By the mid-1960s many Americans began to tire of the fact that Jackie Kennedy would not play the roll that they believed suitable for the former first lady of a slain president. Her halo's fading luster seemed to grow duller every day and it wasn't long before she was generally perceived as "the mean girl". Journalist Leslie Valentine reported that the trashing of Mrs. Kennedy became so widespread by 1967 that no social gathering was complete without someone pointing out her shortcomings.
Seven years must have seemed an appropriate amount of time to withhold information concerning the generally unpleasant character traits that were apparent in First Lady Jackie Kennedy - and so in 1970 Washington writers Lucianne Goldberg and Fred Sparks put pen to paper and recalled all the minutiae they could piece together regarding "Her Elegance":
"Jackie was master of deception. In the White House, she never wore her double-breasted mink coat when she could be photographed. But after her husband died, and she moved to New York, she wore the mink, as one fashion writer put it, 'to do errands around Manhattan'."
This article appears on this site with the permission of Lucianne Goldberg
