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Once Upon a Time by Elizabeth Beller. 25 years after Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy died in a plane crash, her life is being re-examined. This 350-page tome is the highest profile of the books and articles. I wondered why. I think for most of the public, it's promise unfilled. If she'd lived, she'd be 59 now. Perhaps we're all wondering what she would have done with her life. Author Bell offers this explanation.
There is an interesting disconnect between the pictures, which though archival, seemed fresh and of the time I was living, and the articles, which seemed somehow from another era, which they were. The end of the century, the millennium, the last days of the fax machine, the world before 9/11 and, crucially, the full force of the internet. But there was something else that seemed odd: a compulsion to be dismissive of and even disparaging toward Carolyn that appeared to be the flip side to the obsessive attention she attracted.
I so get this. The same could be said about her mother-in-law. In real-time articles abut JBKO, you can track the evolution of the American Woman through the last half of 20th century. In 1960, during the Presidential campaign, Jackie was contrasted with Pat Nixon ... and not favorably. Jackie was considered unrelatable to the average American housewife, with her Social Register pedigree, high-maintenance hair, soft voice and expensive clothes. Her ability to give speeches in French, Italian and Spanish was a boon to her husband in ethnic neighborhoods, but many journalists looked at her as pretentious, over-educated and "not American enough." Then as First Lady and First Widow, we were proud of her. Suddenly her style, dignity and education reflected how we wanted to see ourselves. I believe it was DeGaulle who said, "She taught the world how to behave." When she married Onassis, the press turned on her again. Flighty, shallow, money-grubbing. After he died and she went from Jackie O to Jacqueline Onassis, she was praised again as a woman who worked, even though she didn't have to, because being busy gave her life purpose, as a mother who shepherded her kids safely through a high-profile and challenging childhood in the public eye. Yet when you look at photos of her, from the 1960s to the 1990s, she looks contemporary. Her clothes could be worn today. Her expression is inscrutable. It's as though America kept changing but Jackie was always true to herself.
So I guess I personally wonder less what her daughter-in-law would have done with her life than how we would have dissected and analyzed it over 30 years in the public eye. CBK had a rough time with the press at the beginning. Would they then have come around and lionized her, perhaps as a style icon, advocate or mother? Did Carolyn possess the inner steel it took for Jackie to be Jackie even with the unrelenting scrutiny? I hope this book provides answers.
