Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: America's First Lady

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That weekend in November '63, the weekend of the muffled drums, was the worst time for America in the last half of this century. We forget now the shame we felt as a nation at what had happened in Dallas. A President had been murdered, quite savagely, quite brutally, and the whole appalled world was looking and judging. And she redeemed it. She took away the shame by how she acted. She was young, only 34, and only a few days before she'd been covered in her husband's blood -- but she came home to Washington and walked down those broad avenues dressed in black, her pale face cleansed and washed clean by trauma. She walked head up, back straight and proud, in a flowing black veil. There was the moment in the Capitol Rotunda, when she knelt with her daughter Caroline. It was the last moment of public farewell, and to say it she bent and kissed the flag that draped the coffin that contained her husband -- and a whole nation, a whole world, was made silent at the sight of patriotism made tender. Her Irish husband had admired class. That weekend she showed it in abundance. What a parting gift.

A nation watched, and would never forget. The world watched, and found its final judgment summed up by a young woman, a British journalist who had come to witness the funeral, and filed home: "Jacqueline Kennedy has today given her country the one thing it has always lacked, and that is majesty."

To have done that for her country -- to have lived through that weekend and done what she did from that Friday to that Monday -- to have shown the world that the killing of the President was not America, the loving dignity of our saying goodbye was America -- to have done that was an act of supreme patriotism.

And a lot of us thought that anything good or bad she did for the rest of her life, from that day on, didn't matter, for she'd earned her way, she deserved a free pass, she'd earned our thanks forever.

IN A REMARKABLE INTERVIEW SHE GAVE THEODORE WHITE THE FOLLOWING DECEMBER, she revealed what a tough little romantic she was. "Once, the more I read of history the more bitter I got. For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But then I realized history made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history, reading the Knights of the Round Table, reading Marlborough. For Jack, history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way -- if it made him see the heroes -- maybe other little boys will see. Men are such a combination of good and bad. Jack had this hero idea of history, this idealistic view." And she spoke of Camelot and gave the world an image of her husband that is still, for all the revelations of the past three decades, alive. She provided an image of herself too, perhaps more than she knew. The day before she died, a young schoolteacher in New York City who hadn't even been born when she spoke to Teddy White, told me of his shock that she was leaving us. "I thought she would be like Guinevere," he said. "I thought she would ride off on a horse, in her beautiful silence, and never die."