Innholdsfortegnelse for The Kennedys i Vanity Fair

IVORY POWER With smiles blazing, John F. Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy, and Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. arrived in London, 1938. Joe senior, who had likely made sure photographers would be on hand, was the new U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Joe junior was serving as his secretary. Jack was a junior at Harvard. From the December 2004 issue. From the December 2004 issue. Several months after his inauguration, in 1961, Jack Kennedy was relaxing at the family compound in Hyannis Port with his friend and distant in-law, Gore Vidal. “You know,” Jack said, “I’m get ting awfully tired of reading how my father bought me the election. I think of all the things I did—I was the one out there.” “Well,” Vidal responded, “he certainly made a…

Almost immediately following the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy announced her plans to make the White House a “showcase for great American art and artists.” As White House adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. astutely observed, Jackie’s response to life was aesthetic rather than intellectual or moralistic; in 1951, during her senior year at college, she had won Vogue magazine’s Prix de Paris, a writing contest that awarded the winner an internship at the popular fashion magazine and six months in Par-r is. In her essay Jackie said that the three men in history she would most like to have known were French poet Charles Baudelaire, Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, and Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. If she could be the overall art director of the 20th century, she…

Norman Mailer once called her “the Prisoner of Celebrity,” aptly characterizing Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as the ultimate object of media mythmaking. But Mailer was unaware that by the time he wrote those words, in 1983, the world’s most famous woman had already masterminded what was to be her escape from the constraints of fame. After two chapters of Jackie’s life had been defined by two extraordinary men, after she had been venerated by the world as the widowed First Lady and then vilified for marrying the unworthy Greek, after being portrayed as an extravagant, golddigging spendthrift in the thrall of jewelry and couture fashion, she was going to find ful-fillment on her own terms, and she would do so for the most part comfortably outside the media glare and public…

Along, long time ago, when he was John—just John—I knew him a little. I was a friend of his sister Caroline’s from school. Her brother was a skinny 13-year-old with a big flop of hair. He was thoughtful, undemanding. He remembered your name. He had a watchful eye, a quietness that did not seem to mark him as a Kennedy male, and a mischievous streak that did. As a younger brother he could be protective and loving but also loose, goofy—goofy in a way that kept him from having to control the world too much. As he grew older, authority came to him, and he wore it naturally. If, as a boy, he had been embarrassed by his skinniness, he seemed surprised as a man to have become beautiful—no other…

On Wednesday morning, January 18, 1961, the restless, chestnut-haired 43-year-old man who was preparing, as he would soon put it, to defend freedom in its hour of maximum danger as the next president of the United States was feeling fat. From his family’s duplex penthouse at the Carlyle Hotel, in Manhattan, John Fitzgerald Kennedy had a telephone conference with his internist, who suggested that any extra pounds were the result of trading the frantic pace and infrequent meals of a presidential campaign for the more relaxing transition, and would soon burn away. Reassured, Kennedy ordered his usual high-cholesterol breakfast of broiled bacon, softboiled eggs, orange juice, buttered toast with marmalade, and coffee with cream and sugar. Later that day, he reviewed a selection of silk top hats and underwent a…

A Prize–winning historian, presidential confidant, and White House aide, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was the ultimate Kennedy insider, from campaign to graveside. He left extensive journals when he died, in February 2007, to add to his many published works, including A Thousand Days and The Imperial Presidency. July 19, 1959. Hyannis Port. Jackie Kennedy was the only other person present; and we all drank and talked from about 8 to 12:30… [Jackie] was lovely but seemed excessively flighty on politics, asking with wide-eyed naïveté questions like: “Jack, why don’t you just tell them that you won’t go into any of those old primaries?” Jack was in a benign frame of mind and did not blink; but clearly such remarks could, in another context, be irritating. This is all the more…

Her funeral was what you would have expected it to be: perfect, elegant in its simplicity, done in the manner we have come to know as the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis way of doing things. Rumors of a conflict behind the doors of her 15-room Fifth Avenue apartment between members of the Kennedy family, who arrived en masse the day before her death, and Caroline and John junior, whom their mother had raised so beautifully and who had turned out to be such a source of joy to her, soon surfaced. Senator Kennedy, it was said, wanted a state funeral. Caroline and John, backed by Caroline’s husband, Edwin Schlossberg, and Maurice Tempelsman, insisted on adhering to their mother’s wish to have a private funeral. Caroline, whose strength and inner resolve are…

KATHERINE STIRLING joined Vanity Fair as articles editor in 2010 and was formerly on the editorial staff of The New Yorker. DAVID FRIEND, Vanity Fair’s editor of creative development, has coordinated the magazine’s initial forays into books, e-books, special issues, exhibitions, television, and the Web. LENORA JANE ESTES, Vanity Fair’s associate editor, oversees the table of contents, e-books, special issues, and digital editions of the magazine. JULIE WEISS, Vanity Fair’s art director, oversaw this issue’s design and layout. JEANNIE RHODES, Vanity Fair’s photography research director, edited the photographs for this issue. CARI BEAUCHAMP is an award-winning historian, documentary-film maker, and author. She is the author of five books, including Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years. RICHARD BRADLEY is the editorin-chief of Worth magazine and the author of three books,…

On November 29, 1963, a week after the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, his widow, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, summoned presidential chronicler Theodore H. White to the Kennedy-family compound in Hyannis Port, on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. She wanted White to write an essay about her husband for Life magazine. Jackie Kennedy spoke for four hours, with a “calm voice” and “total recall.” It was a rambling monologue about the assassination, her late husband’s love of history, dating from his sickly childhood, and her views on how he should be remembered. Well versed in the classics, she said she felt “ashamed” that she was unable to come up with a lofty historical metaphor for the Kennedy presidency. Instead, she told White, her “obsession” was a song from the…

Within months of J.F.K.’s death, the president’s widow asked William Manchester to write the authorized account of the assassination. He felt he couldn’t refuse her. Two years later, nearly broken by the task, Manchester found himself fighting a bitter, headline-making battle with Jackie and Bobby Kennedy over the finished book. SAM KASHNER chronicles the toll Manchester’s 1967 best-seller, The Death of a President, exacted—physically, emotionally, and financially—before it all but disappeared It has never gone away, the nightmare of November 22, 1963. Each time one revisits the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, “one hopes for once the story will be different—the car swerves, the bullets miss, and the splendid progress continues. But each time, like a recurrent nightmare, the handsome head is shattered,” as…

About once a week in the months before the September 1995 launch of George magazine, John Kennedy Jr. would convene an editorial meeting in his sparsely furnished office, which overlooked Central Park and the steel-blue oval of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. Sitting around his circular table or perched on the radiator that ran along the window, we’d update him on stories in progress and propose new ones. Sipping a cup of coffee, or reaching out and appropriating one of ours, John mostly listened. At times I got the impression that he was feeling us out, taking the measure of people he had surrounded himself with but did not yet trust. Other times he just seemed uncomfortable at the prospect of revealing what he thought or felt. Editorial meetings can…