Bill O'Reilly - Killing Kennedy

Jackie’s words are scripted, and she reads from cue cards. But they are her own words, chosen specifically to evoke heartfelt emotion. The same American people who elevated a president and his wife to movie star celebrity status have not forgotten Jackie in her time of need. And while she is no longer the First Lady, Jackie Kennedy carries herself with the full weight of that title as never before.

But looks are deceiving: privately she aches, compulsively chain-smoking Newport cigarettes and biting her fingernails to the quick. Her eyes are constantly red-rimmed from crying.

Jackie pauses several times during the filming to catch her breath or flutter her eyes to keep the tears at bay. “All of you who have written to me know how much we all loved him, and that he returned that love in full measure,” she tells the world.

And then Jackie Kennedy takes on the same visionary tone of her husband. She speaks of building a John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, so that people from around the world will know of her husband’s legacy.

It is a brave and poignant performance. In less than two minutes, Jackie Kennedy says a heartbreaking thank-you to the American people. Her grief is obvious, as is her elegance. She symbolizes the grandeur of Camelot, for which Americans are already growing nostalgic.

One of the last times Jackie Kennedy saw her husband’s face was that afternoon at Parkland Hospital, just before the quiet reverence of Trauma One was turned into an unsightly fracas between Secret Service agents and Dallas police. It was in that quiet moment before she slipped her wedding ring onto Jack’s finger. She remembers that moment as if it were yesterday, but prefers to dwell only on the wonderful times. All the indiscretions and controversies of the past are forgotten.

Calm and in command is the way Jackie will always remember Jack. And that’s the way she wants history to remember him. “For Jack, history was full of heroes,” she told Theodore White of Life magazine a week after the assassination. “He was such a simple man, but he was so complex, too. Jack had this hero side to 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.”

It was during that interview, which ran in Life ’s December 6 edition, that she first told the world the tale of JFK listening to the Camelot sound track before falling asleep, and how he loved the final line: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”

When White dictated the story to his editors in New York, Jackie hovered nearby, listening in. She insisted that the Camelot theme be predominant. This is how she wants her husband’s presidency to be remembered.

So as Jackie Kennedy finishes filming the newsreel, and rises from the club chair in Bobby Kennedy’s office—he will keep the attorney general title for nine more months—she understands that this is all part of her ongoing obligation to frame her husband’s legacy. But she also knows it is time to move on to a more normal life—a life that will be far less magical than the one she wants the world to remember. As she sadly admitted to Life ’s Theodore White, “There’ll never be another Camelot.”

And to this day, that statement remains true.

Jackie Kennedy’s enormous grief, and the grace with which she handled herself after the assassination, only enhanced the public admiration she earned during her husband’s presidency. In 1968 she married Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping tycoon on whose yacht she recovered from the death of her son Patrick. The paparazzi dubbed her “Jackie O,” and hounded her constantly, a practice they would continue for the rest of her life. Sadly, the sixty-nine-year-old Onassis died of respiratory failure just seven years after their marriage, making Jackie a widow for the second time at the young age of forty-six. After Onassis’s death, Jackie retreated from the public eye, eventually securing a job with Viking Press as a book editor in New York City. She quit that job three years later, angry and embarrassed that the company had published a work of fiction in which Ted Kennedy was the president of the United States and there was an assassination plot against his life. She then moved on to work for Doubleday for the remainder of her nearly two decades in publishing, editing the books of people as diverse as Michael Jackson, Carly Simon, and Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel laureate. In the early 1990s, Jackie’s lifetime smoking habit finally caught up with her. She died on May 19, 1994, from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of sixty-four.

Caroline Kennedygrew up to attend Radcliffe College and later earn her Juris Doctor from Columbia University. She married Edwin Schlossberg, bore three children, and pretty much stays out of the public eye. In December 2011, singer Neil Diamond admitted that Caroline was the inspiration for his multimillion-selling song “Sweet Caroline.”

John F. Kennedy Jr.became a symbol for the tragic history of the Kennedy family. The image of him on his third birthday saluting his father’s coffin broke hearts worldwide. Erroneously thought to be nicknamed “John-John”—that name was fabricated by the press—John Jr. attended college at Brown and then went on to the New York University School of Law, which eventually led to a short stint in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. In 1988, People magazine named John Jr. “The Sexiest Man Alive.” Like his mother, he was the subject of intense media scrutiny. On July 16, 1999, he was piloting a small plane when it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The accident killed John Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister, Lauren. He was thirty-eight years old. His ashes, and those of his wife, were scattered at sea.

Lyndon Johnsoninherited no small amount of unfinished business from the Kennedy administration, most notably the Vietnam War. He masterfully cobbled together coalitions within Congress to help pass the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson, working closely with Martin Luther King Jr., framed the issue in terms of JFK’s legacy in order to gather support for the act. However, Vietnam was an inherited headache that proved to be his undoing. The Diem assassination was America’s point of no return in terms of involvement, and while there are many who debate whether or not the United States had a hand in his death, there’s no disputing that the situation only got worse from there. After winning the 1964 election in a landslide over Arizona’s Barry Goldwater (a Republican defeat JFK had predicted), Johnson began to mismanage the war in Southeast Asia. As the antiwar movement gained traction, LBJ, fearing defeat, chose not to run again in 1968. Upon leaving Washington, Lyndon Baines Johnson returned to his Texas ranch, where he died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-four on January 22, 1973.

As with the death of John Kennedy, it was Walter Cronkitewho broke the news of LBJ’s death to the nation. Cronkite himself remained a news broadcaster at CBS until 1980. In 2009 he died at the age of ninety-two, still bitter about being replaced by Dan Rather as the anchor of the CBS Evening News.