“A Brief Shining Moment”: When Camelot Came To Washington.
By David Cohea, ReMIND Magazine
America didn’t find out that its 35th president lived in Camelot until after he was gone. But the way we think about 1961, it’s all we can imagine.
The week after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, his wife and first lady Jacqueline — Jackie, to all of us — had called Life magazine and asked to be interviewed. She wanted to frame her husband’s legacy before the historians got it.
In the course of the interview, Jackie told the reporter that every night before bed, John — or Jack, as we all called him — would put on some records. According to her, his favorite song was from the hit Broadway musical Camelot. His favorite part came at the end, where Richard Burton as King Arthur sings, “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”
The story may not even be true — JFK’s longtime secretary Evelyn Lincoln says her boss favored the drinking song “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” — but it hooked a grieving country’s imagination. Camelot grew vast there.
And so the JFK era in the White House is remembered as one of golden idealism, public service, glorious style, artistic possibility and good family times.
At 43 years old, John F. Kennedy was the youngest person to be elected president. In his inaugural address, Kennedy laid out his idea of the country’s future course and asked the freezing assembly in the Capitol’s East Portico and all watching on TV in color for the first time to join in the effort. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” he said famously. “Ask what you can do for your country.”
That optimism and hope were reflected in a policy agenda of economic prosperity, addressing social issues and a strong foreign policy. There were many successes. He championed legislation resulting in the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He established the Peace Corps. He called for a space program that would result in a moon landing by the end of the decade.
But it was Jackie who made the politics so glamorous. Elegant, educated and fashionable, she brought an unmistakably cosmopolitan flair to a previously staid White House. French President Charles de Gaulle was so taken with the young president and his family on a visit to his country, Jack would say he would be remembered as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”
Unlike former presidents and their first ladies, Jack and Jackie became popular in the manner of pop idols and movie stars. Artists, writers and intellectuals were invited to White House dinners. Winsomely photogenic, Jack, Jackie, and children Caroline and John Jr. were pictured endlessly in magazines. Those images resonate to this day: JFK and the family on his sailboat Victura offshore the family’s Cape Cod compound at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Jackie in her pillbox hats, white gloves, Chanel suits and Dior gowns. John Jr. emerging from under Jack’s Oval Office desk, and Caroline riding her pony Macaroni on the White House lawn.
Jackie directed a $2 million renovation of the White House that included stylish furniture and fresh art. The new era of nationwide TV broadcasting allowed the public an intimate view of the result when, on Valentine’s Day 1962, Jackie led a tour of the renovated White House. Broadcast by all three networks, the program would be viewed by 80 million people around the world, including the Soviet Union and China.
Reality, of course, proved a lot harder. There were blunders on the international stage. His personal life was messy.
Too soon for America, the Kennedy White House came to an end. In August 1963, the couple’s third child, Patrick, was born with a lung condition and died 39 hours later. A few months later, the president would be assassinated with the prim and stylish Jackie sitting next to him in horror.
Was Jackie thinking of that song from Camelot as she rode in the funeral procession from St. Matthew’s Cathedral to Arlington National Cemetery? It had only been 1,000 days since her husband had been inaugurated; too soon the music had stopped.
We can only guess that she had in mind what we now so remember: That one shining moment.
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