Photoshop Camelot

Today Julie was watching a documentary called "24 hours after the JFK assassination.  It chronicled the events that altered our childhoods - and our society - after a gunman (or gunmen) put three bullets into our president on a fall afternoon in 1963.  The program included the same grainy and fuzzily-lit images that appeared on black and white televisions all over the world as the events unfolded.  Today those images look like they've been photo-shopped to make them more eerie and unreal.  Ironically, they're similar in their other-worldliness to those of the Apollo moon landings six years later in July of 1969.  

They are odd, grainy, monochromatic images.  Dallas police driving around in their black cruisers with single lights on top.  Everyone wearing black suits and skinny black ties.  A small-town looking Parkland Hospital emergency room.  And everyone , including the reporters on camera, smoking.  

But there are a few color images, and they seem to always include Jackie.  Jackie accepting roses from someone near Air Force One.  Jackie smiling and waving from the limosine.  Jackie in her pink dress and pill box hat.

As the people moved from shock to anger to mourning, countless millions witnessed Jackie's composure in those televised scenes and drew strength from the woman who represented their camelot.   A figure loved by history and beloved by a generation.  

And now there is a book by C. David Heymann that claims that Jackie had a nearly four-year affair with Robert Kennedy.  I'm not saying I believe it.  I don't want to.  But he claims he "spent nearly two decades researching the book, even digging through old FBI and Secret Service files about the clandestine couple. Tapes of his exhaustive interviews are available at the SUNY Stony Brook library."

Look, Robert Kennedy was a father of 11 children.  His brother was assassinated.  And if there is truth to the story, she had an affair with him less than six months after his brother was killed.   I'm not saying I believe it, but the book also quotes Truman Capote as saying, "It was the coming together of a man and a woman as a result of his bereavement and her mental suffering at the hands of her late, lecherous husband."  Oh man.

Then in 1968, shortly after Robert is assassinated as he walks through a kitchen in San Francisco, Jackie marries Aristotle Onassis.  Five years after her husband was killed, she marries a foreign business tycoon.  She marries a man who publicly fueded with the Kennedies - especially Robert Kennedy.   Many believe she was given a pass by the public.   They loved her.   They forgave her.

Perhaps a generation of Americans have found that, like themselves, Jackie was a normal human being.   That Camelot was only as real as magazine covers.  Because people wanted it to exist.   But that the real world was actually in those grainy, lonely images we watched on TV.   And that the iconic woman that people remember in her pink and yellow dresses and matching pillbox hats was extraordinary, but not perfect.