OUR JACKIE

Sociological attempt to situate the different “Jackies” amid the country’s hopes and fears during a fraught time.

Historian Dunak (As Long As We Both Shall Love: The White Wedding in Postwar America) takes an academic approach to the nation’s obsession with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (JKO, as she is generally called), seeing her as a mirror of how American ideals of womanhood evolved over the decades. The author's thorough coverage moves through stages starting from JKO’s days as an “Inquiring Camera Girl” at the Washington Times-Herald, to her years first as a senator’s wife and then as first lady, to her time as a tragic widow and national icon, to the second marriage that made her a "Fallen Queen," and into her final decades as a professional woman in her own right. “JKO often served as a barometer for articulated and idealized views about American women—­how they should behave, what they should value,” Dunak writes. Drawing on a wealth of research and archival sources, the author combs media coverage and private and public accounts of JKO over her lifetime (1929-1994) and reveals how she “met expectations of…womanhood, and then she subverted them.” For example, she was ultrafeminine and stylish as Kennedy’s wife yet had worked before marriage, preferred riding horses to campaigning, and smoked cigarettes, rather scandalously. She was nothing like previous matronly first ladies, such as Mamie Eisenhower, embodying instead the youthful cultural elegance emerging in the 1960s. Kennedy’s team soon learned that her common-man touch could be Kennedy’s best political asset. After the assassination, she was universally admired for the majestic way she handled the aftermath and funeral. Yet her resistance to taking up the liberal causes of the dead president, her seeming recession into the life of a rich, frivolous socialite, eroded public sympathy. Marriage to Ari Onassis shortly after Robert Kennedy’s assassination shocked the nation, yet it was the beginning of JKO’s emergence as her own person. Although always a symbol of the nation’s cultural expectations, she claimed her right to her autonomy.

Astute observations on an iconic figure who is apparently of perennial interest.