Empress of the Nile by Lynne Olson

Author:Lynne Olson [Olson, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

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* After Kennedy’s death in 1963, his wife retained possession of the statue, putting it on prominent display in her Fifth Avenue apartment in New York. It now can be seen at the Kennedy presidential library in Boston.

CHAPTER 16

THE FIRST LADY INTERVENES

In May 1961, just four months after he became president, John F. Kennedy and his wife traveled to France for their first state visit abroad. Until then, Jacqueline Kennedy had been a somewhat controversial figure in the United States. “I was,” she said years later, “a liability to Jack.”

Her elegance and interest in fashion, her love of all things French, and her discomfort with taking part in campaigning and other public activities were among the things that marked her as an interloper during her first days in the White House. “The trouble with me is that I’m an outsider, and that’s a very hard thing to be in American life,” she once told a reporter. In another interview, she acknowledged that “people take my diffidence for arrogance and my withdrawal from publicity as a sign…that I am looking down on the rest of mankind.” Judged by some to be all style and no substance, she was a president’s wife who didn’t fit the traditional First Lady mold.

And then, in Paris, everything shifted. From the day she arrived, Jacqueline Kennedy enchanted the French with her beauty, grace, knowledge of their culture and history, and fluency in their language. After a grand state dinner for the Kennedys at Versailles, a French newspaper declared, “For a few hours, a queen reigned [there] again.” According to Clint Hill, a Secret service agent assigned to guard the First Lady, French president Charles de Gaulle “couldn’t take his eyes off her [at the dinner], and I daresay neither could any of the other guests—men or women.” Having been warned that de Gaulle could be distant and difficult to talk to, Jacqueline acted as the interpreter between him and Kennedy. The crusty French leader would later describe her as JFK’s “dazzling and cultivated wife.” Kenneth O’Donnell, one of Kennedy’s top aides, remembered that she “drew de Gaulle into long and entertaining conversations with her husband that probably made him more relaxed with Kennedy than he had ever been with another head of a foreign country….Privately [JFK] gave Jackie credit for establishing an easy and intimate understanding between himself and de Gaulle.” At the end of the couple’s visit to France, Kennedy himself took note of his wife’s popularity when he opened a press conference with a bemused smile and this statement: “I do not think it altogether inappropriate for me to introduce myself. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”

Both the French and American press extolled her performance, declaring her to be as important as the president in projecting a new and more sympathetic image of America. According to The Washington Post, the Kennedys had been successful in “renewing the vibrant connection between the two countries that bickering and misunderstanding had blurred in recent years.

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