Jackie O's enduring appeal

MARIA FRANCESCA LoDICO | What do you "remember" about the Kennedy presidency and what words/images come to mind re: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis?

Your responses probably resemble those of Berkeley Kaite's students. Slow motion video of Kennedy in a motorcade. Gunshot to the head. Loved, great president. JFK Jr. saluting the casket. Young embodiment of hope. "I will never forget where I was when it happened." Pillbox hat. Pink Chanel suit. Blood-covered. Black veil over face. Noble. Dignified. Enigmatic.

"Students born after the assassination 'remember' details to the letter, demonstrating how much we glean from cultural memory," says Kaite, an associate professor of cultural studies in the Department of English.

Her forthcoming book, The Pink Suit, will explore the cultural construction of Onassis as icon. Her research includes collecting original Life magazines (where Onassis appeared frequently) and reading "every tacky biography" -- there were more of Onassis at the time of her death than any other living American woman.

Churlish friends of Kaite's have dismissed this research, sometimes blurting out, "who cares." Kaite herself didn't care until Onassis had received the last rites. "I got a lump in my throat. Too embarrassed, I kept thinking I needed to get more hobbies."

But accounts of other women's responses, including those of notable feminists Judy Rebick and June Callwood, were just as emotionally invested. "What do we need to remember?" says Kaite. "What are we compelled to say about her?"

Kaite remembers playing with cut-out dolls of a six-year-old Caroline Kennedy and her mother, Onassis. "I loved the clothes and I was the same age as Caroline."

Of several themes that emerge in the historical and popular accounts of her life is that Onassis was a good mother. "This is so entrenched," says Kaite. "Indeed, she embodied maternal non-sexuality."

Even when Onassis died a 64-year-old grandmother, she was represented as eternally young and chaste. Media coverage of her death was splashed with photos of Jackie from the early 1960s.

"When Nixon died, we saw the 70-year-old Nixon. With Jackie, it was the ideal wife and mother," says Kaite. "This is an enduring image of austere sexuality. Maternity and sexuality don't cohabit in the public imaginary. She is not threatening if she remains chaste and married to Kennedy."

Our cultural memory is of the young wife and mother in the chic pink Chanel suit splattered with the blood oozing out of Kennedy's head. In the following days, the beautiful widow became a model of mourning. "She is still praised for not having cried during President Kennedy's funeral. Why such uncommon restraint is glorified is something to be explored."

The photos from the early 1960s, then, return both to a time of mourning and Onassis's notorious silence. The mass media began representing her as the ideal woman, the silent body of containment. Echoing a popular sentiment, Oprah Winfrey, who is herself an icon, has said that Onassis was the one interview she didn't get. "But I respect her more for it."

Onassis's silence is usually associated with masculine self-sufficiency. "The culturally feminine body is the body that reveals too much, the hysterical body, the leaky body, the body characterized by fluids and words. Ironic, then, that we fetishize the body that is self-contained: no words, no emotions ever issued from her. She was the 'strong, silent type.'"

In a wider context, Kaite is interested in what "we" have felt compelled to say in light of Onassis' silence. "Our" story features an Oedipal narrative that raises questions about myth and history. John Kennedy is "remembered" as a great and loved president and his short-lived presidency as Camelot.

But he only beat Nixon by a thin margin of 113,000 votes in the presidential election. Support for Kennedy was, in fact, very ambiguous, says Kaite. And while Kennedy's presidency was marked by such impressive undertakings as the space program, the Peace Corps and the defence of West Berlin, there were plenty of serious blemishes as well -- the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, America's entry into the Vietnam War and Kennedy's chronic womanizing.

"Yet we have seized on Camelot, an idyllic, highly romantic space, and projected our longings onto this place of clear boundaries, strict ranking, duty, obligation and, of course, chivalry." Even if this Camelot didn't really exist, we still want to pretend that it did, says Kaite.

"At the end of the century, when we are all aware of feminist ideas, this is a curious myth to embrace."