Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: America's First Lady

• Share

(3 of 3)

HER FRIENDS SAW A GREAT POIGNANCE IN HER, AND A GREAT YEARNING. BEHIND HER shyness there was an enormous receptivity to the sweetness of life and its grace. A few years ago, friends, a couple, gave a small dinner party for two friends who had just married, and Mrs. Onassis was among the guests. It was an elegant New York gathering, a handful of the renowned of show business and media and society, all gathered to dine on the top floor of a skyscraper. The evening was full of laughter and warm toasts, and the next day her hosts received from Mrs. Onassis a handwritten, hand-delivered letter. "How could there be an evening more magical than last night? Everyone is enhanced and touched by being with two people just discovering how much they love each other. I have known and adored ((him)) for so long, always wishing he would find happiness...Seeing him with ((her)) and getting to know her, I see he has at last -- and she so exceptional, whom you describe so movingly, has too. I am so full of joy for both -- I just kept thinking about it all day today. What wonderful soothing hosts you are -- what a dazzling gathering of their friends -- in that beautiful tower, with New York glittering below..."

With New York glittering below. The world, I am told, is full of those notes, always handwritten and lucid and spontaneous -- and always correct. "The notes were the way she was intimate" with outsiders, said a friend. The only insiders, really, were her family.

THERE WAS ALWAYS IN HER A SENSE OF HISTORY AND THE SENSE THAT CHILDREN ARE watching -- children are watching and history will judge us, and the things that define our times are the great actions we take, all against the odds and with a private valor of which the world will little note nor long remember. But that's the big thing -- the personal struggle, and the sense that our history day by day is forged from it. That was her intuition, and that intuition was a gift to us, for it helped produce the walk down the broad avenues of Washington that day when her heart was broken.

She was one sweet and austere tune. Her family arranged a private funeral, and that of course is what she'd want and that is what is fitting. But I know how I wish she would be buried.

I wish we could take her, in the city she loved or the capital she graced, and put a flag on her coffin and the coffin on a catafalque, and march it down a great avenue, with an honor guard and a horse that kicks, as Black Jack did, and muffled drums. I wish we could go and honor her, those of us who were children when she was in the White House, and our parents who wept that weekend long ago, and our children who have only a child's sense of who and what she was. I wish we could stand on the sidewalk as the caisson passes, and take off our hat, and explain to our sons and daughters and say, "That is a patriot passing by." I wish I could see someone'slittle boy, in a knee-length coat, lift his arm and salute.