From Ask Not

On a low curving wall in Arlington National Cemetery seven sentences from the inaugural address of John F. Kennedy are chiseled into granite tablets below the slain president’s grave. The granite, known as Deer Island after the place in Maine where it was quarried, has a pinkish tinge that becomes brighter when worn. It also covers the pavement in front of the wall where the feet of 150 million visitors have turned it pinker every year. The tablets, too, are changing color, but more slowly, as mourners slide their fingers across the three-inch letters, the closest they can come to touching the man who is buried here.

Jackie and Mamie rode from the White House to the Capitol in a Cadillac limousine together with Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire. It was a moment neither woman could have anticipated with much pleasure, but here they were: Mamie in a gaudy “tomato red” suit, matching hat, and bulky mink, Jackie in Cassini’s fawn coat trimmed with a whisper of sable; Mamie, who had shared a bed with her husband during forty-five years of marriage, and Jackie, who did not plan on sharing the same bedroom with her husband on their first night in the White House; Mamie, who had spent most of her White House evenings sitting next to her husband as they ate their supper off trays perched in front of his-and-hers televisions, and Jackie, who would fill her husband’s evenings with intimate dinner parties and concerts; Mamie, the daughter of an Iowa meatpacker who had never attended college and loved canasta and mahjong, and Jackie, the daughter of a philandering, alcoholic New York stockbroker, who had attended Vassar and the Sorbonne and been named Debutante of the Year. Here they were, then, two women riding together to the Capitol who, because neither suspected the infidelities the other had endured in her marriage, believed they had nothing in common.

As Jackie descended the Capitol steps, the crowd rose to its feet, cheering and applauding. Cassini sensed victory. Her fawn coat, with its understated sable collar, matching pillbox hat, and small sable muff, communicated youth, simplicity, and elegance. She was the gorgeous petal in a dowdy bouquet of fur. He had promised she would stand out but was still astonished when it happened exactly that way. He sensed he was witnessing a turning point in fashion history—the celebretization of fashion, and the iconization of Jackie Kennedy—and once her husband began speaking, he realized that her outfit perfectly complemented his spare and elegant prose.

He had not just dictated, but had lived the words. They told his story, ‘born in this century,’ ‘tempered by war,’ and ‘disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.’ As he delivered them, he became more emphatic and passionate, turning his right hand into a fist and pumping it up and down as he said, ‘The torch has been passed.’ It was here that his nervous energy, heightened by the delays and prayers, began surfacing in his delivery, and he began forging an emotional bond with the audience. Those appropriating the words and themes of Kennedy’s address have failed to appreciate that the text was only part of the magic. There was also an extraordinary convergence of people, events, and history. There was the snowstorm, Jackie’s wardrobe, Frost’s recitation, and an audience already longing for his words. There was a man who left nothing to chance—not his tan, his haircut, or teeth, not even the cut of his suit, or the seating of dignitaries on his platform—and who spoke with the urgency of someone who has narrowly escaped death and cared passionately about the judgment of history. There was a speech he had not only composed but lived; one that was a distillation of the spiritual and philosophical principles forming his character and guiding his life, and that he delivered with a passion that reached deeply buried hearts and elicited from the American people, as Gore Vidal had predicted, ‘a remarkable emotional response.’