She was at her best in the crunch. When disaster struck in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, those who saw her said she was tearless, perhaps spacy, "with a 50-yard stare." But she knew what she had to do to fulfill her commitment to her husband, her children and her country. Her bright pink suit was soiled with blood and gray matter, but she would not change it or leave John F. Kennedy's body.
Everyone present tried to get her away from a gory scene, but there was nothing spacy, nothing at a 50-yard remove, about her defiant resolve. When one of several doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas urged her to leave, she said, "Do you think seeing the coffin can upset me, doctor? I've seen my husband die, shot in my arms. His blood is all over me. How can I see anything worse than I've seen?"
Often described as a mannequin, remote and elegant, she seemed determined to underscore the bloody reality of death by gunshot. At Parkland, where the President was taken by ambulance, every time the Secret Service urged her out, she walked right back in, circling the trauma room. Dr. Marion Jenkins, now 76, remembers that in the minutes after the shooting, "I noticed that she was carrying one hand cupped over the other hand. She nudged me with her left elbow and then with her right hand handed me a good-sized chunk of the President's brain. She didn't say a word. I handed it to the nurse. Then they led her out of the room again."
After Kennedy was officially declared dead, the various tubes and his back corset -- all were removed. His wife approached the body, and, as Jenkins recalls, "she started kissing him. She kissed his foot, his leg, thigh, chest, and then his lips. She didn't say a word." A wife's final anointment and farewell.
When her father died, she put a bracelet he had given her into the casket, to be buried with him. In Dallas she had nothing but her wedding ring. She put it in. Then, turning to her husband's close aide, P. Kenneth O'Donnell, she asked, "The ring. Did I do the right thing?" O'Donnell told her to leave the symbol where it lay.
In the public eye, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' heroism is imprinted through indelible images: at L.B.J.'s side, with a gaze more eloquent than any words, as he took the oath of office; gripping Robert Kennedy's hand and then her children's; receiving the flag that had covered J.F.K.'s coffin. But what of the woman beyond the camera's range? There are no pictures of her heartbreak and bravery at Parkland. Yet that was somehow her way.
Last week she died as she had lived, the most private of public persons, a delicate glow in the harshly lit landscape of American celebrity. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis radiated courage and restraint, glamour and conspicuous shyness. What she thought about her crowded life no one knows because, with the exception of interviews granted to Theodore White and William Manchester in 1963 and 1964 respectively, she never spoke about her experiences after the assassination or revealed her reactions or opinions. Tapes of these interviews exist; White's will be released next year, but Manchester's are embargoed until 2064.