Bring back some good or bad memories


ADVERTISEMENT

June 2, 2017

12 Rare and Intimate Black and White Photographs of a Young and Beautiful Jackie Kennedy in the Early 1960s

It was in those brief, heady years or perhaps it was really just one year, during the campaign and election of 1960—when John F. Kennedy and his young, beautiful wife were fast becoming national and then international celebrities that the legend of Jackie was born.


Looking back now, even in the light of all we know about her fraught, strained, “storybook” marriage to an obsessively philandering husband, there does seem to be something special about Jackie Kennedy. Maybe it’s just that the camera loved her. Maybe she was so intriguing to so many people simply because, set beside the other prominent women in Washington, DC, in the early 1960s, she was young (barely in her 30s), chic and, with her Irish and French ancestry, indefinably and refreshingly “exotic.”

But whatever the reasons behind her appeal, and however concrete or ineffable they might be, the fact remains that for millions of women around the globe, across generations, the woman in the White House in the Oleg Cassini outfits (made expressly for her), throwing formal dinner parties for artists, writers, scientists and diplomats, traveling the world, was the face not only of a new era but of an utterly new type of American woman. She was, somehow, at once warm and elegant, youthful and sophisticated, fun-loving and serious—and on top of it all, self-deprecatingly funny.

“The one thing I do not want to be called is ‘first lady,’” she once said. “It sounds like a saddle horse.”

Here, a collection of 12 rare and intimate black and white photographs from LIFE magazine, from that time in her life when she was first known to a rapt world, simply, as Jackie.

Jackie Kennedy in India, 1962. (Art Rickerby—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Jackie Kennedy during a campaign dinner, 1960. (Ed Clark—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Jackie Kennedy watches a televised debate between the Republican presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, and her husband, John F. Kennedy, 1960. (Paul Schutzer—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Jackie Kennedy reads to her daughter Caroline at the Kennedy family home in Hyannis Port, Mass., 1960. (Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

The mayor of New York City, Robert Wagner Jr., speaks to Jackie Kennedy during a campaign dinner in 1960. (Ed Clark—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Jackie Kennedy in 1960. (Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Jackie Kennedy in 1960. (Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

President-elect John Kennedy with Jackie in January 1961. (Paul Schutzer—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Jackie Kennedy at a formal dinner, 1960. (Ed Clark—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Jackie Kennedy in 1960. (Paul Schutzer—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Jackie Kennedy in 1960. (Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Jackie Kennedy in India, 1962. (Art Rickerby—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)



FOLLOW US:
FacebookTumblrPinterestInstagram

CONTACT US

Browse by Decades

Popular Posts

Advertisement

09 10