Vivian Pemberton informed Delphi Study Club members of highlights of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s life from historian J. Randy Taraborrelli’s book Jackie: Public, Private, Secret during the club’s February meeting.Taraborrelli based his book on hundreds of interviews over a 30-year period as well as previously unreleased material from the JFK Library. Pemberton selected events from Jackie’s childhood to the assassination and funeral of President John F. Kennedy to give a perspective of her early career.Jackie, whose parents divorced when she was 10 years old, attended private schools, studied at Vassar College, and during her junior year studied in Paris before graduating from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. She was an excellent equestrienne, had learned French and had taken ballet lessons.She turned down a junior editorship at Vogue magazine which she had won over 1280 entrants and instead worked as an inquiring photographer at $40 a week for the Washington Times-Herald.Her socially conscious mother, Janet, urged her to break her engagement to stockbroker John Husted and to marry JFK as he was the “better catch.” Janet, now married to wealthy stockbroker Hugh Auchincloss, prevented Jackie’s father, Black Jack Bouvier, from attending the wedding, held in 1953 in Newport, Rhode Island.At JFK’s inauguration, Jackie thought her husband’s speech was one of the most moving speeches and was at his side for the oath of office. She was not fond of appearing in public but was a great asset accompanying JFK in campaigning and on state visits.She felt that the White House resembled a Holiday Inn with furnishings from a warehouse and undertook its restoration, establishing a fine arts committee and asking early American furniture expert Henry du Pont for advice. CBS televised her Restoration tour in 1961.After JFK’s assassination. Jackie refused to change her blood-spattered clothes, saying, “Let them see what they have done.” She insisted that the funeral arrangements be as much as possible like Abraham Lincoln’s. The funeral procession from the White House to St. Matthew’s Cathedral included a riderless horse with boots reversed in the stirrups.Doris Osborn hosted the meeting in the McAninch Room of the Tonkawa Public Library. Attending in addition to the host and the reviewer were Mary Allan, Linda Brown, Evelyn Coyle, Beverly Frazier, Carolyn Ott and Marjilea Smithheisler. Brown will host the March 12 meeting in the McAninch Room.
