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Unlike Pat Nixon or Muriel Humphrey, Jackie takes no part in her husband's political planning. "Jack wouldn't—couldn't —have a wife who shared the spotlight with him," she says. Her political role is mostly visual: she is never consulted about political matters. On the stump
Jackie provides decor and more, sometimes delivers graceful little speeches to ethnic groups in whispery French, Spanish or Italian. Her retentive mind vacuums odd details from the newspapers and matches them with her own inside information.
("Oh," she told a disconcerted aide recently. "You must have leaked that story!") Once, when Jack lost some notes from Tennyson's Ulysses that he wanted to use in a speech, Jackie obligingly quoted excerpts, from childhood recollection.
At times Jackie displays a political naivete that makes reporters wonder if she is not reverting to the dumb Dora masquerade of her St. Grottlesex days. When a reporter told her in mid-campaign that he reckoned Jack's New York margin at more than half a million votes, she looked wide-eyed and uncertain: "Really? That's important, isn't it? How nice.'' And when her political duties are over, Jackie shucks her toga with obvious relief. Last October, after the tumultuous ticker-tape parade through Manhattan, she whipped off her reversible coat, turned it inside out and went off, like a girl just out of school, with her friend and neighbor, Artist William Walton, to look at avant-garde paintings in the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
In the course of the 1960 presidential campaign, Jacqueline Kennedy got a full quota of wound stripes. A malicious rumor was dry-docked at New York's River Club that Joe Kennedy had given Jackie a million dollars not to divorce Jack. An Ohio woman remarked darkly that "she's both French and Catholic. The wine will flow in the White House." Gossip columnists reported seriously that Jackie was not pregnant—that it was all an elaborate hoax to remove her from the campaign scene. Her biggest battle—the affair of the sable underwear—was touched off when Women's Wear Daily reported that Jackie and her mother-in-law spend $30,000 a year on French clothes. Jackie retorted that she could not possibly spend that much, "even if I wore sable underwear," added gratuitously that she doubted that her wardrobe "cost as much as Mrs. Nixon's."
Muumuus if Necessary. Actually, reports an old friend and Florida neighbor of the Kennedys who is something of a clotheshorse herself, "Jackie has a completely American concept of fashion understatement. She wears very little jewelry. She buys very practically. She plans her wardrobe as a whole. In the fall and spring, she will buy one wonderful suit. She has never worn mink. She wears a wool coat over a suit or dress for lunch or dinners. She has one or two evening dresses—classic and simple and terribly chic, not startling." In the aftermath of the battle of the garment district, Jackie has vowed to buy only American clothes in the future, and will resort to muumuus if it will save Jack from embarrassment. Says she: "I am determined that my husband's Administration—this is a speech I find myself making in the middle of the night—won't be plagued by fashion stories."