In the aftermath of John F. Kennedy's assassination, the world has been given a new and splendid. Insight into the character of the nation's and President's "First Lady"--Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. She resolutely controlled her own profound grief and faced up to the public role which necessarily befell her. She performed the role magnificently.
The nation first came to know Mrs. Kennedy as "Jackie"- a beautiful young woman born to wealth and elegance. She loved to ride horses, to promote the arts, to travel and to enjoy gay parties. This, in the main, was the way the nation thought of her.
But she's "Jackie" no more. This happy phase of her life was wiped out in a, terrible twinkling of time on a fateful sunlit day in Dallas. One moment a happy married woman, the First Lady of a great nation; the next, a young widow and a former First Lady-her beloved husband of only 10 years cruelly taken from her by the assassin's gun.
Under the circumstances, she might well have crumpled, and the nation would have understood. But duty lay before her--duty to the memory of her husband, to the nation and to her children Caroline and John. She did, not falter. Instead, she drew upon what must have been a, vast amount of spiritual strength and met the ordealing days head-on.
The President had been dead less than two hours when she stood beside Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson as he took the oath of office which made him her husband's successor .... She added several thoughtful touches to the funeral arrangements, including the inviting of John F. Kennedy's Irish kin to the rites . . . And there was her unannounced visitation to the President's casket as it was being viewed by the public in the Capitol rotunda..:.. There was the silent midnight visit to her husband's grave on Monday night where the eternal flame was burning. The fame, too, was her idea.
Throughout the four painful days, Mrs. Kennedy was a picture of grief, but of composed grief; a grief she sought to shield from her children and from the watching world. The children were too young to comprehend yet at times they seemed to have a sense of the tragedy and when they did she was quick to console them.
Mrs. Kennedy won the heart of a heart-sick world in her last role as First Lady. If her dead husband should speak, we think he might say to her with pride, borrowing a term from his naval days: "Well done."
