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"... There'll never be another Camelot again ...
"Do you know what I think of history? ... For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote. But Jack loved history so... No one'll ever know everything about Jack. But ... history made Jack what he was ... this lonely, little sick boy ... scarlet fever ... this little boy sick so much of the time, reading in bed, reading history ... reading the Knights of the Round Table ... and he just liked that last song.
"Then I thought, for Jack history was full of heroes. And if it made him this way, if it made him see the heroes, maybe other little boys will see. Men are such a combination of good and bad ... He was such a simple man. But he was so complex, too. Jack had this hero idea of history, the idealistic view, but then he had that other side, the pragmatic side. His friends were his old friends; he loved his Irish Mafia.
"History!"—and now she reverted to the assassination scene again, as she did all through the conversation. "... Everybody kept saying to me to put a cold towel around my head and wipe the blood off [she was now recollecting the scene and picture of the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson on Air Force One at Love Field, as the dead President lay aft] ... I saw myself in the mirror, my whole face spattered with blood and hair. I wiped it off with Kleenex. History! I thought, no one really wants me there. Then one second later I thought, why did I wash the blood off? I should have left it there, let them see what they've done. If I'd just had the blood and caked hair when they took the picture ... Then later I said to Bobby—what's the line between history and drama?"
At some point she had said to me, "Caroline asked me, what kind of prayer should I say? And I told her, 'Either please, God, take care of Daddy, or please, God, be nice to Daddy.' " What Jacqueline Kennedy was saying to me now was: please, History, be kind to John F. Kennedy, don't leave him to the bitter old men to write about.
Out of all this, then, I tried to write the story. I typed in haste and inner turmoil in a servant's room, and in 45 minutes brought out the story.
At 2 a.m. I was dictating the story from the Kennedy kitchen to two of my favorite editors, Ralph Graves and David Maness, who, as good editors, despite a ballooning overtime printing bill, were nonetheless trying to edit and change phrases as I dictated. Maness observed that maybe I had too much of "Camelot" in the dispatch. Mrs. Kennedy had come in at that moment; she overheard the editor trying to edit me, who had already so heavily edited her. She shook her head. She wanted Camelot to top the story. Camelot, heroes, fairy tales, legends were what history was all about. Maness caught the tone in my reply as I insisted this had to be done as Camelot. He let the story run.
So the epitaph on the Kennedy Administration became Camelot—a