In 1960, Daniel Boorstin observed, “Today, every American, child or adult, encounters a vastly larger number of names, faces, and voices than at any other period or in any other country.”Footnote 1 With the advent of the Internet, in a single hour, we now see more of these “fragments of people” than Boorstin ever dreamed.Footnote 2 It is a mode of existence which the political sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described as “liquid modernity” – one, he contended, which “stimulates ‘lateral’ rather than ‘vertical’ orientations” and “a splicing of both political history and individual lives into a series of short-term projects and episodes,” and into juxtapositions which do not form a coherent whole.Footnote 3 This disjointed context, Bauman argued, acts as a “natural ecological niche” for celebrities, who “provide a sort of glue that brings and holds together otherwise diffuse and scattered aggregates of people.”Footnote 4 In this article, I will use Bauman's theory of liquid life, along with biographical and journalistic representations of the American former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, to analyze the effects on scholarship of this splicing of stories, and to position life-writing as an illuminating approach for general humanities research.
By life-writing, I mean a methodology combining historical, cultural and textual analysis with rigorous primary research. For the circumstances Boorstin and Bauman depict are connected to the stories of individuals, of real people, an important element which, within the academic study of celebrity, is often either diminished or deliberately ignored. Since his development of star theory in the late 1970s, Richard Dyer's approach has been orthodoxy – Graeme Turner went so far as to call it a “fetish.”Footnote 5 Examining the star as sign, image and text, Dyer argues that the “real person who is the site or occasion” of the image, though the point of origination, is not of primary interest.Footnote 6 However, the dismissal of the “real person” in such analysis ignores the tensions arising when we, in Susan Sontag's words, turn “people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”Footnote 7 This is not to suggest that we do not use celebrities as objects or signs in our daily lives, for we often do. As Adam Gopnik wrote in the New Yorker upon the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, “Everything that we Americans did to her tried to turn her into an object … and everything she did was to try to make herself back into a subject.”Footnote 8 These tensions between a cultural imagining of the individual and the indvidual's sense of her self and her life are worth exploring and, in doing so, life-writing becomes a productive means of factoring the “real person” back in. It helps mitigate the limitations of textual analysis while contributing to our understanding of the ways in which stories of people and events converge and evolve within culture and discourse. Analysis of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's life, for example, reveals how unstable and mutable her life-narrative has historically been within the media and popular culture; how it is something over which, try as she might, she never had control; and how impulsive, impassioned, shifty and presentist are each individual's responses to it. This, in turn, exposes a narrative arc in which each news report or biography represents a unique moment of renegotiation in an ongoing interpretation.
Writing of text and reception, John Frow argues, “The moment of production is a present act launched into an open future, and a working of the past as it is intertextually figured.”Footnote 9 Life-texts undergo the same process. To bring this out of the realm of abstraction, let us consider, for example, a hypothetical early January 1961 magazine profile of the soon-to-be American First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Such a text would have been rooted in what the writer and reader knew of Jacqueline Kennedy's life at that specific point in time, and both its composition by the writer and interpretation by the reader would involve assumptions about the present and future: for the writer, the reader, the nation, Jacqueline Kennedy's life, etc. After John Kennedy's assassination, the story of Jacqueline Kennedy's life – her past, present and future – would be reconfigured based upon the knowledge that her husband had died. Reading that same magazine profile in late November 1963, that reader would likely bring other assumptions to bear upon the article, so that the meanings of the text itself would appear radically different just two years on. Similarly, for me as a researcher, encountering that same profile for the first time in 2015, the article slots in among all my knowledge about the former First Lady, which – due to the passage of time, the occurrence of subsequent events and the availability of more information – is vastly different than that of the reader in 1961. To carry this one step further, in this equation, Pablo Larraín's biographical film Jackie (2016) and the Reelz Channel's mini-series After Camelot (2017) become simply the latest addenda in what Frow characterizes as the “open-ended chain of reception” which continually shifts the text into “unforeseeable contexts,” so that the text is repeatedly reviewed, renegotiated, rewritten and reperformed.Footnote 10
Like any texts, life-narratives are sites of “historical complexity.”Footnote 11 In the case of celebrities, the media play a significant role in this process. Within mass media, messages “are extended in time, temporalized, historicized … become part of history, in the double sense of belonging to the past as well as the present and of constituting some of the resources through which the past is reconstructed and understood.”Footnote 12 Life-writing provides a framework for analyzing these discursive convergences across a multiplicity of seemingly disconnected narratives, events and eras. The life-narrative of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, in turn, proves a useful case study.
JACKIE
Given the public interest in First Ladies, scholarly inquiry into their role and position in American life has been astonishingly limited. In the early 1980s, Lewis L. Gould noted that the “perennial American fascination with First Ladies has recently given signs of achieving a new level of intensity.”Footnote 13 Gould cited evidence of this uptick,Footnote 14 and offered a full-throated defense of the historical study of First Ladies, writing in 1986:
By ignoring First Ladies, we have truncated the humanity of presidents and diminished them as men. Our grasp of the presidency is poorer for that action. But we have also, and this is more important, downgraded a group of women who have fulfilled a unique responsibility … In the most profound sense, the study of First Ladies holds up a mirror to ourselves. And for this male historian, it has also shown the unstated and often unconscious chauvinism about the achievements of women that permeates our society … A history that excludes First Ladies, or the contributions and lives of women generally, will be a record that is limited, false and wrong.Footnote 15
That such an argument was necessary suggests the anemia of the scholarship at the time. Since Gould, others have taken up the gauntlet and, in the last decade, there has been a steady increase in scholarship around First Ladies.Footnote 16 Scholarly inquiry into the influence of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is also increasing; however, that increase has been slow and the scholarship remains limited.
In “Jacqueline Kennedy and Cold War Propaganda” (2005), Carole B. Schwalbe positions the former First Lady as “a potent diplomatic force,” who used principles of “soft power” to “build international support for American interests and ideology” during the Cold War.Footnote 17 In “Jackie Joins Twitter: The Recirculation of ‘Campaign Wife’” (2012), Melody Lehn analyzes the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library's 2010 tweets celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the “Campaign Wife” column to examine how the project “offers some relief to the inability to perform a text-based analysis of Jacqueline Kennedy's words” while also “reshaping the substance of her rhetorical legacy.”Footnote 18 Both Lehn's and Schwalbe's work demonstrates the importance of accessibility – an endemic problem in First Lady scholarship more generally, as presidential libraries tend to prioritize the processing of presidential papers. Their research, along with that of Berkeley Kaite (which I will discuss at length), is innovative and provocative; however, the scholarship remains stubbornly fixed in textual analysis. Eschewing primary biographical research, researchers rely upon secondary biographical sources to a degree which is worrying given the level of inaccuracy and the lack of analytic rigor evident in those sources.Footnote 19 A combination of original biographical research and cultural analysis is what the field needs now.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's life-narrative provides an especially rich site for demonstrating the richness of this approach when investigating the intersections of celebrity and culture, due to her story's visibility, the volume of contemporary comment it garnered, the extreme nature of the responses elicited, the apparent lack of precedent for this in mid-twentieth-century life (particularly for a First Lady), and, crucially, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's own ambivalence. Though she was undoubtedly involved in shaping her own press, her involvement appears to have been significantly less than that of contemporary film stars like Elizabeth Taylor – her nearest celebrity equivalent.Footnote 20 This results in her narrative being comparatively streamlined in a way that many celebrity narratives are not, precisely because the celebrity is openly, actively engaged with the press.
The word “comparatively” should be stressed. Her story is useful because it was believed to be new and strange and different, and as a result it garnered so much contemporary comment and analysis that its evolution becomes possible to track in retrospect. This is not to say that it is, in fact, an “easy” story or that it was necessarily new or different. Rather, it is that, because of the circumstances identified above, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's story now appears in a higher relief than many of the celebrity stories around it, and this is a relief which illuminates dynamics often otherwise obscured.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is firmly situated, alongside Taylor and others, at a historical moment when the circumstances of stardom were evolving into what we would think of as the celebrity culture of today. “The three years that Jacqueline Kennedy spent as First Lady,” Lewis L. Gould noted, “took the institution beyond the status of celebrity and into the even more alluring venue of international stardom.”Footnote 21 The migration Gould describes here isn't a movement from one mode of renown (celebrity) into another (star) but, rather, an amplification in exposure, where the position of First Lady went from a localized, national context to a job that received dramatically expanded exposure on a global scale. In today's terms, it's equivalent to the difference between something being on the Internet and its going viral. The story of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis went viral and the location of this shift with her is key, ensuring, as it did, the accessibility of her story – a story the Boston Globe declared “as significant a female life as has been lived in American history,”Footnote 22 and which Betty Friedan cited as a “significant and poignant mark in the evolution of women.”Footnote 23 All of which is lost in the image of a silent woman that emerged when she died.
THE SILENT GODDESS
Though a false representation of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as a silent figure circulated after her death, she did, in fact, speak in public. In her 1962 televised White House tour, on camera and in voice-overs, the First Lady spoke for approximately one hour; it was the first prime-time television documentary in which a woman provided the majority of the narration.Footnote 24 To many Americans, who had never heard her speak, her voice was surprising. “It produced a small continuing shock,” Norman Mailer recorded, “muffled by shyness perhaps or [it] was too urgent in its desire to sound like other voices, to sound, let us say, like an attractive small-town salesgirl, or like Jackie Kennedy's version of one.”Footnote 25 “Why would a married woman with two children wish to dress and talk in a 13-year-old ‘kittenish’ manner?” one viewer asked her local paper. “To do so, as an average housewife, would be ridiculous; however, to do so in the White House is disgusting.”Footnote 26 Thirty-two years later, when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died, the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, “Only her voice, whisper-thin and high-pitched, was at odds with her regal bearing” – an especially harsh critique given the observation that “[e]ven her incessant smoking didn't mar her noble image.”Footnote 27
After leaving the White House following John Kennedy's death, Jacqueline Kennedy continued speaking. “In a voice so low it was barely audible to those around her,” she gave a brief nationally televised address on 14 January 1964; in early 1964, she narrated a twenty-nine-minute film produced to raise funds for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library; she “softly spoke” during an international broadcast on JFK's birthday in May 1964.Footnote 28 Another common myth is that she never gave interviews; this is also inaccurate. In mid-1964 she did lengthy oral histories with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and William Manchester (albeit these were embargoed). In March 1967, provoked by the Saturday Evening Post’s recent article “Jacqueline Kennedy: A View from the Crowd,” she spoke at length with the journalists Bob Considine and Frank Conniff for a multipart series – “Jackie Kennedy speaks for herself”! – which appeared in the Hearst newspapers.Footnote 29 A few years after her remarriage, in May 1972, traveling in Iran, she gave a surprisingly candid in-person interview to a local female reporter and, the following month, likely at the behest of her mother, she gave a more guarded telephone interview to the Washington, DC society columnist Betty Beale.Footnote 30 In May 1975, several months after the death of her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, she spoke with a journalist in Greece, and in September of that same year, after jogging in Central Park, she sat down in the grass and addressed her situation with a reporter from the National Enquirer’s news service. “Everyone thinks that I'm living it up all the time – but nothing could be further from the truth,” she said, while chewing on a blade of grass. “My life is very dull right now. I'm doing just very ordinary everyday things. Really, my life at the moment would make very uninteresting reading … I want to keep my personal life private – but I certainly don't have anything to hide.”Footnote 31
And yet, when she died, they called her the “Silent Goddess.”Footnote 32 As First Lady, per the Washington Post, “Her silence added to her glamour.”Footnote 33 Following her husband's murder, according to the Boston Globe, “She was speechless, and her silence spoke for the Nation.”Footnote 34 In subsequent years, according to Newsday, “she maintained her silence” – “And silence, of course, is communication.” “Now, in silence, she will make her own final journey to Arlington [Cemetery].”Footnote 35 Her silence was so pervasive within the discourse that a New York schoolteacher – who, Time took care to mention, was too young to remember November 1963 – remarked, “I thought she would be like Guinevere, I thought she would ride off on a horse, in her beautiful silence.”Footnote 36 “She did not do the talk show circuit,” exulted a columnist. “She did not write the tell-all autobiography. She wanted to live her life quietly and well.”Footnote 37
That this was behavior which increasingly went against the status quo is probably, partly, why her “silence” assumed such significance. It was a time felt by some to be a period of escalating American blab and, in identifying and applauding Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's “silence,” the media simultaneously silenced her and refuted the trend of “letting it all hang out.” This was explicit in the obituaries. A symbol of “an old America that was more dignified, more private, an America in which standards were higher and clearer and elegance meant something,” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis served, according to Time, as “a living reminder in the age of Oprah that personal dignity is always, still, an option.”Footnote 38 She died, Newsday reported, in “the dignified quiet that she carved for herself in an age of rising babble.”Footnote 39
But culture is a fog of crosscurrents and disconnected occurrences impinging haphazardly on one another. And so the mid-1990s rise of the narrative of “Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as silent star” cannot be unilaterally classified as backlash against “letting it all hang out.” Liquid modernity, Bauman argued, is characterized by nostalgia for “a bygone world in which time moved much slower and resisted acceleration,” which contrasts with the “precarious” liquid life, “lived under conditions of constant uncertainty,” wherein individuals are “haunted by the problem of identity.” In liquid life, Bauman claimed, we now lack the “frames of reference for human actions and long-term life strategies” which were available to peoples of earlier periods.Footnote 40 The historical success of such strategies is contestable, for it is precisely these oppressive frameworks from which certain groups (women, people of color, LGBTQ people, etc.) have spent the past half-century freeing themselves. However, if such templates are no longer tenable, there are indications that a longing for them may nonetheless persist. Writing of Hillary Rodham Clinton in The Guardian in 2014, Jess Cartner-Morley lamented, “we simply have no template for how a clever, serious woman should look.”Footnote 41 In 1994, if the deification of “Silent Jackie” was, in one sense, a repudiation of the talk show circuit, it seems also to have had deep roots within another contemporaneous life-narrative which defied all available templates: that of the then First Lady (referring to Hillary Clinton).
THE FEMINAZI
John Berger contends, “What we see habitually confirms us in our lives,” at a time in which media surround us with an “unprecedented number of images, many of which are faces” that “harangue ceaselessly.”Footnote 42 And yet these faces –the “fragments of people” to which Boorstin pointed in 1960, that comprise the “short-term projects and episodes” Bauman critiqued in 2007 – are dynamically connected. The stories of the past are viewed through the prism of the present, so that contemporary preoccupations and concerns are brought to bear upon them, prompting a revision of the past and, in some cases, moving elements previously in the background to the fore. And yet our understanding of the present is also informed by narratives of the past and, especially in light of the 2016 US presidential election, examining this aspect of the equation – how the actions of individuals in the present may connect to preexisting assumptions toward life-narratives established in the past – becomes imperative.
This is a process in which anxiety and fear often play a significant part. The narrative around Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at the time of her death looked as it did because it emerged in a precise context, amid significant anxiety around the changing roles of women and men, and fear, in particular, of the change the First Lady at the time seemed to represent. “There is a tremendous fear of her out there,” a Republican direct-mail fund-raiser informed a reporter for a feature entitled “Pinning Down Hillary.”Footnote 43 This article appeared in the June 1994 issue of Vanity Fair, which was on newsstands at the time of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's death. The cover featured a photograph of Tom Hanks alongside the headline “Hillary on the Verge.” “Hillary Clinton is frightening,” Susan Faludi told Vanity Fair. “You look at all the cartoons where Clinton is in diapers or in a dress or in a baby carriage, and she's wearing the pants, and you see the anxiety.”Footnote 44 It was an anxiety from which women were not exempt, as Faludi noted:
If you re-create her as a demon, you can say, ‘It's a good thing I didn't go out there and get that law degree, because look what it does to women – it turns them into monsters!’ She makes some women uncomfortable because she makes them question themselves and look at things they may not want to look at.Footnote 45
In light of this, the life story of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – at many points profoundly uncomfortable and traumatic – suddenly seemed to offer a cultural palliative to the contemporary anxieties around women's roles and, in particular, the woman in the White House.
Even before her husband's election, Hillary Rodham Clinton was controversial. “It's not that she's an accomplished modern woman. It's just that she's grating, abrasive and boastful,” a Republican consultant told the New York Times.Footnote 46 In September 1992, when Jane Pauley asked the candidate's wife why some people didn't like her, she surmised, “I think part of it is that I do have opinions, and I do state my opinions … Maybe the fact that I have such opinions, maybe the fact that I state them forcefully is a little bit troubling to people.”Footnote 47
The criticism followed her into the White House. Rush Limbaugh called her a “feminazi” and, at his rallies, people wore shirts that read “Impeach Hillary.”Footnote 48 In April 1994, the Associated Press reported that “‘Hillary bashing’ is in full swing,” but that, “After weeks of caustic criticism,” she experienced “a few moments of open affection” during an engagement.Footnote 49 Still, the AP noted,
Such moments of unambiguous approval are rare for a first lady who generates criticism on a startling number of fronts – from the way she wears her hair to how she shaped health care policy, practiced law and played the markets. Then there is the core of the enigma: her unfathomable relationship with the president of the United States.
A former aide to Rosalynn Carter decried the “built-in sexism” of these portrayals and suggested that Republicans were preying on fears that Clinton was “too uppity” for a First Lady.Footnote 50
The role of First Lady has, historically, been decorative rather than legislative. Despite Lady Bird Johnson's many accomplishments in the mid-1960s, in the press coverage she was, “first and foremost, a wife,” her press secretary observed.Footnote 51 Thirty years later, Bill Clinton complained to Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, “What's really amazing is that if [Hillary] weren't my wife, people would be throwing garlands at her feet, probably, for all the stuff she's accomplished. But if you're somebody's wife, you're still not supposed to have a mind.”Footnote 52 A typical passage from a Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis biography from 1978 characterized as “the climax in any American woman's life, the inauguration of her husband as President of the United States,”Footnote 53 and alarmingly little had changed in the popular imagination a quarter-century later. In 1996, Sandra Day O'Connor – the first female Supreme Court Justice – received a letter from a schoolboy who told her that he hoped “someday you can become a president's wife.”Footnote 54 To be First Lady was still perceived as the highest position of power for an American woman.
And, in 1994, Jackie, as she was called, was hailed as the best of the best. There was a rallying around her, in a country that seemed – six months away from the mid-term elections that would sweep Newt Gingrich's archconservative movement into office – increasingly divided and fraught. In the New York Times, the columnist Frank Rich wondered if “the reverential grief for Mrs. Onassis gave expression to an unacknowledged national yearning – even a ravenous need – for a higher common purpose during this bitterly partisan time.”Footnote 55
There was, in the responses to her, a tremendous nostalgia. Explaining the presence of so many people lining the street for her funeral in New York City, the reporter Sander Vanocur told viewers of NBC's Today, “There's no class represented in this society and she represents class … There's a plethora of celebrities. This woman stands out because she was classy, dignified, and everything we had hoped would turn out in this society and which hasn't.”Footnote 56 “It's been quite a week for people my age, or a year really,” the historian Stephen Ambrose told Bryant Gumble and Katie Couric. “The death of Pat Nixon, the death of Richard Nixon, and now with Jacqueline Kennedy gone. This was, these were the dominant figures in my lifetime.”Footnote 57 And now they were gone.
In 1994, this nostalgia led to the overwriting of a narrative that, during Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's lifetime, had been both far more interesting and complex. As a reporter for the New York Times noted in a May 1970 profile, when talking to people about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, competing versions emerged: “the sassy, devil-may-care enfant terrible … the willful European traveler … the fey creature … bitchy Jackie, who at some time or another has mimicked and made scornful remarks about every friend and relative she has ever had, or the sensitive Jackie.”Footnote 58 During her lifetime, the tension between these portrayals deepened the mystery of who she might be and what she might be like, contributing enormously to her allure and continuing appeal. She could not be pinned down and so, according to a biographer writing in 1978, people waited “[l]ike addicts … for each new episode” of her story, in an ongoing effort to figure out who this prismatic woman was.Footnote 59
Some eulogies dwelt upon these other aspects of her character. An editorial in the Boston Globe hailed her as an “original” who “maintained an independence”; a woman who “was not a Kennedy clone and refused to play touch football,” she struck “bargain[s] of independence”; “Nobody owned her.”Footnote 60 “A woman of fierce independence” and “implacable determination,” the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in the San Francisco Examiner, before concluding, “She died as she lived, in grace and dignity.”Footnote 61
A notable sameness characterized the vocabulary used within the contemporary culture to describe her life and cultural contribution. A week after her death, Rich observed,
In the flood of coverage of Mrs. Onassis, four words were called upon again and again to define her, as if they were a mantra: grace, dignity, style, class. They were repeated so often that eventually every man-on-Fifth-Avenue interviewed on television mechanically gave the same response: “I admired Jackie because of her dignity and grace.”Footnote 62
She was being rehabilitated. Details were falling from the narrative due, Rich felt, to “the zeal of the press and public alike to erect a Saint Jackie O.”Footnote 63 Using a particular fragment of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's story – this idea of her “silence” – the story that emerged had deep roots within contemporary anxieties about celebrity, gender, women's role in public life and the emotional tenor of public discourse. It was a story, relayed during the height of the culture wars, which reinforced traditional gender roles and appropriate modes of behavior. It also harkened to an earlier time which seemed to some Americans far simpler. The myth of Jackie's silence tapped into all of this. Presented forcefully and convincingly as fact, it is, unfortunately, a myth that has by and large endured in the press coverage of her life and been perpetuated in the subsequent scholarship.
THE AFTERLIFE AND ITS EFFECTS
This disconnect – between “Saint Jackie” and the independent Jackie – was central to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's star appeal during her lifetime and yet absent in most of the eulogies. Instead, they stress her silence and cast her influence in American life almost exclusively within a historical and gendered framework, locating her significance entirely in her husband's assassination and its immediate aftermath. Her stardom, which pre-dated the assassination, was given cursory attention, as was her life after. Though the seven-year marriage to Aristotle Onassis was of tremendous interest during her lifetime, as the culture critic Wayne Koestenbaum noted, upon her death this relationship “was erased with the absoluteness of Soviet regimes banishing dissidents from the historical record.”Footnote 64
As certain elements of her story receded, others moved to the fore: her “silence” in particular. “She almost never granted interviews on her past – the last was nearly 30 years ago – and for decades she had not spoken publicly about Mr. Kennedy, his Presidency or their marriage,” the New York Times obituary contended.Footnote 65 It is a notion reinforced within the scholarship produced on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's life since.
In “The Pink Suit: Jacqueline Kennedy and Celebrity Defilement” (2014), for example, Berkeley Kaite argues for the location of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's fame solely in the suit she wore in Dallas. According to Kaite, because she refused to publicly address – and therefore offer an explanation for – the circumstances of her husband's death, the pink suit she was wearing at the time of her first husband's murder has been culturally coopted to fill the silence as “a visual quotation of all we do and do not know about the assassination.”Footnote 66 While compelling, Kaite's argument overlooks several practicalities that contextualize the suit's place in everyday American life and Kennedy lore, and which complicate the argument being made.
In commenting upon the pink suit with what Kaite characterizes as “neurotic intensity,” the biographies and memoirs are relaying the narrative as it emerged early on. From the outset, the color was emphasized – as a confirmable fact in a weekend in which so much remained unknown, but also as a necessary detail for viewers of black-and-white photographs or black-and-white news broadcasts. In examining the reception of the suit in the obituaries from 1994, Kaite overlooks the role time plays in this story and fails to establish the suit's significance from the very beginning in 1963. This detail is crucial if we are to understand why it is commented upon with such ferocity after, and why and how it functions as she suggests.
Kaite's depiction of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's “enduring silence” about the assassination, “her refusal to speak publicly,” is also misleading.Footnote 67 Kaite, in fact, debunks this herself, in the endnotes rather than the main text, acknowledging that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis did speak about the assassination in her two five-hour interviews with William Manchester.Footnote 68 So it is not that she remained silent on the subject; we are simply not yet privy to what she said. It is an important distinction. In the absence of access to these interviews, which remain sealed until 2067, the pink suit may well operate as Kaite suggests, but it isn't filling a permanent gap left by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's refusal to speak. Rather, the suit fills a temporary gap: the current living generation's inability to access the interviews about the assassination.
The situation with the garment itself is similar. The suit is at the National Archives in Washington, DC, and will not be displayed until 2103. Thus, if the suit is “commented upon with a neurotic intensity” in the biographies and made to speak for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, it is not simply because the suit “has the last word,”Footnote 69 but also because we do not. The suit, along with the interviews, holds knowledge that will be available to future generations but from which our own mortality excludes us. Kaite suggests that the pink suit points to all we cannot know about the assassination, which is, in one sense, correct. But, under embargo along with the Manchester interviews, the pink suit also points beyond the assassination itself: to the fact that we are all mortal, that there are things we cannot know because we will die.
The psychoanalyst Josh Cohen suggests that our interest in invading the privacy of public lives and our assertion of “the right to assert to know everything about everyone else” may be “an unconscious pretext against our ignorance of ourselves.”Footnote 70 There are within us, Cohen proposes, “Zones of obscurity, where knowledge fails to reach,” which are, in turn, “sources of fear and contempt, demanding no less than elimination.”Footnote 71 Stories of lives present an opportunity for a projection out of ourselves, away from those zones, into lives and experiences not our own. A projection through which we seek release, it is, at once, entertaining, imaginative and collaborative. It is widely accepted that novels and films enable this, but stories of real lives do too. And these stories of lives take on lives of their own, to be complexly woven into ours, with or without our awareness of how and why.
Stories of lives are more dynamic than the traditional cradle-to-grave narrative structure implies; they are continually repurposed, a condition that suggests that the telling of lives in mainstream culture is linked not just to the time in which the life is lived, but perhaps even more closely to the cultural moment in which the telling or retelling of that life is produced. However, this is not taken enough into account by researchers when using biographical sources as evidentiary support. And so a newspaper profile or a biography or an obituary is used as evidence of who Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was or what her biographers have said without examination of why her story was being told in a particular way in that specific moment, and the series of translations that story has undergone. The telling shifts with each passing year, which is why 1968's “Jackie” does not look exactly like 1973's, much less like 1994's or 2017's. It is not just that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis changed during her lifetime, but that the times and the context in which her story circulated and was retold changed as well, and have continued to do so after her death. Complicating this further is the multidimensionality of the life-narrative and the proliferation of competing myths within it. So that, in deconstructing the so-called Camelot myth developed in Theodore H. White's article in the 6 December 1963 issue of Life magazine, Larraín's film ultimately perpetuates an equally powerful myth, espoused in an article appearing earlier in that same issue of the magazine and entitled “Mrs. Kennedy's Decisions Shaped All the Solemn Pageantry.”Footnote 72 From this, the Jackie we need now is, it would seem, not a silent woman but, rather, another archetype: the woman in desperate circumstances, engaged in battle, utterly alone.
John Berger wrote, “If we can see the present clearly enough, we shall ask the right questions of the past.”Footnote 73 I would extend this to argue that if, in our research of the past, we interrogate the tensions between a specific life-narrative, the moments of its reproduction and the new meanings it accrues through its various reiterations, we will gain a fuller understanding of how these “fragments of people” – which we encounter by the thousands every hour of every day – act as both a guide and a glue within modern life, how they are shaped by and help to shape the times in which we live.
