of walking in their husband's shadow, both women emerged with strong personalities who played an instrumental role not only in their husband's presidencies, but also in shaping the hearts and minds, hopes and aspirations, of generations of Americans. As a result, the torch they lit provided a beacon for a more visible, independent, and substantive role for future First Ladies, such as Betty Ford, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Michelle Obama.

Such historic figures in a great civilization, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy, can help to illuminate, cultivate, and to summon the reservoir of talent and individual ingenuity that resides within our people. In the American experience, we, as a nation, as a people, have shown that we can meet challenges head-on. Brave and passionate, steadfast and undeterred, we are a nation of pioneers, gifted with the priceless qualities of depth of personality and strength of character.

Conclusion

In sum, I believe so strongly the American people should be reminded about pivotal historical figures, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Jacqueline Kennedy, who each played a vital role in shaping our history. I think there is a yearning on the part of the American people not only for political change, but also for enterprising individuals who would exert a positive influence on American society. Sometimes we have to look to our past to find individuals who elevated our civilization to new heights. If we do not understand our past, we cannot understand our country's future. Our country's youth, who are America's future, need to understand that Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Kennedy believed they could make a positive difference not only in their own personal lives, but also in the social-economic and cultural fabric of American society.  Since Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Kennedy made a difference during their generation, why shouldn't we expect those in a position of influence to make a difference in the difficult and turbulent time in which we live?

Finally, Eleanor and Jackie's dedication to personal development and sense of obligation can best be summed up in a poem by Robert Frost, "Choose Something Like A Star."

...It asks a little of us here. It asks of us a certain height, so when at times the mob is swayed to
carry praise or blame too far, we may choose something like a star to stay our minds on and be staid."                                                                        

Let us know your thoughts on the article below.

About the Author

David M. Huff was born in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1968. A violist, he studied with the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra from 1983-1984. He attended the Interlochen Arts Festival and Interlochen Arts Academy from 1984-1986 and also participated in the Boston University Tanglewood Institute's Youth Program during the summer of 1986. He earned a B.A. in History from West Virginia University and an M.A. in History/Research from West Virginia University. He works in Washington, D.C.

Let Them See What They’ve Done – The Kennedys and the Swearing-in of Lyndon B. Johnson

The assassination of John F. Kennedy inevitably came as a huge shock, but this shock was compounded for those people who had to lead the US afterwards. In this article, Christopher Benedict explains what happened in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, and the problems and politics between Bobby Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson as they sought to move forward.

The swearing in of Lyndon B. Johnson in November 1963.

A Heartbeat Away

You would be hard-pressed to find, among the men who peevishly held the office, a favorable opinion uttered of the vice presidency.

John Adams complained to his wife Abigail of the frustrating ineffectiveness affixed to “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.”

The vice presidency “ought to be abolished” in the mind of Theodore Roosevelt, who offered his grumpy yet prescient perspective that “the man who occupies it may at any moment be everything, but meanwhile he is practically nothing.”

Franklin Roosevelt’s first VP John Nance Garner proclaimed the position “not worth a bucket of warm piss”, while Harry Truman, FDRs third and final second-in-command, joked that vice presidents “were about as useful as a cow’s fifth teat.”

Lyndon Johnson was certainly no stranger to the discontent of thwarted ambition and irksome exclusion. Consistently and deliberately closed out of the president’s inner circle, it was not exactly a well-kept secret that LBJ reserved the greatest measure of his odious disdain for Kennedy’s Attorney General, brother, and ruthless right-hand man Bobby, who Johnson thought “acted like he was the custodian of the Kennedy dream, some kind of rightful heir to the throne.” Jack, meanwhile, would send Johnson off on as many insignificant overseas diplomatic missions as he could concoct with the express purpose of sparing himself the despondent look pulling down Lyndon’s already droopy features as he moped in a perpetual state of self-pity around the White House.

Power Struggle

Lyndon Johnson was literally and figuratively kept in the dark at Parkland Hospital. Seated with Lady Bird in a small, dimly lit waiting room as physicians down the hall attempted frantically to achieve what everyone knew to be the impossible and save John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s life, he was simultaneously processing the pandemonium of Dealey Plaza while looking as far as he dared into the immediate future and the very real probability of his impending ascendance to the presidency. But, amidst the confusion of emergency responders who did not have the time to give him - and some of Kennedy’s other men – an update, Johnson yet again found himself odd man out.

“The disaster had exposed a hidden weakness, the allegiance of individual agents to a man,” William Manchester penned in his masterful The Death of a President. “As long as Kennedy had been in command the lines of authority were clear. Now the old order had been transformed into hopeless disorder.”

Streaked in gore, Jackie refused to be parted from her husband’s side, insisting “I want to be in there when he dies” and that a priest (Father Oscar Huber) be summoned to administer last rites to Jack before the official pronouncement of death could be made for the sake of his immortal soul.

Johnson, meanwhile, awaited word of the inevitable which he would obstinately accept only from the president’s personal friend and political aide Ken O’Donnell who, with Dave Powers, Larry O’Brien and others, comprised JFKs doggedly loyal ‘Irish Mafia’. Whatever the gruesome reality, Lyndon Johnson would never be their president. Johnson, not for the last time that day, would be left wanting. Secret Service agent Emory Roberts was the first to alert Johnson to the president’s mortal demise, but Assistant Press Secretary ‘Mac’ Kilduff would have to do in satisfying Lyndon’s desire for a spokesman from the Kennedy contingency, the first to address Johnson as “Mr. President”.

Only then was LBJ spirited away, the enormity of the situation pressing down upon Lady Bird in her later recollection of flags already flying at half-mast on buildings between Parkland Hospital and Love Field. Kennedy’s body would make the same journey only after a tense standoff between Parkland’s medical staff backed up by local law enforcement and the Secret Service, Irish Mafia, and Jackie Kennedy who collectively used the president’s coffin on a gurney as a battering ram to force their way out. Kilduff finally addressed the press to formally announce to the nation, “President John F. Kennedy died at approximately one o’clock central standard time today here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot wound in the brain.”

Bobby’s Wounds Ripped Wide

The trauma of Robert Kennedy having to learn of his brother’s assassination was compounded immeasurably by the callous insensitivity with which, and from whom, the news was delivered. Bobby would suffer two indignities dealt out in quick succession by the men he hated most. The feelings of loathing, it goes without saying, were reciprocal.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover phoned Bobby’s Hickory Hill home in McLean, Virginia and, with no pretense at sympathy or human decency, informed Kennedy, “I have news for you. The president’s been shot. I think it’s serious. I am endeavoring to get details. I will call you back when I find out more.”

Bobby’s sudden and abominable grief would be rudely interrupted one hour later.

Lyndon Johnson “had been lobbying his bereaved cabin mates one by one,” writes Jeff Shesol in his book Mutual Contempt, “forcing a consensus that the plane should not leave the ground before the transition of power was properly-constitutionally-confirmed.” Whatever his aims were in assuring that presidential continuity be achieved swiftly and legitimately, Johnson’s decision to seek the guidance of the nation’s Attorney General, who at this moment in time was above all a freshly grieving brother, was consistent with behavior that Godfrey McHugh (Air Force Aide to President Kennedy, who had once dated Jackie Bouvier) found “obscene”.

“A lot of people think I should be sworn in right away,” Johnson urged when he got through to Bobby.

“Do you have any objection to that?” He then tactlessly barraged the slain president’s sibling with very specific legal, procedural questions pertaining to taking the oath of office, forcing Bobby to consult his Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach who was “absolutely stunned” by Johnson’s crass requests.

The Judge

Elected to the Texas legislature in 1931 and subsequently 14th District Judge in Dallas, Sarah T. Hughes became acquainted with Lyndon Johnson “in 1948 when he ran for the Senate and I campaigned for him at that time.” In 1961, she was appointed to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas by President Kennedy over the objections of brother Bobby who was of the opinion that Hughes was “too old” and “would be able to retire after ten years”.

She recounted her drive to Love Field following the entreaty for her specific presence to swear in Lyndon Johnson aboard Air Force One. “I was thinking...that I must get there in a hurry, because Vice President Johnson is always in a hurry and wants things done right now and I shouldn’t delay. And the other thing I was thinking about was what the oath of office was...I was brash enough to think that I could give the oath without having looked it up.” Upon her arrival, she walked into the aircraft’s crowded and stiflingly hot second compartment where she encountered and hugged Lyndon and Lady Bird. Rather than getting directly to the business at hand, Hughes was informed by Johnson that “Mrs. Kennedy wants to be here. We’ll wait for her.”

Ken O’Donnell was charged with the unthinkable task of retrieving Jackie from the rear of the plane for her placement in Johnson’s contrived photo-op and angrily refused. He ultimately relented and was stunned by the nobility of Jackie’s response once she had emerged from freshening up in the restroom.                          

“It’s the least I can do”, she said.

The Photographer

Jacqueline Kennedy was rightfully protective of her children and warned away press members from taking or publishing pictures of them, a wish that, back in those days, could be counted upon to be respected. Her husband, on the other hand, relished the opportunity to ring up his personal photographer Cecil Stoughton for impromptu photo sessions, one of which would produce - among the many iconic images he would capture during Kennedy’s 1,000 day administration - what would forever remain his own personal favorite. Caroline and John Jr. appear to be singing and dancing in front of the president’s desk in the oval office as their doting father sits in his chair and happily claps along. Stoughton is also responsible for the only known picture of Jack, Bobby, and Marilyn Monroe together (at a Democratic fundraiser), as well as Kennedy’s inauguration, state dinners and White House visits, personal vacation snapshots, and national magazine covers. He would also be assigned, as a photojournalist for Time magazine, to Bobby Kennedy’s railway funeral procession.

Kennedy with his children in the oval office.

Accompanying the Kennedys to Dallas, he photographed their arrival on the tarmac at Love Field, rode several cars back in the motorcade, and was rushed along with all other participants to Parkland Hospital. Witnessing Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson being escorted from the premises, Stoughton asked where they were going and, after being told Washington, replied “So am I” and was conveyed to Love Field in the cruiser of a Texas state trooper which was very nearly shot at by police officers guarding Air Force One with good intentions but itchy trigger fingers. He switched out the color film he had been using that day for black and white that would be suitable for the wire services and was mortified when the shutter of his Hasselblad camera would not engage as the makeshift ceremony began. Fortunately, after a vigorous shake or two, he was able to fire off twenty shots while standing on a couch behind and to the right of Judge Hughes who grasped a Catholic missal on which an extraordinarily solemn Lyndon Johnson placed his left hand, the right raised at a ninety degree angle. ‘Mac’ Kilduff held President Kennedy’s Dictaphone between Hughes and Johnson to record audio documentation of the swearing-in. Lady Bird stands to the right of her husband, partially obscured, while Jackie is positioned prominently and strategically to his left, the bloodstains on her skirt and stockings undetectable because of the manner in which Stoughton prudently framed his shots.

Insubordination

Before landing at Andrews Air Force Base, Johnson made certain that the press was aware that their presence was not only permissible, but sanctioned. His hope was to be filmed stepping off of Air Force One, escorting Jackie as well as Kennedy’s coffin in a visible show of personal solidarity and presidential continuity. Kilduff tried to convince Mrs. Kennedy that it was best to offload the president’s body from a side or rear entrance out of view of the cameras, but she maintained, “We’ll go out the regular way. I want them to see what they have done.” Furthermore, Jackie resisted the suggestion that she change into a clean outfit, one that was not befouled by her husband’s blood and brain matter. “No”, she repeated disobediently. “Let them see what they’ve done.”

No sooner had Air Force One touched down in D.C. than Robert Kennedy burst onboard and headed directly for Jackie. In a breach of both protocol and etiquette, he pushed past Lyndon Johnson, the new president, without so much as acknowledging his existence. Along with O’Donnell, Powers, O’Brien, Kilduff, and McHugh, they hurriedly disembarked, carrying the coffin with them to a waiting ambulance. An abandoned and incensed Johnson was thwarted once more by the Kennedy assembly, promising those left to listen that “I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help, and god’s.”

It would not take Johnson long to begin throwing his considerable weight around the White House, ordering Kennedy’s personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln, on the morning of November 23 to gather her things and depart the Executive offices so that he could bring in “my own girls”. Having already met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff the night before, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk prodded the new president to move immediately into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, something even he knew to be imprudent, not to mention insensitive.

Regardless of Bobby Kennedy’s vitriolic evaluation of Johnson’s haste to occupy the oval office or else “the world would fall apart”, LBJ did in fact have sincerely fond feelings for Jackie and sought not to injure her, especially in an already fragile state. Lady Bird, who had quite a way with words, put it like this: “Lyndon would like to take all the stars in the sky and string them on a necklace for Mrs. Kennedy.” He was, however, an egocentric individual and would be deeply wounded by the fact that Jackie kept him at a physical and emotional distance from then on, in favor of Bobby to whom she was bound by grief.

With that in mind, it is a good thing for Johnson that Jackie’s 1964 conversations with Arthur Schlesinger would not be published until forty-seven years later. In them, she reveals these none too flattering sentiments. “I guess it’s very good for the country that he could go around and make this air of good feeling and lull so many people into this sense of security, which they wanted after all the tragedy of November. He can’t bear to ever be alone and face something awful. Maybe he wants to disassociate himself so if it goes wrong, he can say ‘I wasn’t there.’”  

Did you find this article interesting? If so, tell others! Share it, tweet about it, or like it by clicking on one of the buttons below!

Sources

• Kennedy Assassination: 24 Hours After (2009, Produced by Time Travel Unlimited for History Channel)
• The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2014, Simon & Schuster)
• Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1978, Houghton and Mifflin)
• The Death of a President: November 1963 by William Manchester (1967, Harper & Row)
• Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud That Defined a Decade (1997, W.W. Norton & Co.)
• Sarah T. Hughes Oral History Interview 10/7/68 by Joe B. Frantz (from the archives of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library
• Cecil Stoughton Dies at 88; Documented White House by Margalit Fox (New York Times, November 6, 2008)
• Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy: Interviews With Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. 1964 (2011, Hyperion)                                                                                                                                                                                                      

The long-lost words of Jackie Kennedy

Jacqueline Kennedy was one of the most high-profile -and private - women of the twentieth century, and her marriage to John F. Kennedy remains the source of intense speculation. While the public rarely heard her voice during her lifetime, letters and interviews released since her death have provided insights into who she was and, as Wendy Loughlin recounts here, how she felt about JFK.

She was famous for wanting privacy and famous for not getting it, becoming instead the object of an intense public fascination that has outlived her by 20 years. Jacqueline Kennedy followed her husband into the spotlight reluctantly, and then spent nearly half her life fighting its glare without him. 

Jackie and JFK in May 1961.

The doe-eyed young Jackie who was terrified of the crowd that assembled outside the church on the day she married John F. Kennedy is not the Jackie we came to know later—not Jackie O, the persona, the jetsetter who hid behind dark sunglasses and silence. But it’s the young Jackie whose voice we heard—or partially heard—after a Dublin church unearthed and nearly auctioned off a cache of her letters last month.

She wrote the letters to Irish priest Joseph Leonard over the course of fourteen years, from 1950 to 1964—years in which she met, married and lost JFK. Excerpts were first published in the Irish Times and quickly re-printed by publications around the world. And while the letters must have included her thoughts on a number of different topics, it’s telling that the passages chosen for release focus almost exclusively on John F. Kennedy.

Portrait of a Marriage

History has repeatedly been revealed through letters, but the letters of first ladies are often compelling in intimate, as much as historical, ways; at their core, they tell us about a marriage. The Kennedy marriage, with its mixture of glamour and tragedy, hearsay and scandal, has captured the public’s imagination for half a century.

They say she was intelligent with a rapier wit, that she could size people up in a single meeting, that she made JFK laugh. We see it in footage from the 1962 America’s Cup dinner, when she leans across the table toward him as if no one is watching. She’s wearing a strapless Cassini gown, looking conspiratorial as she rocks her chair in his direction, oblivious to the puffs of smoke from his cigar. He bends toward her easily, listens intently, smiles. 

But mostly, we don’t see it; and her silence after his death, alongside rumors and revelations about his philandering, left a vacuum that has been filled with countless books and articles full of an almost feverish speculation about the true nature of their relationship. Ironically, her quest for privacy deprived her of it, made people clamor for her all the more, more than for any other first lady in history. Which is why the letters are so titillating.

It may be also why reading the letters feels like an invasion of privacy, why it probably is and why even a public usually hungry for a glimpse behind the scenes of Camelot felt uncomfortable with their release. A few weeks after the story broke, the Kennedy family intervened and the letters were removed from auction on May 21.

Another photo of JFK and Jackie from May 1961.

Public Figure, Private Thoughts

Still, the letters don’t feel any more intimate, any more telling about the Kennedy marriage than parts of Jackie’s 1964 oral history interviews with historian Arthur Schlesinger, which were released by Caroline Kennedy in 2011. Like when Jackie recounts what she said to JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis: “If anything happens, we're all going to stay right here with you... I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do, too—than live without you.” Or how, after the death of their newborn son, Patrick, “he sobbed and put his arms around me.”

But as Caroline notes in her introduction to the interviews, Jackie knew she was on the record when she spoke with Schlesinger, knew her words would shape history and one day become part of the public domain. When she began writing to Father Leonard in 1950, a 21-year-old Jackie Bouvier certainly could not have imagined this, could not have known what lay ahead for her—that ten years later, she would become first lady. “I feel as though I had just turned into a piece of public property,” she told Time magazine on the eve of her husband’s inauguration. “It’s really frightening to lose your anonymity at 31.”

This is not the first time Jacqueline Kennedy’s private letters have turned public, nor even the first time her letters have provided a glimpse at her feelings about John Kennedy. “I loved you from the first day I saw you,” she wrote to him a month before his death, “and if I hadn’t married you my life would have been tragic because the definition of tragedy is a waste. But ten years later, I love you so much more.”

The letter, which ran seven pages long, found its way into the hands of a private collector in the late 1990s, and excerpts from it have been published several times since. As with the Irish letters, the Kennedy family objected to its release. Yet this letter in particular may be the most compelling argument against the most persistent negative rumors about their marriage—that she only married him for his money, or that he only married her because he needed a first lady.

In fact, they loved each other—and the handful of times we hear her in her own words, that’s what she tells us. Is that fact historically significant? Perhaps not. But it’s still nice to know.

Now, click here to read our article on John F. Kennedy and the Tsar – The parallel lives of two fatherless boys.