The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate. Obama isn't the first president to receive the award. IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. Politics Covid U. News World Opinion Business. Share this —. Follow NBC News. Brower: "People tended to underestimate her intelligence. I think almost every first lady gets this treatment. She knew about JFK's affairs Bennett: Jackie had a secret male friend!! I didn't know that; this is so juicy!
Brower: Oh I know! Frank Finnerty. Good for her, right? I wonder if she knew what she was really getting into. Brower: Can you imagine what she had to put up with? All the blatant cheating. It always fascinated me that the press kept it a secret. It was an open secret, really, but out of respect for Kennedy and the presidency it wasn't reported at the time. I think that even surprised some of Kennedy's friends.
Bennett: Awful. I can't imagine. The stress must have been unbearable. He had this extensive apparatus of Secret Service to keep his secrets and some of the women were White House staffers -- so it was all happening right under her nose at times.
None of these stories are new, but it's still shocking to have the hindsight of knowing there were serious cracks in this "great American marriage" storyline. And to say that if she divorced him she would have ended his political career -- wow. What the times were like then!
Bennett: Amazing! Brower: Marilyn's dress when she sang "Happy Birthday" to the President!!!! Bennett: And cut to Jackie escaping from it all with horseback riding.
These casual looks were just as great as her formal ones, IMHO -- the capri pants and polo tops, T-shirts and white denim. SO American iconic. Every woman wanted that ease of being casual and chic and here's this great role model for that blend of high and low style.
That reminds me a lot of Michelle Obama. She was one of JFK's top advisers. Brower: This time in history, the Cuban Missile Crisis, has always fascinated me; there was a real fear that a nuclear war would start with the White House as the prime target. Jackie told her husband, "I want to die with you, and the children do, too. Bennett: He always seems to come back to her; that's the real power of their marriage. I always find it compelling in marriages where there has been infidelity to see the perseverance of the spouse who was cheated on, like Jackie was.
She must have somehow known that their bond was ultimately too strong to throw away. It says a lot about the kind of person she was. Brower: If Jackie had divorced him, I don't think he would have become president.
I think that's the case with most of the modern presidents -- without their wives they would never have risen to the pinnacle of American politics. My favorite part of this Cuban Missile Crisis story -- aside from a nuclear war not starting -- was the fact that Jack gave Jackie a Tiffany sterling silver calendar of those 13 days. It had her initials engraved next to his, "J. She valued privacy, but often had to grieve in public.
You just can't not acknowledge the inherent legacy of tragedy in the Kennedy family. I absolutely think he would have become president one day. We won't see that pink suit for decades.
Brower: The tragedy of this is also that their happiest days were after Patrick's death, and shortly before JFK's assassination in The pink suit!
Brower: It was a replica of a Chanel suit; she needed to be seen wearing American-made clothing. The National Archives actually has the suit, but it won't be made public for decades.
Bennett: Really?? I had no idea! Brower: Not until at least , per Caroline Kennedy. I think it's too fresh and painful. I can see why she'd make that decision; I mean, the suit looks brand new, according to an archivist. And still has the blood stains on it. Jackie must have just been stunned. In shock. Brower: I can't imagine what she went through.
She saw her husband murdered in the most gruesome way imaginable. She planned JFK's funeral from the plane. Brower: The fact that she had the ability to plan the funeral on the flight back -- what strength. I interviewed Jim Ketchum, the White House curator she spoke to from the plane, and he was stunned by how she was able to hold herself together so quickly after seeing her husband killed.
She immediately thought of her husband's favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, and said JFK's funeral should be exactly like his. And it was. Ketchum told me that on the day of the ceremony, he got a phone call from her around a. She told Ketchum she'd "really like to have something more American to share," and asked him to replace the painting ASAP.
That attention to detail when her life had been torn apart amazes me. Even in the midst of her grief, Jackie understood history and the incredible weight of that moment. Yes we can! She started to stump for Obama around the country. At one point last year, she was visiting the Obama campaign office in West Palm Beach and was interviewed for a local television station by a small boy about ten years old.
They sat on a table, side by side, cases of bottled water stacked behind them against the wall. Each time he asked a question, he twisted around and aimed his very large microphone right at her mouth, as though carefully feeding a zoo animal. She had a faint smile on her face as she answered his questions, but she did not otherwise react to his cuteness with any cuteness of her own. Sometimes while he asked his questions, she gazed around the room, as though she were thinking about something else.
She enjoyed campaigning for Obama, but running for office on her own behalf was different. She was comfortingly self-effacing. That would be humiliating.
That was reflected last year in two women she championed who are still in office. She felt that there was more than room for courage in politics among those who are successful. Then, there were the legacy issues. She would never know whether people were voting for her or just for a Kennedy. Young people. And when we walked in, the people in the restaurant stood up and started clapping.
I was like, Wow, what is this? And yet, of course, the best argument for appointing Caroline Kennedy to the seat had been that she was Caroline Kennedy. That was her chief value to New York. Served in the state legislature? You think that is a better qualification than her intellect, her breadth of experience, her ability to get things done for the state? Hillary Clinton had that, too, and that enabled her to have a value to other senators right off the bat that she could then translate into what she could get for New York.
Harry Reid, in an unprecedented moment, has said that this is the senator he wants, and that is hugely important for practical purposes—he would have this star player who could be deployed to help get other senators elected. When Caroline Kennedy first announced her intention to seek the Senate seat, some of her friends were surprised that she would volunteer for such a role, given how shy and reserved she seemed, and how obsessed with maintaining her privacy.
They were like icebergs. They revealed only a small portion of themselves—everything else was deeply submerged. She declined to be interviewed for this article. Her friends understand that to speak about her in public would mean banishment. When she announced her bid for the Senate, she gave a few of her friends permission to speak with reporters, but several of those friends, after making the most anodyne or laudatory comments, panicked and withdrew them, or demanded anonymity.
She is often sarcastic when she talks to the press, and she can be short to the point of rudeness. She is easily annoyed by what she perceives to be prying or stupid questions. Kennedy shook her head in irritated disbelief. But whereas her mother liked to keep her family out of the public eye altogether, insofar as that was possible, with Caroline Kennedy the issue seems to be not so much privacy as control.
She is happy to reprint family photographs in her books and sell off intimate family artifacts, as long as she is in charge of the process. She organized two auctions of Kennedy memorabilia, in which she sold family letters, old toys, and bric-a-brac from the family homes. The two auctions brought in about forty million dollars. Caroline Kennedy, it seems, is less private in the sense of secretive than private in the peculiar legal sense that the word has taken on, and that she has written about.
But when there was something she was interested in she was out there. Caroline Kennedy has a magic about her that is very useful in politics, and politicians in her family and her party have always used it. They tell her what they were doing and how they felt when her father was killed.
They tell her how elegant her mother was, or that they saw her mother walking in Central Park. They tell her they once sat next to her brother at a Knicks game. It never stops. She has been pursued by several stalkers.
If Caroline Kennedy wants someone to help her with a project, if she wants advice, or an expert to explain something to her, virtually anyone will make himself available to her right away. A couple of weeks ago, she asked Sister Paulette LoMonaco, who works at Good Shepherd Services, and whom she knew from her time working in education, to organize expert briefings for her on child welfare and youth services.
And the e-mails of appreciation were just amazing. I was also really impressed with her intelligence and with her ability to absorb so much information so fast. While she was in the White House—when she was three, four years old—the public was obsessed with her to the point of madness. Strangers sent her letters. Someone came out with a Caroline Kennedy doll. Press interest in her was insatiable—and while her mother hated the idea of her being in the newspapers, her father tended to encourage it, because it helped him.
He would feed cute anecdotes about her to his press secretary. Even long after she left the White House, she was badgered by the press.
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