Jackie Kennedy: First Lady of the New Frontier

A First Lady can’t sign bills, command troops, or issue executive orders, yet Jacqueline Kennedy still reshaped American civic life. We sit down with Barbara Perry, presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and author of *Jacqueline Kennedy: First Lady of the New Frontier*, to look past the fashion headlines and get into the real mechanics of Jackie’s influence. 

We talk about her hands-on role in the White House restoration and why she obsesses over details that most people would never notice. Barbara shares how Jackie helps create the first modern White House guidebook and builds the kind of public history infrastructure that keeps working long after one administration ends. We also explore a bigger argument: in the middle of the Cold War, culture is not fluff. Jackie’s vision of the White House as an icon becomes a form of American soft power, aimed at showing the world what democracy looks like when it takes its own story seriously. 

Then we turn to the harder truths: intense press attention, young motherhood, difficult pregnancies, personal loss, and the private strain of living in a public “goldfish bowl.” We discuss the courage and message-making that follow Dallas, including how Jackie helps shape the nation’s mourning through symbolism and planning. And yes, we end with something that humanizes the Kennedys in the best way: the pets, the gifted puppies, and the surprisingly diplomatic role of a family menagerie. 

If you care about presidential history, civic culture, or leadership without elected office, listen now and tell us what detail changed the way you see Jackie Kennedy. Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show.

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Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to Civics in Year. Today I am so honored and excited to have Barbara Perry with me. Barbara Perry is a presidential historian at the University of Virginia's Miller Center and one of the country's leading scholars on the Kennedy family and First Lady. She is the author of Jaclyn Kennedy, First Lady of the New Frontier. And she really today is going to help us bring Jackie Kennedy, you know, to the public and really talk about her. So we're going to talk about Jaclyn Kennedy, not just as the first lady and cultural icon, but as someone who kind of helped shape how Americans remember the presidency and American history itself. Dr. Perry, I'm so excited to have you on. And I know, listeners, we started recording later because we were just kind of catching up and chatting about things. So thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Oh, it's so much my pleasure, Liz. Thank you so much for doing this and for having such a great topic in this 250th birthday year for the U.S.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Yes. So, in talking about Mrs. Kennedy, what surprised you about how she kind of understood her role as First Lady and her influence on American civic life?

SPEAKER_00 1:20

I think what surprised me the most in going through the papers that were available at the time I did the book, which was in the early 2000s, and even to this day, all of Mrs. Kennedy's papers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library have not yet been released, but they have released those that are part of the work that she did that is so famous about restoring the White House. So what I had to do to get beyond that, and those weren't not even available at the time I did the book, was to find her work and her letters and her memos

Finding Jackie In Other Archives

SPEAKER_00 1:55

in other people's papers. And one that was really helpful was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was at the time he was brought into the White House as almost the resident historian for President Kennedy, but an assistant to the president, an advisor to the president. He was like his father, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had been a Harvard professor of history. And so Kennedy, having gone to Harvard, felt really close to him and brought a whole brain trust from Harvard to Washington to work with him. And what surprised me the most was how much Mrs. Kennedy was involved. And this really brought me into First Lady's history. I knew of First Ladies, but I hadn't delved into the discipline of studying First Ladies, and I had not delved so deeply into the study of Mrs. Kennedy. And I think my sense about a number of First Ladies, except at that point, maybe certainly Hillary Clinton had just served as first lady and obviously was very involved in policy. And I knew enough about Eleanor Roosevelt to know how involved she was in policy. But I think I saw other first ladies as more symbolically involved in a topic or in a role or an action, and that it was more superficial. I didn't necessarily think they were superficial, but I thought that they wouldn't perhaps have delved as deeply into the weeds, I'll call it, of whatever topic they had chosen at that time as they were first lady to serve. And so in Mrs. Kennedy's case, what I realized was just how deeply rooted she was in particularly the restoration of the White House. And the back and forth that she had with Arthur Schlesinger, just as an example of one point in that process, was that Mrs. Kennedy, as a young girl, as an adolescent, uh young Jacqueline Bouvier, had been taken by her mother to the White House for a tour. And she was disappointed as a 13-year-old not to have a takeaway in terms of something physical to take away. She didn't have a brochure, she didn't have a booklet. So she decided to write, along with Arthur Schlesinger and with help from the National Geographic Society's editor, to write the first guidebook to the White House. And she went back and forth into all the details. She read every word. She would correspond frequently with Arthur Schlesinger, who was helping her to write it again, along with the National

The First White House Guidebook

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Geographic Society. So to this day, the White House Historical Society or Association that she founded in the early 1960s continues to publish that book in multiple editions every few years. It updates it. And the one other thing that I found surprising and sort of cute was that, like many men, Arthur Schlesinger was very taken with Jaclyn Kennedy. And it got so that as I went through his memos and letters to her, I noticed he started signing them love Arthur. And I don't mean to indicate that there was anything improper and he was a happy married person, but that I think he just felt so close to her that he wanted to show his love and respect for her at the time.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

And I I love that she uh saw something, you know, in the White House that she didn't, you know, she wanted to change because she didn't get that. So the first lady, like the the office of the first lady, is not in the Constitution, right? This has been created by these women throughout history. So Jacqueline Kennedy specifically seemed deeply aware of kind of that history unfolding around her. How intentional was she in shaping the public image and the legacy of the Kennedy administration and in her role as first lady?

SPEAKER_00 5:45

I think that first of all, back to your original point about her contribution to civic life in the United States, was as she said in her famous tour of the White House, as she had almost finished the restoration by February of 1962, there were still some more things to do, but she wanted it to be an icon. It it wasn't as though she was the first to have that view. Dolly Madison, for example, after she had fled the British in 1814 during the so-called War of 1812, when the British invaded Washington and burned the White House, she barely escaped and it was charred from the inside. And so it had there, there was talk about the possibility of rebuilding it elsewhere in the city. And I think Dolly Madison knew enough to know it was already an icon, as it was called the executive mansion. Then when they painted it white to cover up the charred walls, it became the White House, of course. So Mrs. Kennedy was carrying on with that tradition, as you say, it what she wasn't the first person or first first lady to think of it that way. But the reason I think it's so important that she decided to restore it to its original beauty, to bring back as many pieces of furniture and artwork and decorative arts as she could, was that we're right squarely in the middle of the Cold War. And so I

Restoration As Civic Mission

SPEAKER_00 7:05

sometimes refer to her as a Cold Warrior, as was her husband, and fighting particularly the communist world led by the Soviet Union. We, the US, the leader of the free world, with the president at the head. But she knew enough to know that we were also trying to get unaligned countries. At the time we would call them third world countries. Now we might say they were uh underdeveloped countries or developing countries. And this we these were particularly in Africa, in Asia, in other parts of the world in South America. And they might not have decided yet to cast their lot with the communist or with us, the free world, the democracies in the world. And so she wanted to invite the leaders of these unaligned countries to come to the White House to see its beauty, to see its civic culture, to see our arts. And then hoping that we could convince them to join our side rather than to join the communists. So she had a role beyond the decorative or the symbolic. The symbols were really meaningful for her.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

So the White House restoration project really becomes one of her signature achievements. Why did preserving history and culture matter so much to her? And what impact did that have on Americans?

SPEAKER_00 8:27

The question is a good one just generally about why are some people drawn to history? And I was, and to the history of the presidency and the constitution and our government because my mother took me to see John F. Kennedy when I was a little girl. He was campaigning in our hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. And this launched me, I would tease my mother until she passed and say, Mother, you caused me to become a presidential historian or scholar when I was four years old. And she also loved Mrs. Kennedy. And so she would bring me books about her and the president. So I think it for Mrs. Kennedy, then little Jackie Bouvier, I think because she was born, she was born on Long Island, but she lived a major part of her life in Manhattan in New York City, which obviously is filled with culture and arts and history. And then as an adolescent, her mother had her mother had divorced when Jackie was an adolescent. Her mother remarried. And the man she remarried had homes in Northern Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, and in Newport, Rhode Island. So again, the history of the United States in those areas really caught the attention of a very young Jacqueline Bouvier. And then her trip

Cold War Soft Power At Home

SPEAKER_00 9:45

to the White House as an adolescent and being disappointed that she didn't have a takeaway physically for it. But the other was that when she left university with a degree from George Washington, she had studied French. She studied in Paris for her junior year abroad, became fluent in French, loved French history and British history and European history. And she came back to the United States, finished her last year at George Washington University, and then she became what was called the inquiring photography girl for one of the papers in Washington. And she would go around Washington, DC and be kind of the woman on the street. You know, she'd walk up to people and say, Hi, I'm the inquiring photographer girl for the local paper. May I take your picture? What are you doing in Washington? And sometimes she would pick famous people or public officials like her future husband, who was a member of Congress, and his colleague, Richard Nixon. And she'd go up to them and she'd speak to them and take their picture and put their answers in. So she was really in the mix of that Georgetown, Washington, D.C. government journalist group. And she just continued then her lifelong interest in history, not so much in politics. I think that even put her off sometimes, but certainly history, government, arts, and culture and civics were all part and parcel of her persona.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

Your book highlights, you know, Jackie Kennedy's public poise, but also her private struggles. And I think, you know, when we had first talked, I told you how I went on a deep dive in the Kennedys and I read your book on Rose Kennedy. But that always really struck me about Jackie. You know, she did have those private struggles. How did she navigate these intense public expectations that were placed on the first ladies during the 1960s?

SPEAKER_00 11:50

They were particularly pressures that were put on her because she was so young, uh, only 31 when she became first lady, with two young children, Caroline, who was just three when they moved into the White House, and still to this day, the only president-elect and first lady to be to have a baby between the election and the inauguration. So she comes into the White House with an infant and a three-year-old toddler. And she also had very difficult pregnancies and difficult births.

What Shaped Her Love Of History

SPEAKER_00 12:25

She had lost two babies. One was stillborn, one was a miscarriage. She had a difficult pregnancy with John Kennedy Jr. and a difficult birth with him. So she was still quite weak from the birth of John Kennedy Jr. And yet she was so young and beautiful. The public and the media were so drawn to this young woman with these two young children and her handsome husband that she really had to get up to speed very quickly in being the first lady and try to be used to being filmed everywhere she went and photographed wherever she went, and trying to keep the media away from her children who were so cute and beguiling. But she, and her husband, by the way, wanted there to be lots of photographs of his beautiful wife and his beautiful children. But she was trying to protect the children and protect her own privacy. The other challenge that she faced throughout her marriage was that her husband was a womanizer. There's just no doubt about it in the historical record. John Kennedy, much like his father, was an unfaithful husband. And I do think that he loved his wife, but he it was said by a woman who worked for him in his days in Congress that he compartmentalized his life. And so one part of his life was as a womanizer, and another part of his life was, I think, a loving husband and a loving father. How he squared that circle, I don't know in his own mind, but maybe just simply by compartmentalizing it. So Mrs. Kennedy had that problem. I think she thought that being in the White House was to some extent being in the goldfish bowl, as they say. But the part of the way she dealt with that was getting out fairly frequently. She rented a home for the family where she would often go with the children in Northern Virginia. She was a great equestrian. She loved to ride to the hounds and do fox hunting and jumping. And so she would take the children and go away. Or she would go to New York with her sister, perhaps, or by herself to do shopping. She would go to Europe sometimes by herself or take Caroline to Italy, as she did one year. She also on an unofficial trip, but one that really won friends in a difficult part of the world. She went in March of 1962 with her sister to India and Pakistan, who were often at odds with each other and were being pulled into the Soviet realm. So by sending Mrs. Kennedy there on an unofficial but very spectacular

Fame, Motherhood, And Privacy

SPEAKER_00 15:05

successful tour, she won friends in that part of the world for us. So I think she also worried that knowing that her husband was a womanizer, I think she faced a terrible dilemma. Was he going to try to be a womanizer in the White House? Or did she have to worry that when he went away on official trips, that he might not be faithful to her? And so towards the what would be the end of their time there, she wrote to a friend and she said, I am really surprised at how happy I am in the White House. I thought it would be more of a struggle, but she said, I've come to an understanding of what my role is. I actually see more of my husband because, you know, we live above the store. We live in a workplace, but uh we've carved out time for ourselves and our children and protecting them. And so it's what's so sad is that it came to an end so suddenly and tragically.

SPEAKER_01 16:03

And that I think a lot of people listening, you know, that image of Mrs. Kennedy, you know, after leaving Dallas, you know, when she's with LBJ, like that that image is kind of burned into the collective memory of Americans. And I mean, even for me, like I wasn't born until, you know, 20 years later. But I that picture for me is is etched in my brain because it also shows for me, you know, this huge tragedy happened. We're we're in a cold war, and our the leader of our country is gone, and his wife is standing with what will become the president. He was, you know, the vice president and just his show of strength. And I, when I think of Jackie Kennedy, that's the word I always think of as strength. Not that she didn't have her, you know, her struggles, but that just toys and strength that she had. So for our listeners or for teachers or students who are learning about the presidency today, what can Mrs. Kennedy's story teach us about leadership, public service, and influence outside of elected office?

SPEAKER_00 17:24

I think Mrs. Kennedy's courage and strength, as you say, and it's a sometimes a bit of an irony that her husband wrote a book called Profiles and Courage in the 1950s before he became president, and it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography. And it was about all men who had served in Congress as House members or Senate members who would make choices that they thought were right, even if they thought it would cost them the office that they held and then run for. And yet I can remember, I can remember the day President Kennedy was killed. I was in a Catholic school. We were taken to church to pray for him. And I then watched with my family, Mrs. Kennedy come home with his casket. We could see it on TV. And even though we had a black and white television, you could see her skirt and her hosiery streaked with her husband's blood. And I remember at the time that she was called a profile encourage, and she certainly was. And to contrast her, for example, with Mary Todd Lincoln, who had her own issues while First Lady and some physical struggles too, but both of those women were present at the moment their husbands were shot. And I can't think of anything

Dallas, Grief, And Public Messages

SPEAKER_00 18:35

more upsetting than that. And yet, Mrs. Lincoln, sadly, because of her physical and mental response to her husband's tragic assassination, couldn't even attend his funeral and went into isolation. Mrs. Kennedy, first of all, at the height of the shock of having her husband murdered before her very eyes in the limousine on that street in Dallas, she insisted that she wanted to continue to wear her suit that had the bloodstains on it because she was she was telling the new first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, who said, Mrs. Kennedy, wouldn't you like to change out of that clothing? And she kept saying, No, I want them to see what they did to Jack, to my husband. So she even then was creating a message. And she also very quickly then was planning the funeral of her husband to follow the Lincoln process, uh, to follow the iconography of Lincoln, to shroud the lights in the White House in black crepe, and to have the kind of military funeral for her husband, who was a veteran of World War II. So even while she must have been flooded with grief and shock, she somehow was able to think logically about what she wanted to present. And indeed, at the request that came from the new president Lyndon Johnson to stand with him and his wife, Lady Bird, in Air Force One that had just received her husband's body in the casket and they were trying to get out of Dallas as fast as they could because they didn't know was this a communist plot? Would Johnson be the next that, and it turned out Lee Harvey Oswald, who was this the shooter who at least took the fatal shot to the president, was a communist and had defected to the Soviet Union and was supporting Castro and Cuba. So they they didn't know the Secret Service didn't know what would Johnson would be next. But in that plane on that tarmac at the strangely named Love Field in Dallas, the president, new president asked Mrs. Kennedy, would you stand with me? And when you see that famous photograph, it was taken by a White House photographer, Cecil Stoughton, and he very graciously and gracefully shoots Mrs. Kennedy from the waist up so that you do not see the bloodstains on her skirt or on her hosiery. But the fact that she was able to do that and then bring her two little children on that Saturday when they took the president's body up to Capitol Hill to have it lie in state at the Capitol, to dress those two little children. Caroline was almost six. She comprehended the horror, I think. John Jr. was too young to understand, but he saluted his father nevertheless when his mother asked him to come out of the church and the funeral. So those images, as you say, are burned into the public consciousness and our civic history, I think, thanks to Mrs. Kennedy's courage.

SPEAKER_01 21:44

So I don't want to end on that note. I do want to, especially for our younger listeners, we've been talking about pets, presidential pets. Because it really humanizes the president, it humanizes Know the first family.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

Did the Kennedys have any pets? They did. And uh certainly for President Kennedy, despite the fact that he seemed to have a number of allergies, including to animals, including horses. So he could never join his wife in her equestrian activities or his daughter Caroline, who had three ponies while they were in the White House. And my favorite name was macaroni, the pony. And so she was following her mother

Kennedy Pets And Family Life

SPEAKER_00 22:30

into that equestrian role. But the president was not drawn into horseback riding. And I think John Jr. also had an allergy to horses. But there are many pictures of President Kennedy as he was growing up with family pets. One called Buddy, when he was growing up with his eight siblings in the Kennedy family, Buddy was a wirehair fox terrier, was a very popular dog for people to have as pets in the 1930s because of the movies called The Thin Man, where there was a dog that was a white-haired fox terrier who was called Asta, Skippy in real life. But those were very popular. The president, as he got a bit older in the college years, had a Doberman pincher and their pictures of him with that. Jacqueline Kennedy, as a little girl, when she was Jackie Bouvier, probably about four or five years old, beautiful photograph that I have in my book of her with a spaniel. So it was very logical and natural then for the Kennedys coming into the White House to have lots of pets. And often they were gifts. So my two favorite gifts, one was an Irish wolfhound from the president of Ireland that was sent to President Kennedy after President Kennedy made a very sentimental trip back to the land of his roots in the summer of 1963. And if you know anything about Irish wolfhounds, they're about the size of a great dane. They're among the biggest dogs, so they're just huge. And I must say they didn't pick a very clever name. They called him Wolfie. But Caroline loved him. She also had a Welsh terrier called Charlie. And then President Khrushchev, uh, Chairman Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, talked to Mrs. Kennedy at state dinner that was held in Vienna in 1961. And he had had a summit meeting with President Kennedy that didn't go very well. He he really gave President Kennedy a tongue-lashing. And I think Kennedy was shocked by that. But Mrs. Kennedy charmed Khrushchev at the state dinner that night in Vienna in Schoenburn Palace. And all of a sudden, one day at the White House arrives a crate from the Soviet Union with three puppies. And they were all the children, the puppies of one of the dogs the Soviets had sent into space. And so now they had three more puppies. And then Ireland also sent to President and Mrs. Kennedy a Spaniel called Shannon for the city and the airport where President Kennedy left from when he visited Ireland in 1963. And so at the toward the last few months of the president's life at Hyann's Port, for example, where the Kennedy family had long had a compound, you'll see beautiful photos of Wolfie, Charlie, Shannon, and the three Soviet puppies. And it's just a it's almost like a Norman Rockwell portrait. And yet that famous picture that's taken in color, which is pretty unusual for that time, most of the pictures of the Kennedys tend to be in black and white. But uh Mrs. Kennedy is wearing a beautiful pink summer shift. But it's just after she and the president had lost their baby Patrick, who was born prematurely in August of 63 and died from a lung ailment after only a day and a half of living. And so the president asked that all of the their dogs be brought to Hyannisport from Washington to try to soothe the family, and particularly Caroline, who was waiting for a new brother or sister. And again, she was old enough at five to understand the sadness around the family.

SPEAKER_01 26:14

Oh how fun though to have, I mean, the puppies from I.

SPEAKER_00 26:21

And there's a love, there's a lovely picture of John Jr. And, you know, he's become, I think, even more famous now for another generation because of the recent series about him and his wife, uh, Carolyn Bissett. They married in the mid-1990s, and he was often named by People magazine the sexiest man alive. And she was a beautiful young woman in Manhattan working for Calvin Klein. So they were another fairy tale couple that had a tragic ending. But the pictures of John Jr. as a little boy are just precious. And one of them is in that last year, I think in 1963, where he's he's holding Shannon the spaniel. And instead of sucking his thumb, he was, I think, sucking his forefinger. But it's just the sweetest, and his mother is with him, and you know, she she puts his her arm around him, and then he leans in to Shannon the spaniel. And by the way, as an adult, he always had dogs. And and and it is the case that when he died when his plane crashed, uh, killing himself and his uh wife and her sister in 1999 as they were flying from New York to Hyannesport, he had had a dog who became famous called Friday. And there would be pictures of him and Carolyn after they married walking Friday through the streets of Manhattan. It looked to be a mix of some sort, maybe a hound who was kind of spotted. And and so I remember people asking, well, oh, they hope that Friday wasn't on that plane, too. And then people said no, he had been left behind for a caretaker and was cared for, and even after his master and mistress had died.

SPEAKER_01 28:04

Oh Dr. Perry, this has just been so wonderful. And you teased it a little bit. So there is actually going to be another episode on President Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt. And we are going to, this will actually, if you're listening to this when it comes out, it'll be the next episode. So thank you so much for talking to us about Mrs. Kennedy and really making her more human and showing us how she shaped American civic life, but also the office really of the first lady.

SPEAKER_00 28:41

She did. And I like to say, with those exceptions of the policy-oriented, I mean, really policy-oriented in a broad way, Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton, Mrs. Kennedy bridged not only in

Her Lasting Model For First Ladies

SPEAKER_00 28:55

her own life the generations of women who were more traditional and then prior to the modern women's movement of the 1970s, but indeed, I think she served as a bridge between more traditional first ladies after Eleanor Roosevelt, is almost a reaction to that, like Bess Truman, like Mamie Eisenhower, who all did very good things while first ladies, but they they didn't want to overdo. And then you you get into Mrs. Johnson and certainly Rosalind Carter, who picked up again policy topics that they would run with. And so I think Mrs. Kennedy played that really important role, not only of making again the White House an icon that it is to this day, but that she created a more modern aspect of the First Ladyship.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Dr. Perry, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 29:49

Thank you, Liz, and thank you for your interest in Mrs. Kennedy. She's a fascinating woman and part of our civic history, and I think she will remain so forever.