Whispers from another time: The Jackie Kennedy we didn’t know

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“There is a loveliness in the whisper of another era, a softness and a shadow,” Jacqueline Bouvier wrote in 1951. “We are none of us insensitive to an echo of the past.”

Whispers and echoes from her own era, the bygone days of her and John F. Kennedy’s Camelot, remain with us still. In our anti-intellectual age wherein erudition is derided as elitism, it’s good that they do. Their time is a reminder that it wasn’t always like this.

“Only an educated and informed people will be a free people,” said JFK in a speech lauding the learned at Vanderbilt University’s convocation in 1963. The “ignorance” of voters in a democracy “impairs the security of all.”

The echoes of the Kennedy era come a bit closer this summer with the release of a groundbreaking new book on Jackie Kennedy: Camera Girl, The Coming of Age of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy.

The book by Carl Sferrazza Anthony focuses intently on the years before her 1953 marriage to then-senator Kennedy. She’d been a brilliant student and wanted to be a writer, not a housewife “who could bake the best cake.” Her approach was encapsulated in words of guidance she gave to a friend. “Read, then think. Listen, then think. Watch, then think. Think – then speak.”

Jackie Bouvier was debutante of the year in 1947, but anyone holding an image of her as primarily a glamour queen will find it shattered in this book. The camera girl, the book maintains, was an intellectual, her brilliance often hidden by the male-dominant conventions of the age.

In her college board admission exams, which were written by 26,000 students that year, Ms. Bouvier finished in the top 25. In a writing competition for a position at Vogue magazine, there were more than 1,000 entries. Several essays were required from applicants, to show a wide range of knowledge of history, politics, the arts, and literature. Ms. Bouvier won it.

Her oppressive mother, Janet, who sometimes beat her, blocked her from taking the Vogue job. She maintained that if Jackie did not conceal “how bright she was” she would never “land a husband.”

But it was the appeal of the mind that attracted JFK. There were glamour girls aplenty around for him, one of whom described him as “so immature emotionally, so mature intellectually.” But what drew Jack and Jackie together was “respect for each other’s intellect,” said her stepbrother, Yusha Auchincloss. It was the primary channel through which “love definitely grew.”

In his terribly misogynistic way, Kennedy said Jackie “could really think like a man; rational, and had acute insight.” To establish his foreign policy credentials as a new senator, he needed a powerful speech on Southeast Asia and Vietnam, a passion of his. He turned to a 23-year-old girl he was intermittently seeing, one fluent in French who had studied the colonization of Vietnam at the Sorbonne under a leading authority on the subject.

Jackie Bouvier produced an 88-page study for JFK, which is detailed for the first time in Camera Girl. “The Vietnamese want a new way of life,” she wrote. “It is them that we must give the reins.” Peace would only come when Vietnam had leaders its people trusted, but it’s “not for the French, Chinese or Americans to say who those people are.” Her warnings were prescient. They went unheeded.

Blocked from Vogue, she worked at the Washington Times-Herald where she wrote more than 600 columns with accompanying photos based on street interviews. She was starting to get major feature writing assignments, but with the marriage approaching she was reluctantly compelled to end her newspaper work.

As the book makes clear, she hungered for JFK to win the White House and her talents helped pave the way. “He had the goods but she shaped them,” said close friend Aileen Bowdoin.

But once in the Oval Office, the rich mind of Jackie Kennedy described in this book is rarely evident. She was in the background, her image evidenced, her substance not. In her later years she became a book editor, but it was not what she had once hoped for. Of a beau who had once slighted her, she wrote, “Someday I’ll send him a literary masterpiece that will make him swallow his braces.”

That her gifts were never realized makes her story sadder. Sadder still would be for her to see Camelot as echoed in the campaign for the Democratic nomination of Robert Kennedy Jr., a conspiracy theorist. It’s such a descent from the enlightened trajectory Jack and Jackie wished to nurture for the nation.