So good evening, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Craig Clunies,
and I just thought I would say a few words again before David Luban delivers the last of the four Terror Foundation lectures in American art.
Just to give those of you who maybe haven't attended these lectures before,
a little bit of a background as to what's going on here and what kind of exciting
development this is both for American studies and history of art at Oxford.
The Terra Foundation for American Art, based in Chicago, is a generous and generously funded institution that has given the history faculty and the
history of art department the funds to have with us for a whole year this year and next year.
And we hope in years subsequent to that, a visiting professor of American art.
And it was very important to us in setting up this scheme that the terror visiting professor be fully embedded in the department as a colleague,
teaching both postgraduate students and undergraduate students.
And it has to. I have to say that as the first year of this scheme draws to an end, it's been successful beyond my expectations.
And a great deal of that success is due to the commitment and charm and energy of our much esteemed temporary colleague, David Lubin.
David, is Charlotte David's kind of dayjob or substantive position or whatever you want to call it?
He is Charlotte C. Weber, professor of art at Wake Forest University in the United States.
And he's been with us, as I say, for the whole year, teaching undergraduates and postgraduates.
I just wanted to say a little bit more about the kind of links which the University of Oxford more broadly is developing with the Tara Foundation.
The Tara Foundation will be other are the sponsors of a major exhibition of early 20th century American modernist art,
which will be happening at the Ashmolean.
And in connexion with that exhibition, at least two of our postgraduate students, two of our Masters students,
have written for that catalogue, giving students an opportunity to be involved in the actual practise of writing for exhibitions.
And the Terra Foundation have also generously lent from their collection a couple of works which are in the Ashmolean at the moment.
And one of those has actually formed the focus for the extended essay on an object or image in Oxford, which first year undergraduates.
All right. So this is this is really the kind of thing that we very much hoped would happen that at all levels.
The American art starts to become part of the of the offering here.
The size of the audience here tonight tells us, as if we didn't know that there's a real Audy,
a real audience in Oxford, a real desire to know more about American art.
And as I say, David has got this off to a really wonderful start.
So it's a very great pleasure to introduce him tonight and to ask you to welcome him to deliver the last of these lectures frozen in history.
The Kennedys arrive in Dallas. Please welcome David Leupen. Keep in mind, Mike, does this work?
Yes. Now, I had a complaint last week from someone near and dear to me, my wife, that that the acoustics were not very good.
She said I shouldn't even use the mike. I should just build it out. So she's saying turn it off.
Well, I certainly agreement on this. I don't want to do a test.
OK, now I am not using the mike and now I am using the mike.
Now I am not using the mike. This is great.
I love a communal decision and I am going to take this off.
Turn it off. Turn it off. Drill, baby, drill. Right now I have to get me out of my pocket.
There's many wires here. All right. OK. Does this work?
All right. Well, thank you. And I will try to be suitably loud if you see me sort of dropping flagging an energy some more.
And, you know, I will know to keep going. It's been fantastic teaching at Oxford this year.
A dream come true. I've had the best students, the best colleagues.
Unfortunately, they're going to boot me out. We have to leave my wife and I have to leave.
We were hoping the doctor would say, no, stay forever. But that hasn't happened.
So I don't know why. But anyway, so tonight's tonight's set this afternoon.
Whatever time this lecture is revisiting material, that was in my 2003 book Shooting Kennedy,
which I published on the fortieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.
And I've had this material off to the side for a long time.
And when I have this opportunity, give a terror lecture, I thought, well, I'm going to revisit this, look at it, see what it means to me today.
So that's what you're hearing now. All right.
And finally, last thing, while I'm asking for all this advice from my on the line.
All right. Without further ado, I will put my glasses on.
No single year in the past century, let alone any other single weekend,
produce so many unforgettable world famous pictures as those that emerged from November 22nd to 25th, 1963.
These are the dates marking the assassination in Dallas and the funeral in Washington of President John F. Kennedy.
Since their initial publication flung them out to a stunned but voracious audience, public, I should say,
these remarkable images have been indelibly engraved on the modern consciousness,
as befits the first American president to exploit the relatively new medium of television.
And as such, the presiding figure of the post-war information age, the JFK images, are highly mediated objects of social spectacle.
Some of these pictures are amongst the best known and most often reproduced of the past century.
The first lady climbing on the trunk of a Lincoln cut Lincoln Continental convertible.
Whether to escape the killing pit or recover a fragment of her husband's head.
The new president, Lyndon Johnson, taking the oath, the oath of office on Air Force One.
Jack Ruby bursting out of a crowd to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, the stoic widow standing hand-in-hand with her children.
Or perhaps most famously, the shot of her three year old son, John Junior, poignantly saluting his fallen father.
These images are so famous that they have, in a sense, become invisible.
We look right past them as if they were panes of glass into a we take to be the historical reality behind them.
We incorrectly assume that we scrutinise them only because they show important historical events as
they were occurring and not because they are in themselves compelling works of art and popular culture.
Complex instances of visual representation that only appear to be simple,
straightforward and see through the assassination of the president had such a traumatic effect on those who were alive at the time,
because never before in American history had the general public felt so immediately and emotionally connected to the United States president,
president and his immediate family.
This had a lot to do with television, which, as I've mentioned, had only recently become the American family medium par excellence,
but also with what media historians now call the golden age of photojournalism.
When popular weekly magazines such as Life and Look flooded American homes with brilliant and captivating images,
amongst them, pictures of the irresistible young Kennedy family.
At the same time that these image Smiths were depicting Jack Kennedy as a happy and devoted father,
they also found ways of representing him as an individual of profound depth and lonely destiny.
As in George Tames famous photograph showing the president alone in the Oval Office, stooped over, as it were,
by the burdens of his his role were in Mark Shaw's haunting image of Kennedy disappearing into the sand dunes of Cape Cod.
Some of the most memorable pictures of Jack Kennedy amounted to photographic portraits of him
and his wife as he and Jack LOEs shot of the two of them having breakfast in a Portland,
Oregon, diner during the campaign of 1960, composed in an offhand manner and lit and cure a squirrel.
Like a scene from a film noir, the photograph bears a striking resemblance to anybody.
Guess what painting I'm going to show. Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.
Other photos of the two Kennedys together similarly resonate with famous artistic antecedents.
Take, for example, this Life magazine cover, which appeared on newsstands in July 1953,
shortly before young Senator Kennedy from Massachusetts announced his engagement to Jacqueline Bouvier.
The photograph depicts them, but especially him, as the epitome of American innocence, freshness and youth.
Indeed, part of the selling of John Kennedy at this point in his career involves showing him to be at heart a young,
irresistible, carefree lad, a so-called barefoot boy.
For nearly a century, the barefoot boy had been one of America's most cherished archetypes,
a figure of energy, spontaneity, wholesomeness and honesty.
Even when, like Tom Sawyer, he occasionally fibbed in an essentially harmless manner.
The pairing of Jack's barefoot boyishness and the sun, sea and sales calls to mind Winslow Homer's great 1876 oil painting,
breezing up a sentimental favourite in the canon of American art.
Homer's shows three young lads seated or reclined informally on the deck of a sailboat.
The Gloster, an adult fisherman, controls the rope lines and the boat bounds over the waves amid sun and spray.
An art critic of Homer's time in terms that my character might well characterise the barefoot senator nearly a century later singled out,
quote, the boatman's barefoot boy. The bigger the boat,
the boatman's barefoot boy who sits upon the thought and whose bright eye evidently sees
such enormous horizons as he looks through the curl of spray shaved up by the keel.
I doubt that Life's photographer had this type of imagery in mind when he took the photo.
Nor do I think that the magazine's photo editors, or for that matter, its readers, ever specifically drew the connexion.
But it's they're all the same insofar as the so-called barefoot boy motif has endured in our
collective unconsciousness and reappeared in various guises throughout our national history.
From here on in today, I wish to concentrate on one iconic image of the assassination weekend,
an ex post facto double portrait of President Mrs. Kennedy on their arrival at Love Field in Dallas shortly before noon on Friday,
November 22nd, 1963. Forty five minutes later, the president would be dead.
I should point out that it is impossible to look at such images with an historically innocent eye.
They come to us, as they did to their initial viewers, drenched in what we might call the future conditional tense,
for we inevitably know, as the protagonist in the photograph, do not what is to become of them?
In less than an hour's time, we can only ever view this picture.
Pro kleptocracy, as it were, for the dire future that had not yet occurred when it was made,
lays across it conspicuously like a frosting that can never be scraped away.
Frozen in history, the figures are always forever poised on the precipice.
About to suffer heat to die. She does scream and that minor bumbling character who can be seen leaning over behind them.
Lyndon Johnson about to become the most powerful man in the world.
In his memorial issue of one week later, Life magazine opened its coverage of the assassination with this full page photograph.
The rest of the pictures in the report are black and white, as if the very colours of human life.
Not to mention happiness had bled out of them, leaving only charred remains.
They are small and blurry, and most of them were called from the eight millimetre home movie that a Dallas clothing manufacturer, Abraham Zapruder,
had fortuitously made in the boat motorcade as it passed his vantage point on what notoriously came to be called the grassy knoll.
In contrast, the love field, a rival shot taken by the veteran life photographer Arthur Ridker B seems larger than life,
vividly coloured, crisply focussed. It fills the page.
The Kennedys look tall and vibrant. They come so close to the photographic picture plane that they seen within our grasp.
Giants amongst us. Life's editors clearly intended record B's photo as a resplendent, magical, wonderful before to the drab,
dismal and violent after in what turned out to be the best selling issue of the magazine in its 50 year history.
The photograph has the formal density of a carefully composed painting.
It is filled with intriguing visual, some symmetries and repetitions.
Consider, for example, how the knots lapel of the first lady's suit echoes that of her husband's, but more loosely and expansively.
Or how the stripes of his shirt connect to the broad blue stripe on the jet and the stripes of the flag,
as well as to the piping on her suit and the subtle striped pattern in its warp and weft know to have the geometric
pattern of his neck tie with its neat rows of rounded rectangles harmonises with the boot clay fabric of her wool jacket,
as well as with the row of porthole windows on the jet and the three zeros on the planes.
Call number lined up beneath the flag. The President's pocket here.
Handkerchief aligns with the jet's tail. The handkerchief.
The vice president's white carnation. And the first lady's white glove form an inverted triangle.
Compactly framing her. Particularly delicate is the way husband and wife fleetingly touch arms, his hand going one way hers,
the other, regardless of its original journalistic purpose and subsequent historical significance.
The Ridker be photographed stands on its own as a richly complex visual artefact.
The accompanying text from life commences now in the sunny freshness of a Texas morning with roses in her arms and a luminous smile on her lips.
Jacqueline Kennedy still had one hour to share the buoyant surge of life with the man at her side.
Here is that sense of the future conditional. I mentioned that is the staple of legends about heroes, saints and martyrs.
Life's designers laid out in the opening two pages of the report so that the prison on the far left seems almost to look past his wife to the facing
page on which an uncaptured black and white photo shows a bouquet of light coloured roses abandoned on the back seat of the vice president's car.
The direction of his gaze, as in Renaissance paintings,
establishes a before and after narrative triumphal entry of the hero on one side and on the other,
as if he alone four sees it a melancholy emblem of his imminent martyrdom.
Do you buy that? You're with me here, okay?
Mrs. Kennedy arrives. Mrs. Kennedy carries in her arms a bouquet of red roses, according to presidential historian William Manchester.
She was welcomed with red roses instead of the yellow rose of Texas because with so many political festivities planned for the day,
local floras had already sold out of that preferred colour.
Manchester notes the white roses were also available and that these were bestowed on Lady Bird Johnson,
the vice president's wife, and Nellie Connally, the governor's wife.
But the first lady was honoured with red.
Red roses have a longstanding tradition going back to the Middle Ages of signifying the spilling of holy blood, the martyrdom of a saint.
It was pure happenstance that Mrs. Kennedy received red roses instead of yellow.
And no one at Love Field, including the photographer, had any idea of what was to take place.
A mere eight miles away. Still, in retrospect, which is the only way anyone has ever viewed this photograph.
It prophesies his death to come.
The symbolic meaning of the red roses would surely have remained latent without any prophetic significance whatsoever.
Had the assassination not occurred. But the assassination did occur.
And therefore, life's photo serves as a modern day equivalent to a late Gothic painting such as Martin Sheen,
Gower's 14, 73, Madonna and Child in a Rose Bower which counted.
And the religiously informed viewer to invest the lovely red flowers on display with a sense of the mortal tragedy to unfold.
Although the roses in the photograph in no way predicted the assassination.
They have given that photo a sense of ineluctable tragedy, conferring on John Kennedy, whose political ratings were slipping a beatific aura.
He does not possess at the time of his death. Indeed, under normal circumstances,
an alternative cultural signification would have emerged from the photo from ancient Rome to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena.
Each New Year's Day roses have also been a sign of victory, pride and triumph.
If in the Middle Ages, roses was the symbolic flower, the virgin in the ancient world, they were the signature flower of Venus,
the goddess of love, a connexion not lost on the modern floral industry, which does a brisk business in them.
Every Valentine's Day. But Italy's famous mythological painting, The Birth of Venus,
which is a misnomer because the scene depicted is not the birth of the goddess, but her triumphant arrival by sea to the Isle of Kitara.
Shows are being ciao showered with pink roses, the float down out of the sky from the wing gods Zephyr.
As long as we momentarily put aside our foreign knowledge of what is to come,
we see how Ridker B's photo renders the first lady as America's Aphrodite clothed.
To be sure, with Air Force One, her Zephyr and the aptly named Love Field,
her Kitara, the Triumphal Association of Roses, remains visible in the photograph.
But because of our knowledge, in retrospect, it comes inevitably tinged with a sad or bitter irony.
Roses are not the only richly meaningful signifier, are not the only richly meaningful signifiers in love field photo.
Let us now examine, in turn the president's body.
The first lady's garment and the aeroplane in the background.
First, though, allow me the rest. The liberty of referring to the pictures protagonists as Jack and Jackie,
which is how they were widely known throughout America, indeed much of the rest of the world during those years,
as evidenced, for example, by the chant of Jackie Jackie,
with which hordes of Parisians greeted the first lady as she and the president paraded down the shops in a.D.A in 1961.
Jack's face. You will notice, is yes.
You don't see his picture, his face right there. I screwed up. Jack's face, you will notice, is very full, even jowly in his youth.
Jack Kennedy had been almost painfully thin.
The time he graduated from Harvard, he was six foot one in height, but weighed only one hundred and forty five pounds.
By at. Biographers have suggested that when he first ran for public office as a congressman from Massachusetts,
his gangly, underweight form made female voters want to take care of him and feed him a good home cooked meal.
By the time he entered the White House 15 years later, Jack had fattened up.
Partially, this was because of his age.
He was now well into his 40s and because of the heavy round of state dinners that had become such a noted fixture of his administration.
Further, he was taking cortisone treatment to control his Addison's disease, a life threatening glandular affliction.
A side effect of this steroid replacement treatment.
A replacement treatment with facial puffiness. Apparently, Jack was unhappy about putting on extra weight, especially around the face,
and in 1962, along with millions of other middle aged American men.
He began using a new product on the food market known as Metrical, produced by the Mead Johnson Company.
Metrical was the first liquid dietary meal substitute to be sold nationally, and it was an instant bestseller on supermarket shelves.
A can of metrical supposedly, sir,
supply all the daily vitamins and nutrients a person needed with few of the calories that normally came along with them.
Metro Carl appeared at the time that low calorie soft drinks were introduced onto the market diet right COLA in 1962 and TAB.
In 1963, the first meeting of Weight Watchers, organised by a dieting housewife in Queens, took place in May 1963.
Meanwhile, the President's Council on Physical Fitness gave official encouragement to the exercise craze that was taking hold throughout the land.
Toning up the muscles in eliminating excess pounds was now a matter not simply of narcissism, but of patriotic duty for a nation of fit citizens.
Was a nation fit to combat foreign enemies?
Here's how life describes the president left in the left field arrival photo, vibrant with confidence, crinkle eyed with an all embracing smile.
John F. Kennedy swept his wife with him into the exuberance of the throng at Dallas's love field.
The emphasis in the photo on Kennedy's vibrant physical appearance made all the more emphatic here.
By the way, his son burnished hair, stands out against the deep blue sky,
gave visual form to a word that he had made a key note of his presidency vigour.
Or, as he, in many comic impersonators he spawned, pronounced it, vigour.
The presidential historian Theodore White recounts that when he interviewed the president's widow for Life magazine a week after the assassination,
and she really relived her traumatic memories of it, she recalled almost in reverie.
His head was so beautiful. His mouth was so beautiful.
As I look at the love field photo with Jack,
Natalie attired in a bluish grey waisted wool suit and a stiff collared white shirt with blue chalk stripes.
I think of another photo taken in California a year and a half earlier.
This one shows the president emerging from the Santa Monica surf like a modern day Adonis surrounded by adoring nymphs.
His Metro Callon exercise regimented 45 year old body exuding male pinup beauty in torso and toothy grin alike.
He resembles the hunk played by Burt Lancaster in the steamy 1953 Hollywood classic.
From Here to Eternity, as we look again at the love field photograph, we see how Jackie,
in her serene proximity to the handsome, charismatic, vigorous president,
her body must have served as a fantasy stand in a surrogate for millions of other American women who wish to be enveloped in his magical aura.
OK. Now, let us turn from the president to his wife. I'm not going to comment on her body the way I have on his, but rather on what she's wearing.
Still, I do want to mention what's inside her body, and that's French cuisine.
In the early 1960s, the first lady was a signifier for Americans of cultural sophistication and more specifically, French sophistication.
The pronunciation of her first name, Jacqueline and the EII, are ending of her maiden name, Bouvier were themselves continual reminders of Frenchness.
So, too, were the many Gail Washington dinners over which she presided their menus prepared by the White House master chef, Frenchman Rene.
They don't. For example, the night the world's most celebrated cellist, Pablo Casals,
performed in the East Room, dinner consisted of French cuisine paired with American wine.
That same year in 1961, a former State Department employee turned housewife, Julia Child,
published her first cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which became a bestseller in 1963.
Child introduced her now legendary TV cooking show, The French Chef.
America was indeed becoming to invoke the title of a more recent bestseller, A Fast Food Nation.
McDonald's started up in 1954. Burger King in 1957.
Domino's Hearties, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut all in 1960.
TV dinners, frozen foods,
Angella were ubiquitous at mealtime in suburbia despite or perhaps because of this Bergey of convenience foods geared to a hyper mobile,
hyper active, middle class society. Jackie Kennedy epitomised a slow food ideal to which many Americans, at least in their dreams, aspired.
At Love Field, Jackie wears a double breasted strawberry pink Chanel suit with a midnight blue piping.
It's the most legendary garment in American history.
Even more so, I would say that Monica Lewinsky's blue dress for even after it was soiled by her husband's brain matter.
She refused to change out of it for the long flight with his body back to Washington.
In a famous picture of her departing for the presidential plane at Andrews Air Force Base with her hand class,
Beñat of her brother in law, Robert Kennedy, the splatter of blood across the skirt of the Chanel suit is conspicuous and startling.
Startling not simply because it was the president's blood and because first lady's had until now always existed in a world magically,
mythically sealed off from blood and other messy substances of daily life and suffering such as Greece, grime and dirt.
But also because in 1963,
the item of peril known as the Chanel suit was just about as solid a symbol of Bushwas female chic as can be found anywhere in the Western world.
By wearing a Chanel suit, a woman gave notice that she was smart, classy and independent.
She was not expected to have her suit bloodied like a butcher's apron, even before the president's blood was spilt on the garment.
Made it the holy relic it has since become today locked away in storage at the National Archive.
Jacky's Chanel suit came with a great deal of 20th century history attached to it.
The brand name Chanel refers to one of the most impressive and influential women of that century.
Gabrielle Coco Chanel. Born in France in 1883 and reared as a poor orphan in the convent.
Chanel became Paris's leading fashion designer. By the end of World War One.
Like her friends Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, John Cocteau and Sergei Diaghilev.
She was a modernist. And she, more than any other individual,
liberated women from the tight restrictions of Belle Epoque fashions and provided them with a comfortable alternative of modern styles.
Her designs offered women the relaxed freedom of movement previously reserved for men,
eliminating stays, bustles and corsets and substituting silk cotton wool jersey for satin.
Chanel introduced loose fitting sweaters, blazers, pleated skirts, trench coats and the trademark little black dress.
By the 1930s, she was the most famous clothing designer in the world,
arrested as a collaborationist at the conclusion of World War Two and set free only thanks to the intervention of her friend Winston Churchill.
She departed for Switzerland in retirement, living off the revenue of her patented perfume, Chanel Number five, in 1954.
However, at the age of 71, she threw herself back into the fashion business in vexation at the regression of women's
fashions as she saw it toward a socially conservative and physically restrictive style.
In particular, she took aim at Christian Dior, so-called new look, which the couture Kia introduced in the early post-war era.
In an avowed attempt to weight make women feel feminine,
glamorous again after the prolonged period of drab functionality that had characterised the war years,
Chanel accused Dior of treating women like armchairs to be upholstered.
He puts covers on them, she sneered.
Her goal was to treat women as real world beings who reasonably wished to dress in a manner that combined elegance and functionality,
practicality and chic or fashion femininity. And up to date independence.
By the early 1960s, the Chanel suit had become a wardrobe staple of the upwardly mobile American female.
A Chanel suit fit almost every daytime occasion that required a woman to dress stylishly.
It was thus the perfect outfit to wear in a presidential motorcade.
Or was it during the 1960 campaign, the Kennedy camp had come under withering criticism for Jackie's devotion to high priced French French fashion,
conservatives claim that such devotion was needlessly extravagant and as such,
a harbinger of the liberal overspending that they predicted would become rampant in government.
Were her husband to be elected elected? Moreover,
why wasn't the president the why wasn't the candidate for the top office in the land insisting that his wife settle for clothing made in America?
Kennedy's rival for the presidency, Vice President Richard M. Nixon,
had already years earlier some praise of his wife Pat for being satisfied to wear what he called a good Republican cloth coat.
Defensively, Jack insisted that Jackie cut down on her couture RTA bills and from now on, Buy American as seen in the coat she wears here,
in which the Kennedy people claim which the Kennedy people claimed was an inexpensive imitation of an original design by she, don't she?
This was tartly disputed by Women's Wear Daily, and the skirmishes over Jackie's skirts continued.
The situation changed, so after, however, after her triumphal visit to Paris and Vienna in 1961,
where the crowds clearly adored her in such rebarbative figures as French President Charles de Gaulle and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev,
whom she met in Vienna, were visibly enchanted by her charm.
This is when President Kennedy introduced himself as, quote, the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris commenting on her triumph abroad,
an English newspaper wrote, quote, Jacqueline Kennedy has given the American people from this day on.
One thing they had always lacked majesty.
The American public basked in the reflected glory of its first lady, and now Jackie could wear whatever she pleased,
although she continued to appear in public in American designed an American made clothing.
She occasionally opted for a French outfit such as the Chanel suit.
The colour of the suit, by the way, was not insignificant. It was pink.
Nowadays, we may take pink for granted, but in the 1950s,
it was a new colour in fashion and it was associated most of all with Jackie's predecessor in the White House,
Mamie Eisenhower, as the popular culture historian Carolyn Marlene has noted.
Mrs. Mrs. Eisenhower was such a fan of the new hue that it was popularly called First Lady Pink.
Quote, also known as Mamy Pink, writes Marling.
It was the shade in which she redecorated her boudoir in the family quarters of the White House from the pink top jars of Elizabeth
Arden cosmetics to the pink tufted headboard of her queen sized bed from her pink bed jackets to the fluffy pink rugs in the bathroom.
Her private world was a monotone confection. She favoured pink evening gowns and pink hats.
She kept to brandy snifters full of pink rosebuds at her elbow and quote, So possibly Jackie wore pink in Dallas as a subliminal nod,
not specifically to Mamie Eisenhower,
but more generally to the traditional femininity with which Fink with which pink had come to be associated in the post-war era.
Perhaps because she was making an appearance in a defiantly conservative part of the country,
Jackie chose Pink as a way of compensating for the foreign origins and suspiciously feminist associations of her Chanel suit.
Because as I mentioned earlier, life's magazines, life magazines,
frame enlargements from the Zapruder film were initially published in black and White.
The only opportunity the public had for seeing Jackie suit in colour was by viewing the photograph.
We had been examining. It wasn't until 11 months later when Life published a special report on the investigative findings of the Warren Commission,
that the public had the opportunity to see the mayhem in Dealey Plaza in colour.
This time, life printed eight framed enlargements from Abraham Zapruder as home movie, all coloured in vivid hues.
Now, the pink of Jackie's suit was not only visible, it was conspicuous.
Set off against the navy blue. The presidential Lincoln Continental over the trunk of which she lurched whether to escape the onslaught or,
as she later explained, in a half, crazed effort to recede to retrieve a shard of her husband's skull.
The term shocking pink was not invented for this occasion, but it might well have been.
Oddly, the editors for this October 1964 issue of life chose to follow the grizzly sequence of
colour photos of the assassination with an automobile ad spread out over two pages.
This in itself wouldn't be strange, but the new model car that was being advertised was a Lincoln Continental.
Was the ad copy trumpets as America's most distinguished motor car.
Perhaps it would been more appropriate to say America's most notorious motor car.
Sorry, my slide is not the best quality. Here is the Lincoln in a nineteen.
Here the Lincoln is a 1965 model instead of 1961.
It's grey rather than navy blue and it's a hard top sedan rather than a limousine convertible.
But it's ominously parked beside a grove of trees that stand like sentinels in an eerie mist.
And a sign reading Private Road, nailed to a white stake in the ground resembles a simple wooden cross in a military graveyard.
The slender brunette model poised behind beside the new Lincoln Continental wears a Chanel suit.
Not only that, it's unmistakeably pink. All that's missing is the pillbox hat and the armful of roses.
When I saw it, too, when I sought permission to reproduce this ad in my 2003 book about the Kennedys,
the legal department at Ford Motor Company refused. They have.
They may have been as baffled as I was as to why this ad would have been placed where it was in the magazine.
I suspect that with 40 years hindsight, they felt that their placement had not been in particularly good taste.
So let's return to the love field photograph. Jackie's suit is not the only signifier.
Frenchness in the photograph.
We've been examining the presidential jet that stretches white, blue and silver behind the heads of the beautiful couple.
Even those sporting an American flag on its tail was a French origin insofar as it was designed by the world's then leading industrial stylist,
Raymond Loewy, who was born in France in 1893 and has served as a captain in the French army during World War One,
an immigrant to the United States in 1919 with the equivalent of 40 dollars in his pocket.
Loewy became one of the founders of a new profession called Industrial Design,
citing amongst his influences modernist such as Picasso, Diaghilev, Love and yes, Chanel.
Loewy, along with his staff, design the familiar exterior look of innumerable objects of modern life from toasters,
electric shavers, refrigerators and soda fountain dispensers to automobiles, buses.
Steam locomotives and luxury liners in the internationally recognised corporate logos for Exxon TWC,
a United Airlines, Canada, Dry Nabisco and innumerable other brand name consumer products.
He also designed the exterior markings in interior living quarters of Air Force One.
Here's how that came about. Jack Kennedy was not pleased with the look of the Boeing 787.
He had inherited from President Eisenhower and he wanted to give it a fresh new appearance.
Therefore, he invited Loewy to come to the White House and suggest changes.
One week later, Loewy reappeared with sheets of coloured paper, scissors, razor blades and rubber cement.
Quote, Since since the president's desk in the Oval Office was relatively small, Louis recounts incited by autobiography.
We just sat on the floor cutting out coloured paper shapes and working out various ideas.
JFK Airport enjoyed his plunge into industrial design so much that he told his secretary,
Mrs. Lincoln, that we were not to be disturbed while we were working here.
You see the triumphant result of their collaboration. After the Air Force One redesign was completed,
the president suggested to Loewy that together they develop other projects that would use industrial design to modernise and advertise America,
as Loewy put it. The physical appearance of the country could be aesthetically upgraded, but only with governmental help.
What this may suggest is the Kennedy saw the nation's aesthetic style not as something frivolous and inconsequential,
but as integral to its Cold War initiative,
whereas America had divided constantly with the Soviets as to who had the advantage in terms of conventional and nuclear munitions.
There was no question as to which side was superior in the production of consumer goods.
And Kennedy was keen on widening that gap. Jet passenger travel had been introduced to America only as recently as 1959.
Initially, jet travel was considered glamorous, chic and thrilling four years later.
The public's romance with a passenger jet was still in full bloom when Air Force One touched down at Love Field.
And that, of course, is why it made perfect sense for Kennedy to fly the 30 miles from Fort Worth to Dallas.
Rather than drive, I mean, I can imagine that these cities are 30 miles apart.
They get into Air Force One so they can come down like gods out of the sky.
Now, that's the photo we're seeing now. In doing so, he was staging a grand theatrical entrance.
There was about much more than his own godlike prowess, although it certainly was that, too.
It was about the prowess and modernity of America and its forward looking nature,
its ability to soar powerfully and gracefully into the future for all of that.
The presidential plane also beckoned respectfully toward the past because America was settled
by pioneer families who transported themselves across the continent by means of their own.
Self-sufficient modes of travel or at least.
Or so at least, has been the longstanding myth and rugged individualist ideal that Kennedy's arrival by Air Force One,
his own personal intercontinental jet, amply reinforced.
At the very least, the spectacular airborne arrival promoted the American travel business,
which had been more bundes until very recently and was suddenly growing apace into one of the nation's most popular,
warm, profitable capital industries.
Needless to say, it also gave a boost to the aerospace industry in what Dwight Eisenhower had called the military industrial complex.
Today, especially since September 11, passenger jets no longer emit this aura.
They have become, as never before, a potentially nightmarish vehicles of mass destruction.
Even before 9/11, they were no longer glamorous and chic Chariots of the Gods.
Nor were they proud symbols of the American will to settle the land Conestoga wagons of the sky.
Instead, they had become, for many of us, loud, smelly, overcrowded, environmentally destructive,
annoyingly delayed beasts burden that made flying less an adventure than an ordeal.
Here, though, on a resplendent autumn day in Dallas, the sleek, light blue Boeing jet,
the measures, the distance between the president and first lady,
but also unites them and its expansive reach bespeaks the dreams and promises of that long lost era.
The vivid hues of the red roses, the pink sue, the blue necktie, the blue sky, the white gloves,
the blue and white striped shirt, and the white and blue stripes along the fuselage all come together in a single,
compact geometric unit, a fixed high on the tail of the jet, the U.S. flag,
as if to stamp this glorious day with an affirmation of patriotic pride in America.
As a patriotic icon, the love field photograph might be called American Modern,
in contrast with the famous Grant Wood painting of three decades earlier,
American Gothic Wood's painting portrays a pair of Iowans right rigidly posed in front of
a neatly kept farmhouse marked by a Gothic revival upper story window by the late 1950s.
The painting came to symbolise with tongue in cheek irony or otherwise,
depending on the viewer quintessential plain, upstanding, hard working American folk.
As the art historian Wanda Corn has amply demonstrated, quote,
A virtual torrent of Takeoff's of American Gothic began to appear in the 1960s and, quote,
often with famous heads, including those of presidential couples grafted onto the bodies of the two farm folk, as in this example from the 1980s.
In a left field photo, or what I'm calling American modern, the Kennedys are no farmers.
Jack has a movie stars mean and is clad in Brooks Brothers, not overalls.
Jackie, dressed in Chanel, looks like a million bucks with her luxuriant hair and radiant smile.
The key object in the foreground, the picture is not an old fashioned pitchfork, but a bouquet of roses,
which despite their earlier noted iconographic suggestion of martyrdom to come.
In this context, called in mind instead a beauty pageant queen or a diva laden with flowers at her curtain call.
The Victorian Gothic farmhouse window in the background of Wood's painting is transformed here into a row of jet portholes.
Here we have a snapshot of American modernity circa 1963.
That is every bit as idealised in its own way as was Grant Wood's Depression era tribute to the American yeoman farmer.
I want to conclude with the last comparison, and that's the love field picture of Jackie at the side of one present United
States with a picture from only three hours later of her at the side of another.
This is the famous wire photos, wire service photo of Lyndon Johnson taking the oath of office on Air Force One before its return to Washington.
Johnson's advisers realise the symbolic importance to the nation, indeed to the world, of showing the peaceful, if hurried, transition of government.
And it was absolutely crucial that Mrs. Kennedy appear in the picture beside him to signal her approval of due process.
Were she absent from the photo, would have left doubt. Observers minds as the legitimacy of the presidential succession.
Jackie didn't want to be there. She wanted to remain in the back of the plane along alone with the coffin and her husband's closest friends.
But she understood her obligation to appear at the swearing in ceremony, and she complied.
She refused to our. She refused, however, to change out of her bloodstained clothing into the white dress and white jacket that
someone carefully laid out for her on the bed in the presidential suite aboard the plane.
The White House photographer who took the picture recognising that this was the most important photo shoot of his life went out of
his way to crop the cameras field of view so that the bloodstains on Mrs. Kennedy's outfit would not appear in any of the negatives.
It was only as mentioned earlier when she arrived at Air Force at Andrews Air
Force Base that the public had an opportunity to glimpse the bloodstained suit,
albeit in black and white, not colour.
When we look at Jackie and Jack standing proud and tall outside of Air Force One and then cast our eyes over to Jackie and Lyndon,
standing cramped and solemn inside the same aeroplane, the before and after quality, the pairing is almost unbearable in its poignancy.
The larger point of hope to make this afternoon is that this single iconic image from the archive of the Kennedy assassination is rich with art,
popular culture and material culture signification as some of these have remained late in the photo.
All these years, for example, the beauty and vigour the president's body,
the sophisticated and liberated Frenchness of the first lady's garment and the modernity of Air Force One.
These are meanings I contend the viewers have understood about the love field photo all along,
even if until now no one has bothered to spell them out so explicitly,
other signification such as the red roses as a sign of martyrdom would never have emerged from the deep structure of the image at all.
Hadnot of historical circumstances, that is, the assassination called them forth.
I've tried to show how the analysis of a single visual artefact,
an on the spot news photo can draw upon a series of disparate but concurrent discourses from
across the cultural spectrum in order to discover how that portrait was embedded in its time.
That this portrait remains so fascinating today has to do with the godlike stature of the Kennedys and our society's collective nostalgia,
justified or not, for the antediluvian period, the so-called Camelot that they represent.
But it also, I believe, has to do with the ongoing relevance of these various crucial themes and issues about bodies, beauties,
bodies, beauty, female independence, class modernity and violent martyrdom that this portrait pulls together into its visual field.
More than half a century has passed since this photograph froze in time,
a moment of triumph and glory before a page was forever turned in the history of America.
While in no way does this picture foretell the tragedy that was to come.
In retrospect, it captures the vividness, vibrancy and surging life energy of a nation that on that bright Dallas morning,
was striding confidently, perhaps too confidently into the future.