Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

by Maureen Callahan

She had known her absence that night would be infinitely more powerful than her presence, so she stayed on her rented farm in Virginia with her children and her horses, sending the public a careful, nonverbal message: Your First Lady shares your values, and she is also appalled. The trappings of celebrity and garish shows are not for her. She is happiest taking care of her small children far from the spotlight. A spectacle such as that one is far beneath her.

Lyndon, like all bullies, was a coward at the core.

Henri Cartier-Bresson had sparked controversy by saying that he considered his paintings far more legitimate, as art, than any of his photography. Jackie ended her piece by quoting Cartier-Bresson on his philosophy, in which she no doubt saw herself: “I’m… a bunch of nerves, but I take advantage of it… You have to be yourself and you have to forget yourself… The world is being created every minute and the world is falling to pieces every minute… It is these tensions I am always moved by… I love life, I love human beings, I hate people also… I enjoy shooting a picture, being present. It’s a way of saying ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’… And there’s no maybe.”

if there’s a great effort, even if it’s the eleventh hour, then you can succeed and I know that’s what we’ll do… If we don’t care about our past, we cannot hope for our future.”

Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth and Bill Moyers’s Healing and the Mind

“It took three years,” Chase-Riboud wrote, “from the time a concerned Jacqueline Onassis had turned to me and said, ‘You must write this story,’ to the time it was published at Viking Press with her as my acquiring editor… I realized that sitting beside me in a black one-piece swimsuit was one of the few women in the world who could explain political power and ambition, American sex and American autocracy, the back stairs at the White House and the intolerable glare and flame of living history. Who else?”

“I think that people who work for themselves have the respect of others,” Jackie told Steinem. “I remember a taxi driver who took me to the office. He said, ‘Lady, you work and you don’t have to?’ I said yes. He turned around and said, ‘I think that’s great!’”

Jackie Onassis once told Gloria Steinem, “What I like about being an editor is that it expands your knowledge and heightens your discrimination. Each book takes you down another path. Some of them move people and some of them do some good.”