Killing Kennedy

notice the popping flashbulbs that followed in her wake. Speaking before a host of dignitaries at the Palais de Chaillot, JFK opened his remarks with somber tones as he delivered an apt description of his status in the eyes of Paris and the world. “I do not think it altogether inappropriate for me to introduce myself to this audience,” he said with a straight face. “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris—and I have enjoyed it.”
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    After her walk past the CBS camera, the First Lady starts her television special by narrating a brief history of the White House. Viewers hear her demure voice as images of drawings and photographs fill the screen. There is drama in her words, underscoring her emotional attachment to the building. She speaks in approving tones about Theodore Roosevelt’s addition of the West Wing, which moved the offices of the president and his staff from the cramped second-floor environs of the White House residence into a far more spacious and businesslike environment.
    There is an air of tragedy in her voice as she describes how the White House had to be gutted in 1948. President Truman’s study floor had begun vibrating as if on the verge of collapse. An inspection revealed that the entire building was about to implode because it had not been renovated or reinforced for decades. “The whole inside was scooped out. Only the exterior walls remained,” Jackie says breathily as photographs of giant bulldozers tearing out the historic original floors and ceilings flash on the screen. “It would have been easier and less expensive to demolish the whole building. But the White House is so great a symbol to Americans that the exterior walls were retained.”
    The First Lady finishes her monologue with a reminder that she has immersed herself in the details of all renovations, past and present: “Piece by piece, the interior of the president’s house was put back together. The exterior views were exactly those which Americans had seen throughout the century, except for the balcony on the South Portico—which President Truman added.”
    The scripted words are a coy barb. Truman was roundly denounced in 1947 for adding the balcony, which was seen as a desecration of the White House’s exterior architecture. President Kennedy was initially nervous about Jackie’s restoration, fearing that she would come under the same sharp criticism as Truman. But rather than defer to her husband, as she does so often, the First Lady refused to back down. This “won’t be like the Truman Balcony,” she insisted, assuring her husband that her efforts would be viewed positively. Her focus would be the interior, finally finishing the work those bulldozers began in 1948. Her goal is nothing less than to transform the White House from the very large home of a bureaucrat into a presidential palace.
    Mamie Eisenhower was once fond of referring to the White House and its objects as her personal property—“my house” and “my carpets.” She also had a passion for the color pink. Jackie, who doesn’t get along with her predecessor, has gotten rid of all of Mamie’s cheap furniture and carpeting and painted over the pink.
    As Americans are about to see for themselves, the White House now belongs to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.
    The First Lady once again steps before the camera to take viewers on a walk around her new home, now followed by the show’s host, Charles Collingwood of CBS. Jackie’s personal touches are everywhere, from the new draperies, whose designs she sketched herself; to the new guidebook she authorized to raise funds for the restoration (selling 350,000 copies in just six months). She has done away with oddities such as the water fountains that made the White House look more like an office building than a national treasure.
    The First Lady has scoured storage rooms and the National Gallery, turning up assorted treasures such as paintings by Cézanne, Teddy Roosevelt’s drinking mugs, and James Monroe’s gold French flatware. President Kennedy’s new desk was another of Jackie’s finds. The Resolute desk, as it is known, was carved from the timbers of an ill-fated British vessel and was a gift from Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880. Jackie found it languishing in the White House broadcast room, buried beneath a pile of electronics. She promptly had it relocated to the Oval Office.
    No one other than longtime household staff knows the