Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [9]
Walking around the square, Jacqueline recalled learning while a student in Paris about how the French protected their vital buildings and places. She wished the House and Senate would "pass a law establishing something on the order of Monuments Historiques in France." (Congress did, in 1966.) As she wrote in a letter, she could not sit still while America's monuments were "ripped down and horrible things put up in their place. I simply panic at the thought of this and decided to make a last-minute appeal." In response, an eminent American architect complained that there was "practically nothing" on the square's west side worth preserving: "I hope Jacqueline Kennedy wakes up to the fact that she lives in the twentieth century." But Mrs. Kennedy prevailed. "Hold your breath," she wrote one of her co-conspirators. "All our wildest dreams come true. . . .The Dolley Madison and Tayloe houses will be saved!!!" Had someone else been First Lady, the vista seen from the Executive Mansion's north windows today might be very bleak.3 Among other capital monuments she managed to protect was the old gray mansard-crowned Executive Office Building, built in the 1870s next to the White House, which had once housed the Departments of State, War, and Navy.
In January 1961, when the just-inaugurated President and his wife rode down Pennsylvania Avenue, they were newly reminded that L'Enfant's design for a grand ceremonial mile from Capitol to White House had given way to dilapidated tattoo parlors and souvenir stores. Sometimes at night, unbeknownst to the public, Jackie "would walk halfway" to the Capitol with Jack, as she later scrawled to her brother-in-law, Senator Edward Kennedy: "The tawdriness of the encroachments to the President's House depressed him. He wished to do something that would ensure a nobility of architecture along that Avenue which is the main artery of the Government of the United States. . . . He wished to emulate Thomas Jefferson, with whom he had such great instinctive affinity. . . . I just wanted to tell you with all my heart that this is one thing that really meant something to Jack." The President established a commission for the boulevard's redevelopment and oversaw it closely with his wife. Jacqueline recalled to Ted Kennedy that Pennsylvania Avenue was one of the last things "I remember Jack speaking about with feeling" before they left for Texas in November 1963.
She famously recast the White House as a treasure house of historic American furniture, painting, sculpture, and artifacts that would rival world-renowned museums. For the hundred and sixty years after Abigail and John Adams became its first residents, presidential families had restyled the mansion's public rooms at their whim. When Jacqueline Kennedy first scrutinized them, her heart sank. The bad wallpaper and reproductions were "early Statler," she said, almost devoid of American history. She drafted a plan to persuade wealthy collectors (employing "my predatory instincts," she privately joked) to donate important American pieces; remake the public rooms, with careful research, into proper historical venues; and establish a White House Historical Association to keep some future president's wife whose aunt "ran a curio shop" from revamping those rooms to her own ahistorical taste. Especially after Jacqueline's televised tour of the newly remade White House rooms in February 1962, which was seen by fifty-six million viewers, the project helped make Americans more aware of their traditions in the decorative arts. Enduring too are certain other ways Mrs. Kennedy changed what she described as "the setting in which the presidency is presented to the world," including the contours of state dinners and other presidential ceremonies. She transformed the austere Oval Office into "a New England sitting room" by moving in sofas and easy chairs, unsealing its fireplace, and installing the massive H.M.S. Resolute desk, which has since been used by five of her husband's