Caroline Kennedy visits the Old Fox

We had a rare treat in Redwood City this week:  a visit from a member of the Kennedy family no less.
Caroline Kennedy spoke before a packed house at the Fox Theater this week.  All tickets apparently sold out several days in advance.  The people in the audience looked to be mainly those who had lived through and grown up with Camelot.











The purpose of her visit, sponsored by Kepler's bookstore of Menlo Park, Cargill (surprise!) and the Fox Theater (who look to be under new management and/or adopting a new strategy by including lectures as part of their offering), was to hawk a book on her mother, "Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy" by Michael Beschloss, to which Caroline had provided a foreword.


The book is a compilation of unedited interviews done by Kennedy aide and prominent historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. talking to all sorts of people within the then administration, including Jacqueline.  These interviews were part of an oral history project conducted a few months after President Kennedy was killed, to try to get the recollections of the administration while they were still fresh in the participants' minds.
In her talk, Caroline emphasized the impact that her mother had had not just on popular culture but on diplomacy.  One surprising example was Jacqueline's plan to save Egypt's Abu Simbel temple from the rising waters of the Aswan dam.  In a formal memo addressed to the President, Jacqueline noted and emphasized that while the Russians were building the dam for obvious political and economic gain, that funding the rescue, transfer and transporting of this temple to another site would be seen as a non-political gesture by America helping to save Egyptian cultural heritage, in stark contrast to the Russian project.

During the evening, some excerpts from the tapes prepared by ABC news, who had done a special on the book a few weeks ago, were also played.  The excerpts covered 3 areas: 1) the voracious reading habits of John F. Kennedy (which I found surprising - one wonders how much time the President would have had to read).  Jacqueline pointed out that her husband found time to read in the spaces that you wouldn't expect, for example, while slowly knotting a tie he would also be reading a book in front of him.

She also helped her husband by translating many books in French to help him get a greater grasp of the international issues of the day particularly when it came to third world countries where she was able to translate books published in French written by African and Indo-Chinese authors.  (This at a time when the Algerian and second IndoChinese wars were occurring.)

2) Tension in the White House during the Cuban Missile crisis and 3) Jacqueline's efforts to restore the White House which was in terrible disrepair inside and was a hodgepodge of styles, in the midst of push-back from campaign people scared of a Truman repeat and with their eyes on 1964.  (Truman had done some major changes to the White House a decade earlier which were used to attack him in domestic politics.)  She also created a tour booklet and film on the White House for the domestic and international public, showcasing its history and legacy.

Caroline focused on how her mother fought against being marginalized and being put in her place by the professional politicians around her.  During John Kennedy's campaigns for the senate and the presidency the campaign managers and political strategists considered her to be a liability.  Her upper class accent, finishing school manners and haute couture screamed elitism while those strategists and campaign managers were trying to pull in the votes according to the lowest common denominator.  It becomes ironic, then, that Jackie Kennedy came to be considered one of the greatest First Ladies in our history whose style went on to become widely imitated, and funnily enough became a style setter and common denominator in the fashion and cultural world, identifying the young american style of the 60s.