Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [10]
Mrs. Kennedy also transformed the role of the First Lady. Since her restoration of the White House, a venture she conceived and assigned to herself, every president's wife has felt compelled to focus on some important public project. The thirty-one-year-old Jackie was serious when she said her preeminent job in the White House was to be wife and mother, but as Lady Bird Johnson later recalled, "She was a worker, which I don't think was always quite recognized." With that work ethic, it was natural that Jacqueline would take on the restoration project, although she knew it would prove exhausting. She had had a full-time job after graduation from college, which was unusual in her social group, and later, in 1975, when her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, had died, and both of her children were away at school, she took on a real job as a book editor at Viking and Doubleday, with a reputation for quality volumes of art and history that benefited from her taste, life experience, and expertise.
Jackie's capacity for intellectual growth manifested itself in the 1970s with her embrace of the women's movement. She told a friend she had come to realize that she could not expect to live primarily through a husband. She championed various feminist causes, including Gloria Steinem's Ms. magazine, and despite her aversion to giving interviews, gave one in praise of working women for a 1979 cover story in Steinem's magazine, saying, "What has been sad for many women of my generation is that they weren't supposed to work if they had families."
But in the early 1960s, all of this was in Jacqueline Kennedy's future. Retrospectively she felt that of equal importance to her White House restoration were her far less well known efforts as First Lady to save Abu Simbel. Alarmed to learn in 1962 that floods were threatening the exalted Egyptian monument, she wrote JFK, "It is the major temple of the Nile—13th century b.c. It would be like letting the Parthenon be flooded. . . . Abu Simbel is the greatest. Nothing will ever be found to equal it." Despite JFK's insistence that congressmen would dismiss Abu Simbel as some "Egyptian rocks," the First Lady's personal appeal to Capitol Hill won Egypt the necessary funds. When Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, offered to send one of his country's treasures to America as a thank-you gift, she requested the Temple of Dendur, which she and her husband hoped to install in Washington, D.C., to "remind people that feelings of the spirit are what prevent wars."
John Kennedy would have been quick to affirm that the cultural milestones of his presidency—Pablo Casals and the American Ballet Theatre in the East Room, the Mona Lisa displayed in America, the dinner for Nobel laureates, the efforts to develop a national theater (now the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), and others—would most likely have been absent had he not married Jacqueline Bouvier. Both Kennedys insisted that the arts must be included in any definition of a full American life. The affluent society of the early 1960s was a propitious moment for such a statement. Many Americans, enjoying postwar prosperity, were pondering how to spend their newfound discretionary income in leisure hours that their struggling forebears could only have dreamt of.
Jacqueline Kennedy's acute sense of how symbols and ceremony could shape American history was never more evident than during the long nightmare weekend after her husband's assassination. Remembering what she had read, while transforming the Mansion, about Abraham Lincoln's funeral, the most elaborate in the country's past before 1963, the stunned widow improvised three unforgettable days of tone-perfect ceremony—the ritual in the East Room and Capitol Rotunda, the foreign leaders walking to the strangely intimate old cathedral, JFK's beloved Air Force One flying in salute above the burial, the lighting of an eternal flame