Editors From The United States

"To be sure, a generation of Americans admired Jacqueline Kennedy's extraordinary grace and courage during her husband's funeral and were naturally protective of her privacy when she was alive. But a wealth of letters and other documents -- including an extensive oral history by Mrs. Kennedy kept under wraps at the JFK Library until 2011 -- remained out of sight, well past her death in 1994, leaving the historical record incomplete."

"Jackie Kennedy's letters underline the behind-the-scenes role of Halle, who urged President Kennedy to bestow honorary U.S. citizenship upon Winston Churchill at special 1963 Rose Garden ceremony. But more importantly, the Halle correspondence provides further insight into the first lady's relationship with JFK during their White House years and the painful aftermath of her husband's November 1963 killing."

"In the late 1960s, Jacqueline Kennedy was, perhaps, the world’s most famous widow, but few had access to her feelings, either in grief or in the public eye."

"Jackie loved in Jack the man he wanted to be, and David was the man helping him, in her eyes, to be the man Jack wanted to be."

"As she had done so many times in the decades since Dallas, she again grappled with the randomness of the world and the abruptness of tragedy."

"She knew what must be done to keep John F. Kennedy’s memory alive. She must glorify his work, and so she did. But, what she didn’t realize was that her own great legacy was one to be remembered too."

"Jackie’s insistent push of this theme exemplifies her keen understanding of public diplomacy, and the importance of maintaining a favorable public image in the eyes of world."

"Today, November 22, 2016, marks the 53rd anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. His legacy of American exceptionalism lives on, much in part due to the words of his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, who made it her mission to keep her husband’s memory stamped firmly in the minds of Americans and global citizens for years to come."

"I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked, it was caked with blood — her husband’s blood. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights — that immaculate woman exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood."

"If history is any guide, she might be sort of a Jackie Kennedy type, a well-dressed woman who will be seen as popular in the women's magazines but largely stays quiet and on the sidelines in terms of her public image."

"First the world will call me Bouvier, hey Then I'll change to Jackie K. After my date with tragedy I'll let Aristotle take care of me I want to be Jackie Onassis, oh yeah...."

"I draw so much inspiration from her. How she influenced style, how she influenced bringing so much to the White House when she was there. So many artists were supported by her and definitely with everything she went through, she was so focused on keeping her children safe, protected and loved and really fulfilling their own dreams and she had such an elegance."

"For some people, the 1996 public auction of Mrs. Kennedy’s private effects, down to the most trivial and tangential (such as her Hermès hairbrush), was when the wrong scent began somehow to cling to the business. For others, it was Caroline Kennedy’s release in 2001 of a volume fragrantly titled The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, which one hopes would not have seduced the incautious purchaser into supposing that the First Lady had ever extended herself into verse."

"If the subject were being a major player in establishing the popular reputation of the Kennedy administration, that would be an entirely different story. With amazingly professional velocity, she seized control of the image-making process and soon had an entire cadre of historians and super-journos honing and burnishing the script."

"Michael Beschloss, who has steered this frail craft of last-sip publishing into harbor, may have overstepped himself as a historian by saying that the tapes show Jackie as a major player in the Kennedy administration. But they certainly make it difficult if not impossible to accept her at her own paradoxical valuation, as merely a self-effacing hostess and decorator."

"Of all the first ladies we’ve had, Jackie Kennedy stands out. She changed the role. She was elegant and sophisticated. She took an intense interest in the historical furnishings of the White House. She brought in paintings and furniture that represented the past. She brought entertainers that had not been there before."

"Whenever we took her anywhere, she'd immediately be recognized, and before we knew it there would be a swarm of people gawking, and often approaching her to shake her hand. She would smile graciously and offer a polite greeting, but as soon as we were alone, she'd quip, "You'd think I was someone important, for heaven's sake.""

"She's regal; she's elegant as ever; she is an everlasting mystery. I think she's elevated the human spirit in this country. If there were more Jackie Kennedys around, this would be a better place in which to live. I find her to be a very noble person."

"As the years went by, Jackie O somewhere along the way crossed the line from widowed, beloved First Lady to pop icon."

"Though it must have pained her at times, she remained the perfect political wife."

"Like no other First Lady before her, Onassis cut a mod figure, with Oleg Cassini outfits, Givenchy gowns and the pillbox hats that topped her bouffant hairdo."

"At age 31, she brought a sense of youth and fashion to Washington, making the pillbox hat the rage and redecorating a stodgy White House. Yet the image that remains seared in the national consciousness is of the First Lady cradling her fallen husband’s head in her lap, her pink suit splattered with his blood."

"Everything about her high society upbringing predicated a charmed life."

"Starting with that powder-blue inauguration ensemble, plenty of first-lady watchers have noticed that Melania Trump’s fashion choices have seemed one pillbox hat away from copying Jackie Kennedy, perhaps the biggest style icon to occupy the White House."

"Although Jackie had a timeless style she injected a panache and flair into her outfits that gave them her unique stamp. Her staples however, and the accessories we remember her for, are her oversize sunglasses, strands of pearls and silk scarves."

"The key to her lasting influence of course was her timeless elegance, as relevant today as it was in her hey day."

"One of the reasons Jackie was much loved was for her all-American style. Although she constantly had her eye on the Paris and Milan catwalks, she worked closely with designer Oleg Cassini to interpret looks."

"Not only was Jackie deeply loved and adored, but she set the bar for First Lady fashion. Decades after her time in office, we still reflect on her timeless look and countless articles have been dedicated to copying her style."

"Undeniably one of the greatest style icons of the last century, Jackie's elegance and class were an inspiration to millions."

"Famous people, in conversation with strangers, will often struggle to point out the space between what we expect of them and who they really are—and that, of course, is another way of drawing attention to our expectation, and so to their celebrity. Mrs. Onassis paid new people the infinitely more difficult compliment of assuming that the baggage you both brought to the table was of infinitely less importance than the new gifts you might take away from it."

"It’s certainly not the Jackie that we knew later on. By then, she’s a different woman."

"It was not the same relationship or friendship that I had with Audrey (Hepburn). The American people felt emotion for Jackie, but they preferred to have an American couturier design her dresses when they came to France for a state visit."

"Jackie was very modern; her spirit was modern, she was a new image for America because he was a young president."

"And Jackie was herself a sexual sophisticate. She hung illustrations from the Kama Sutra in the dining room of one of her country houses; she was self-confident enough to include pretty young women on the guest lists of her private parties because she knew they invigorated her husband; she understood that she had married a man with a vivid sexual past, and certainly wouldn’t have wanted it any other way."

"She was playing a long game, and against all odds she’s still winning it. She had her eye on what she grandly called History, a concept large enough to encompass both her interest in 18th-century France and the necessity of maintaining a complicated fiction—at once face-saving and humiliating—about the nature of her marriage. It’s not a tissue of lies, but it is a tissue, one that has been rent so many times that it should be nothing more than dust motes by now, but she was a woman who brought every one of her formidable gifts to bear when it came to the subject of John Kennedy; and we’re no match for her."

"Mrs. Kennedy's dignity in the face of that tragedy moved millions of people and will make her, I suspect, someone who many will always admire. It is, in the end, better to see our presidents — and everyone else around us — as human beings than to engage in an idealization that really diminishes our own agency and sense of responsibility."

"I think it would be very cynical — and completely wrong — to see her remarks on these tapes as calculated myth making. There is an off the cuff quality to these conversations, a rambling, even at times disjointed mood that shows Kennedy in a reflective mood. Much of what we hear is quite unvarnished. The conversations range over several days and many hours. The sound bites that have gotten the most media attention were stripped of their context and when that is provided, as it is in the tapes, one gets a sense of a person who intensely enjoyed some of her experience in the White House and was overwhelmed by and even abhorred some of what she saw. She does not, it is true, share with Schlesinger any doubts about or criticism of her husband. That isn't surprising."

"At the same time, the tapes themselves are replete with examples of Mrs. Kennedy's independent thinking and ironically, she describes again and again incidents when her views diverged from those of her husband. Her comments on women in politics, in fact, follows her observation that she found it difficult to forgive politicians with whom JFK had crossed swords while her husband saw such conflicts as very much a part of the business of politics."

"These comments, which sound so antiquated to modern ears, reflect, obviously, Mrs. Kennedy's perspective at this moment in her life. Undoubtedly they were derived in part from her background, her class, her sensibility. But they also capture views that were shared by many in her generation."

"Her iconic status really came after President Kennedy's death when she withdrew from public life and was rarely heard from publicly. The Jacqueline Kennedy on these tapes fits, I think, with what we might have expected if we think of her from the vantage point of her White House years."

"Shortly after her husband’s inauguration, she appointed interior designers to aid her transformation introducing warm tones of strong colours such as blue, yellow and red, and applying geometric symmetry in the positioning of furniture to enhance the magnificence of the arched windows and architectural panelling. She transformed the once stuffy interior into one that exuded grace, elegance and refined formality."

"For her it was imperative that everybody who visited the White House should see a house that was beautiful and lived in and that represented so much of American history."

"Throughout her life, despite the many tragedies she endured (loosing a husband and a baby boy) her poise and style endured. We adore you Jackie O., you are a role model in every sense!"

"But whatever the reasons behind her appeal, and however concrete or ineffable they might be, the fact remains that for millions of women around the globe, across generations, the woman in the White House in the Oleg Cassini outfits (made expressly for her), throwing formal dinner parties for artists, writers, scientists and diplomats, traveling the world, was the face not only of a new era but of an utterly new type of American woman. She was, somehow, at once warm and elegant, youthful and sophisticated, fun-loving and serious—and on top of it all, self-deprecatingly funny."

"Looking back now, even in the light of all we know about her fraught, strained, "storybook" marriage to an obsessively philandering husband, there does seem to be something special about Jackie Kennedy. Maybe it's just that the camera loved her. Maybe she was so intriguing to so many people simply because, set beside the other prominent women in Washington, DC, in the early 1960s, she was young (barely in her 30s), chic and, with her Irish and French ancestry, indefinably and refreshingly "exotic.""

"It was in those brief, heady years or perhaps it was really just one year, during the campaign and election of 1960—when John F. Kennedy and his young, beautiful wife were fast becoming national and then international celebrities that the legend of Jackie was born."

"Kennedy was the epitome of 1960s haute couture. Her style was aspirational, unattainable. Obama is more of a fashion populist. It's hard to imagine Kennedy, in her pillbox hat and leopard-skin coat, dishing about shopping at J.Crew."

"Like many fellow fashionistas, Donahue is rushing to cram Obama's 5-foot-11-inch frame into the mold left by her timeless predecessor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The trouble, historians say, is that it's a lousy fit."

"I can't put it any better than Jackie Kennedy did after the Cuban Missile Crisis. She said that what worried President Kennedy during that very dangerous time was that a war might be started — not by big men with self-control and restraint, but by little men — the ones moved by fear and pride."

"God gave her very great gifts and imposed upon her great burdens. She bore them all with dignity and grace and uncommon common sense. May the flame she lit so long ago burn ever brighter here and always brighter in our hearts. God bless you friend, and farewell."