1 00:00:01,520 --> 00:00:05,730 So good evening, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Craig Clunies, 2 00:00:05,730 --> 00:00:17,820 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. 3 00:00:17,820 --> 00:00:21,060 Just to give those of you who maybe haven't attended these lectures before, 4 00:00:21,060 --> 00:00:26,700 a little bit of a background as to what's going on here and what kind of exciting 5 00:00:26,700 --> 00:00:31,080 development this is both for American studies and history of art at Oxford. 6 00:00:31,080 --> 00:00:40,920 The Terra Foundation for American Art, based in Chicago, is a generous and generously funded institution that has given the history faculty and the 7 00:00:40,920 --> 00:00:48,300 history of art department the funds to have with us for a whole year this year and next year. 8 00:00:48,300 --> 00:00:53,670 And we hope in years subsequent to that, a visiting professor of American art. 9 00:00:53,670 --> 00:01:02,280 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, 10 00:01:02,280 --> 00:01:07,200 teaching both postgraduate students and undergraduate students. 11 00:01:07,200 --> 00:01:17,010 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. 12 00:01:17,010 --> 00:01:27,000 And a great deal of that success is due to the commitment and charm and energy of our much esteemed temporary colleague, David Lubin. 13 00:01:27,000 --> 00:01:31,860 David, is Charlotte David's kind of dayjob or substantive position or whatever you want to call it? 14 00:01:31,860 --> 00:01:38,340 He is Charlotte C. Weber, professor of art at Wake Forest University in the United States. 15 00:01:38,340 --> 00:01:44,460 And he's been with us, as I say, for the whole year, teaching undergraduates and postgraduates. 16 00:01:44,460 --> 00:01:53,640 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. 17 00:01:53,640 --> 00:02:02,430 The Tara Foundation will be other are the sponsors of a major exhibition of early 20th century American modernist art, 18 00:02:02,430 --> 00:02:05,520 which will be happening at the Ashmolean. 19 00:02:05,520 --> 00:02:12,360 And in connexion with that exhibition, at least two of our postgraduate students, two of our Masters students, 20 00:02:12,360 --> 00:02:23,280 have written for that catalogue, giving students an opportunity to be involved in the actual practise of writing for exhibitions. 21 00:02:23,280 --> 00:02:29,640 And the Terra Foundation have also generously lent from their collection a couple of works which are in the Ashmolean at the moment. 22 00:02:29,640 --> 00:02:39,060 And one of those has actually formed the focus for the extended essay on an object or image in Oxford, which first year undergraduates. 23 00:02:39,060 --> 00:02:46,470 All right. So this is this is really the kind of thing that we very much hoped would happen that at all levels. 24 00:02:46,470 --> 00:02:52,290 The American art starts to become part of the of the offering here. 25 00:02:52,290 --> 00:02:58,070 The size of the audience here tonight tells us, as if we didn't know that there's a real Audy, 26 00:02:58,070 --> 00:03:03,010 a real audience in Oxford, a real desire to know more about American art. 27 00:03:03,010 --> 00:03:07,140 And as I say, David has got this off to a really wonderful start. 28 00:03:07,140 --> 00:03:16,080 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. 29 00:03:16,080 --> 00:03:32,320 The Kennedys arrive in Dallas. Please welcome David Leupen. Keep in mind, Mike, does this work? 30 00:03:32,320 --> 00:03:43,000 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. 31 00:03:43,000 --> 00:03:51,510 She said I shouldn't even use the mike. I should just build it out. So she's saying turn it off. 32 00:03:51,510 --> 00:03:58,350 Well, I certainly agreement on this. I don't want to do a test. 33 00:03:58,350 --> 00:04:03,940 OK, now I am not using the mike and now I am using the mike. 34 00:04:03,940 --> 00:04:07,860 Now I am not using the mike. This is great. 35 00:04:07,860 --> 00:04:14,320 I love a communal decision and I am going to take this off. 36 00:04:14,320 --> 00:04:21,950 Turn it off. Turn it off. Drill, baby, drill. Right now I have to get me out of my pocket. 37 00:04:21,950 --> 00:04:26,980 There's many wires here. All right. OK. Does this work? 38 00:04:26,980 --> 00:04:35,860 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. 39 00:04:35,860 --> 00:04:41,800 And, you know, I will know to keep going. It's been fantastic teaching at Oxford this year. 40 00:04:41,800 --> 00:04:48,050 A dream come true. I've had the best students, the best colleagues. 41 00:04:48,050 --> 00:04:52,880 Unfortunately, they're going to boot me out. We have to leave my wife and I have to leave. 42 00:04:52,880 --> 00:04:58,550 We were hoping the doctor would say, no, stay forever. But that hasn't happened. 43 00:04:58,550 --> 00:05:07,010 So I don't know why. But anyway, so tonight's tonight's set this afternoon. 44 00:05:07,010 --> 00:05:16,610 Whatever time this lecture is revisiting material, that was in my 2003 book Shooting Kennedy, 45 00:05:16,610 --> 00:05:21,950 which I published on the fortieth anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. 46 00:05:21,950 --> 00:05:24,950 And I've had this material off to the side for a long time. 47 00:05:24,950 --> 00:05:31,730 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. 48 00:05:31,730 --> 00:05:35,930 So that's what you're hearing now. All right. 49 00:05:35,930 --> 00:05:44,760 And finally, last thing, while I'm asking for all this advice from my on the line. 50 00:05:44,760 --> 00:05:57,660 All right. Without further ado, I will put my glasses on. 51 00:05:57,660 --> 00:06:02,220 No single year in the past century, let alone any other single weekend, 52 00:06:02,220 --> 00:06:13,260 produce so many unforgettable world famous pictures as those that emerged from November 22nd to 25th, 1963. 53 00:06:13,260 --> 00:06:28,880 These are the dates marking the assassination in Dallas and the funeral in Washington of President John F. Kennedy. 54 00:06:28,880 --> 00:06:35,750 Since their initial publication flung them out to a stunned but voracious audience, public, I should say, 55 00:06:35,750 --> 00:06:41,480 these remarkable images have been indelibly engraved on the modern consciousness, 56 00:06:41,480 --> 00:06:47,270 as befits the first American president to exploit the relatively new medium of television. 57 00:06:47,270 --> 00:06:57,140 And as such, the presiding figure of the post-war information age, the JFK images, are highly mediated objects of social spectacle. 58 00:06:57,140 --> 00:07:03,140 Some of these pictures are amongst the best known and most often reproduced of the past century. 59 00:07:03,140 --> 00:07:08,000 The first lady climbing on the trunk of a Lincoln cut Lincoln Continental convertible. 60 00:07:08,000 --> 00:07:13,430 Whether to escape the killing pit or recover a fragment of her husband's head. 61 00:07:13,430 --> 00:07:20,870 The new president, Lyndon Johnson, taking the oath, the oath of office on Air Force One. 62 00:07:20,870 --> 00:07:31,550 Jack Ruby bursting out of a crowd to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, the stoic widow standing hand-in-hand with her children. 63 00:07:31,550 --> 00:07:40,550 Or perhaps most famously, the shot of her three year old son, John Junior, poignantly saluting his fallen father. 64 00:07:40,550 --> 00:07:45,770 These images are so famous that they have, in a sense, become invisible. 65 00:07:45,770 --> 00:07:53,750 We look right past them as if they were panes of glass into a we take to be the historical reality behind them. 66 00:07:53,750 --> 00:08:00,890 We incorrectly assume that we scrutinise them only because they show important historical events as 67 00:08:00,890 --> 00:08:08,330 they were occurring and not because they are in themselves compelling works of art and popular culture. 68 00:08:08,330 --> 00:08:14,030 Complex instances of visual representation that only appear to be simple, 69 00:08:14,030 --> 00:08:23,450 straightforward and see through the assassination of the president had such a traumatic effect on those who were alive at the time, 70 00:08:23,450 --> 00:08:33,770 because never before in American history had the general public felt so immediately and emotionally connected to the United States president, 71 00:08:33,770 --> 00:08:37,970 president and his immediate family. 72 00:08:37,970 --> 00:08:47,000 This had a lot to do with television, which, as I've mentioned, had only recently become the American family medium par excellence, 73 00:08:47,000 --> 00:08:53,150 but also with what media historians now call the golden age of photojournalism. 74 00:08:53,150 --> 00:09:01,400 When popular weekly magazines such as Life and Look flooded American homes with brilliant and captivating images, 75 00:09:01,400 --> 00:09:16,040 amongst them, pictures of the irresistible young Kennedy family. 76 00:09:16,040 --> 00:09:22,970 At the same time that these image Smiths were depicting Jack Kennedy as a happy and devoted father, 77 00:09:22,970 --> 00:09:29,840 they also found ways of representing him as an individual of profound depth and lonely destiny. 78 00:09:29,840 --> 00:09:37,370 As in George Tames famous photograph showing the president alone in the Oval Office, stooped over, as it were, 79 00:09:37,370 --> 00:09:47,470 by the burdens of his his role were in Mark Shaw's haunting image of Kennedy disappearing into the sand dunes of Cape Cod. 80 00:09:47,470 --> 00:09:52,930 Some of the most memorable pictures of Jack Kennedy amounted to photographic portraits of him 81 00:09:52,930 --> 00:09:58,330 and his wife as he and Jack LOEs shot of the two of them having breakfast in a Portland, 82 00:09:58,330 --> 00:10:06,040 Oregon, diner during the campaign of 1960, composed in an offhand manner and lit and cure a squirrel. 83 00:10:06,040 --> 00:10:11,770 Like a scene from a film noir, the photograph bears a striking resemblance to anybody. 84 00:10:11,770 --> 00:10:21,400 Guess what painting I'm going to show. Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. 85 00:10:21,400 --> 00:10:28,450 Other photos of the two Kennedys together similarly resonate with famous artistic antecedents. 86 00:10:28,450 --> 00:10:37,840 Take, for example, this Life magazine cover, which appeared on newsstands in July 1953, 87 00:10:37,840 --> 00:10:45,730 shortly before young Senator Kennedy from Massachusetts announced his engagement to Jacqueline Bouvier. 88 00:10:45,730 --> 00:10:54,430 The photograph depicts them, but especially him, as the epitome of American innocence, freshness and youth. 89 00:10:54,430 --> 00:11:02,650 Indeed, part of the selling of John Kennedy at this point in his career involves showing him to be at heart a young, 90 00:11:02,650 --> 00:11:08,170 irresistible, carefree lad, a so-called barefoot boy. 91 00:11:08,170 --> 00:11:14,290 For nearly a century, the barefoot boy had been one of America's most cherished archetypes, 92 00:11:14,290 --> 00:11:18,940 a figure of energy, spontaneity, wholesomeness and honesty. 93 00:11:18,940 --> 00:11:25,870 Even when, like Tom Sawyer, he occasionally fibbed in an essentially harmless manner. 94 00:11:25,870 --> 00:11:36,580 The pairing of Jack's barefoot boyishness and the sun, sea and sales calls to mind Winslow Homer's great 1876 oil painting, 95 00:11:36,580 --> 00:11:42,200 breezing up a sentimental favourite in the canon of American art. 96 00:11:42,200 --> 00:11:47,860 Homer's shows three young lads seated or reclined informally on the deck of a sailboat. 97 00:11:47,860 --> 00:11:56,830 The Gloster, an adult fisherman, controls the rope lines and the boat bounds over the waves amid sun and spray. 98 00:11:56,830 --> 00:12:06,850 An art critic of Homer's time in terms that my character might well characterise the barefoot senator nearly a century later singled out, 99 00:12:06,850 --> 00:12:14,670 quote, the boatman's barefoot boy. The bigger the boat, 100 00:12:14,670 --> 00:12:19,770 the boatman's barefoot boy who sits upon the thought and whose bright eye evidently sees 101 00:12:19,770 --> 00:12:25,080 such enormous horizons as he looks through the curl of spray shaved up by the keel. 102 00:12:25,080 --> 00:12:32,370 I doubt that Life's photographer had this type of imagery in mind when he took the photo. 103 00:12:32,370 --> 00:12:41,510 Nor do I think that the magazine's photo editors, or for that matter, its readers, ever specifically drew the connexion. 104 00:12:41,510 --> 00:12:48,590 But it's they're all the same insofar as the so-called barefoot boy motif has endured in our 105 00:12:48,590 --> 00:12:57,180 collective unconsciousness and reappeared in various guises throughout our national history. 106 00:12:57,180 --> 00:13:04,860 From here on in today, I wish to concentrate on one iconic image of the assassination weekend, 107 00:13:04,860 --> 00:13:15,900 an ex post facto double portrait of President Mrs. Kennedy on their arrival at Love Field in Dallas shortly before noon on Friday, 108 00:13:15,900 --> 00:13:23,670 November 22nd, 1963. Forty five minutes later, the president would be dead. 109 00:13:23,670 --> 00:13:31,110 I should point out that it is impossible to look at such images with an historically innocent eye. 110 00:13:31,110 --> 00:13:39,020 They come to us, as they did to their initial viewers, drenched in what we might call the future conditional tense, 111 00:13:39,020 --> 00:13:45,270 for we inevitably know, as the protagonist in the photograph, do not what is to become of them? 112 00:13:45,270 --> 00:13:50,460 In less than an hour's time, we can only ever view this picture. 113 00:13:50,460 --> 00:13:57,410 Pro kleptocracy, as it were, for the dire future that had not yet occurred when it was made, 114 00:13:57,410 --> 00:14:03,390 lays across it conspicuously like a frosting that can never be scraped away. 115 00:14:03,390 --> 00:14:09,300 Frozen in history, the figures are always forever poised on the precipice. 116 00:14:09,300 --> 00:14:18,330 About to suffer heat to die. She does scream and that minor bumbling character who can be seen leaning over behind them. 117 00:14:18,330 --> 00:14:23,370 Lyndon Johnson about to become the most powerful man in the world. 118 00:14:23,370 --> 00:14:33,750 In his memorial issue of one week later, Life magazine opened its coverage of the assassination with this full page photograph. 119 00:14:33,750 --> 00:14:39,450 The rest of the pictures in the report are black and white, as if the very colours of human life. 120 00:14:39,450 --> 00:14:46,150 Not to mention happiness had bled out of them, leaving only charred remains. 121 00:14:46,150 --> 00:14:55,880 They are small and blurry, and most of them were called from the eight millimetre home movie that a Dallas clothing manufacturer, Abraham Zapruder, 122 00:14:55,880 --> 00:15:05,990 had fortuitously made in the boat motorcade as it passed his vantage point on what notoriously came to be called the grassy knoll. 123 00:15:05,990 --> 00:15:16,250 In contrast, the love field, a rival shot taken by the veteran life photographer Arthur Ridker B seems larger than life, 124 00:15:16,250 --> 00:15:21,140 vividly coloured, crisply focussed. It fills the page. 125 00:15:21,140 --> 00:15:29,420 The Kennedys look tall and vibrant. They come so close to the photographic picture plane that they seen within our grasp. 126 00:15:29,420 --> 00:15:42,450 Giants amongst us. Life's editors clearly intended record B's photo as a resplendent, magical, wonderful before to the drab, 127 00:15:42,450 --> 00:15:51,010 dismal and violent after in what turned out to be the best selling issue of the magazine in its 50 year history. 128 00:15:51,010 --> 00:15:56,350 The photograph has the formal density of a carefully composed painting. 129 00:15:56,350 --> 00:16:02,020 It is filled with intriguing visual, some symmetries and repetitions. 130 00:16:02,020 --> 00:16:11,590 Consider, for example, how the knots lapel of the first lady's suit echoes that of her husband's, but more loosely and expansively. 131 00:16:11,590 --> 00:16:19,060 Or how the stripes of his shirt connect to the broad blue stripe on the jet and the stripes of the flag, 132 00:16:19,060 --> 00:16:26,860 as well as to the piping on her suit and the subtle striped pattern in its warp and weft know to have the geometric 133 00:16:26,860 --> 00:16:35,950 pattern of his neck tie with its neat rows of rounded rectangles harmonises with the boot clay fabric of her wool jacket, 134 00:16:35,950 --> 00:16:41,950 as well as with the row of porthole windows on the jet and the three zeros on the planes. 135 00:16:41,950 --> 00:16:47,140 Call number lined up beneath the flag. The President's pocket here. 136 00:16:47,140 --> 00:16:52,360 Handkerchief aligns with the jet's tail. The handkerchief. 137 00:16:52,360 --> 00:16:59,380 The vice president's white carnation. And the first lady's white glove form an inverted triangle. 138 00:16:59,380 --> 00:17:09,970 Compactly framing her. Particularly delicate is the way husband and wife fleetingly touch arms, his hand going one way hers, 139 00:17:09,970 --> 00:17:17,650 the other, regardless of its original journalistic purpose and subsequent historical significance. 140 00:17:17,650 --> 00:17:27,820 The Ridker be photographed stands on its own as a richly complex visual artefact. 141 00:17:27,820 --> 00:17:39,970 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. 142 00:17:39,970 --> 00:17:47,230 Jacqueline Kennedy still had one hour to share the buoyant surge of life with the man at her side. 143 00:17:47,230 --> 00:17:55,980 Here is that sense of the future conditional. I mentioned that is the staple of legends about heroes, saints and martyrs. 144 00:17:55,980 --> 00:18:05,800 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 145 00:18:05,800 --> 00:18:16,510 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. 146 00:18:16,510 --> 00:18:20,590 The direction of his gaze, as in Renaissance paintings, 147 00:18:20,590 --> 00:18:28,840 establishes a before and after narrative triumphal entry of the hero on one side and on the other, 148 00:18:28,840 --> 00:18:35,600 as if he alone four sees it a melancholy emblem of his imminent martyrdom. 149 00:18:35,600 --> 00:18:43,420 Do you buy that? You're with me here, okay? 150 00:18:43,420 --> 00:18:52,990 Mrs. Kennedy arrives. Mrs. Kennedy carries in her arms a bouquet of red roses, according to presidential historian William Manchester. 151 00:18:52,990 --> 00:19:00,790 She was welcomed with red roses instead of the yellow rose of Texas because with so many political festivities planned for the day, 152 00:19:00,790 --> 00:19:05,110 local floras had already sold out of that preferred colour. 153 00:19:05,110 --> 00:19:10,900 Manchester notes the white roses were also available and that these were bestowed on Lady Bird Johnson, 154 00:19:10,900 --> 00:19:15,310 the vice president's wife, and Nellie Connally, the governor's wife. 155 00:19:15,310 --> 00:19:19,300 But the first lady was honoured with red. 156 00:19:19,300 --> 00:19:29,920 Red roses have a longstanding tradition going back to the Middle Ages of signifying the spilling of holy blood, the martyrdom of a saint. 157 00:19:29,920 --> 00:19:36,010 It was pure happenstance that Mrs. Kennedy received red roses instead of yellow. 158 00:19:36,010 --> 00:19:41,770 And no one at Love Field, including the photographer, had any idea of what was to take place. 159 00:19:41,770 --> 00:19:50,740 A mere eight miles away. Still, in retrospect, which is the only way anyone has ever viewed this photograph. 160 00:19:50,740 --> 00:19:53,620 It prophesies his death to come. 161 00:19:53,620 --> 00:20:01,240 The symbolic meaning of the red roses would surely have remained latent without any prophetic significance whatsoever. 162 00:20:01,240 --> 00:20:06,970 Had the assassination not occurred. But the assassination did occur. 163 00:20:06,970 --> 00:20:13,960 And therefore, life's photo serves as a modern day equivalent to a late Gothic painting such as Martin Sheen, 164 00:20:13,960 --> 00:20:21,310 Gower's 14, 73, Madonna and Child in a Rose Bower which counted. 165 00:20:21,310 --> 00:20:31,540 And the religiously informed viewer to invest the lovely red flowers on display with a sense of the mortal tragedy to unfold. 166 00:20:31,540 --> 00:20:36,100 Although the roses in the photograph in no way predicted the assassination. 167 00:20:36,100 --> 00:20:46,660 They have given that photo a sense of ineluctable tragedy, conferring on John Kennedy, whose political ratings were slipping a beatific aura. 168 00:20:46,660 --> 00:20:53,540 He does not possess at the time of his death. Indeed, under normal circumstances, 169 00:20:53,540 --> 00:21:02,420 an alternative cultural signification would have emerged from the photo from ancient Rome to the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena. 170 00:21:02,420 --> 00:21:08,800 Each New Year's Day roses have also been a sign of victory, pride and triumph. 171 00:21:08,800 --> 00:21:17,000 If in the Middle Ages, roses was the symbolic flower, the virgin in the ancient world, they were the signature flower of Venus, 172 00:21:17,000 --> 00:21:24,710 the goddess of love, a connexion not lost on the modern floral industry, which does a brisk business in them. 173 00:21:24,710 --> 00:21:32,420 Every Valentine's Day. But Italy's famous mythological painting, The Birth of Venus, 174 00:21:32,420 --> 00:21:40,940 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. 175 00:21:40,940 --> 00:21:51,280 Shows are being ciao showered with pink roses, the float down out of the sky from the wing gods Zephyr. 176 00:21:51,280 --> 00:21:56,410 As long as we momentarily put aside our foreign knowledge of what is to come, 177 00:21:56,410 --> 00:22:03,640 we see how Ridker B's photo renders the first lady as America's Aphrodite clothed. 178 00:22:03,640 --> 00:22:09,370 To be sure, with Air Force One, her Zephyr and the aptly named Love Field, 179 00:22:09,370 --> 00:22:16,800 her Kitara, the Triumphal Association of Roses, remains visible in the photograph. 180 00:22:16,800 --> 00:22:25,670 But because of our knowledge, in retrospect, it comes inevitably tinged with a sad or bitter irony. 181 00:22:25,670 --> 00:22:34,460 Roses are not the only richly meaningful signifier, are not the only richly meaningful signifiers in love field photo. 182 00:22:34,460 --> 00:22:38,690 Let us now examine, in turn the president's body. 183 00:22:38,690 --> 00:22:43,820 The first lady's garment and the aeroplane in the background. 184 00:22:43,820 --> 00:22:52,550 First, though, allow me the rest. The liberty of referring to the pictures protagonists as Jack and Jackie, 185 00:22:52,550 --> 00:22:58,520 which is how they were widely known throughout America, indeed much of the rest of the world during those years, 186 00:22:58,520 --> 00:23:03,140 as evidenced, for example, by the chant of Jackie Jackie, 187 00:23:03,140 --> 00:23:12,770 with which hordes of Parisians greeted the first lady as she and the president paraded down the shops in a.D.A in 1961. 188 00:23:12,770 --> 00:23:18,110 Jack's face. You will notice, is yes. 189 00:23:18,110 --> 00:23:26,930 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. 190 00:23:26,930 --> 00:23:30,480 Jack Kennedy had been almost painfully thin. 191 00:23:30,480 --> 00:23:37,820 The time he graduated from Harvard, he was six foot one in height, but weighed only one hundred and forty five pounds. 192 00:23:37,820 --> 00:23:45,200 By at. Biographers have suggested that when he first ran for public office as a congressman from Massachusetts, 193 00:23:45,200 --> 00:23:53,420 his gangly, underweight form made female voters want to take care of him and feed him a good home cooked meal. 194 00:23:53,420 --> 00:24:01,030 By the time he entered the White House 15 years later, Jack had fattened up. 195 00:24:01,030 --> 00:24:03,490 Partially, this was because of his age. 196 00:24:03,490 --> 00:24:11,770 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. 197 00:24:11,770 --> 00:24:20,590 Further, he was taking cortisone treatment to control his Addison's disease, a life threatening glandular affliction. 198 00:24:20,590 --> 00:24:25,710 A side effect of this steroid replacement treatment. 199 00:24:25,710 --> 00:24:35,930 A replacement treatment with facial puffiness. Apparently, Jack was unhappy about putting on extra weight, especially around the face, 200 00:24:35,930 --> 00:24:41,210 and in 1962, along with millions of other middle aged American men. 201 00:24:41,210 --> 00:24:47,810 He began using a new product on the food market known as Metrical, produced by the Mead Johnson Company. 202 00:24:47,810 --> 00:24:57,050 Metrical was the first liquid dietary meal substitute to be sold nationally, and it was an instant bestseller on supermarket shelves. 203 00:24:57,050 --> 00:25:00,050 A can of metrical supposedly, sir, 204 00:25:00,050 --> 00:25:09,870 supply all the daily vitamins and nutrients a person needed with few of the calories that normally came along with them. 205 00:25:09,870 --> 00:25:19,610 Metro Carl appeared at the time that low calorie soft drinks were introduced onto the market diet right COLA in 1962 and TAB. 206 00:25:19,610 --> 00:25:30,380 In 1963, the first meeting of Weight Watchers, organised by a dieting housewife in Queens, took place in May 1963. 207 00:25:30,380 --> 00:25:38,960 Meanwhile, the President's Council on Physical Fitness gave official encouragement to the exercise craze that was taking hold throughout the land. 208 00:25:38,960 --> 00:25:49,340 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. 209 00:25:49,340 --> 00:25:53,180 Was a nation fit to combat foreign enemies? 210 00:25:53,180 --> 00:26:04,400 Here's how life describes the president left in the left field arrival photo, vibrant with confidence, crinkle eyed with an all embracing smile. 211 00:26:04,400 --> 00:26:11,870 John F. Kennedy swept his wife with him into the exuberance of the throng at Dallas's love field. 212 00:26:11,870 --> 00:26:17,170 The emphasis in the photo on Kennedy's vibrant physical appearance made all the more emphatic here. 213 00:26:17,170 --> 00:26:22,280 By the way, his son burnished hair, stands out against the deep blue sky, 214 00:26:22,280 --> 00:26:28,700 gave visual form to a word that he had made a key note of his presidency vigour. 215 00:26:28,700 --> 00:26:36,440 Or, as he, in many comic impersonators he spawned, pronounced it, vigour. 216 00:26:36,440 --> 00:26:45,500 The presidential historian Theodore White recounts that when he interviewed the president's widow for Life magazine a week after the assassination, 217 00:26:45,500 --> 00:26:51,740 and she really relived her traumatic memories of it, she recalled almost in reverie. 218 00:26:51,740 --> 00:26:57,740 His head was so beautiful. His mouth was so beautiful. 219 00:26:57,740 --> 00:27:00,320 As I look at the love field photo with Jack, 220 00:27:00,320 --> 00:27:07,790 Natalie attired in a bluish grey waisted wool suit and a stiff collared white shirt with blue chalk stripes. 221 00:27:07,790 --> 00:27:14,240 I think of another photo taken in California a year and a half earlier. 222 00:27:14,240 --> 00:27:23,330 This one shows the president emerging from the Santa Monica surf like a modern day Adonis surrounded by adoring nymphs. 223 00:27:23,330 --> 00:27:33,980 His Metro Callon exercise regimented 45 year old body exuding male pinup beauty in torso and toothy grin alike. 224 00:27:33,980 --> 00:27:41,090 He resembles the hunk played by Burt Lancaster in the steamy 1953 Hollywood classic. 225 00:27:41,090 --> 00:27:50,240 From Here to Eternity, as we look again at the love field photograph, we see how Jackie, 226 00:27:50,240 --> 00:27:55,200 in her serene proximity to the handsome, charismatic, vigorous president, 227 00:27:55,200 --> 00:28:09,950 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. 228 00:28:09,950 --> 00:28:20,420 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. 229 00:28:20,420 --> 00:28:26,840 Still, I do want to mention what's inside her body, and that's French cuisine. 230 00:28:26,840 --> 00:28:36,350 In the early 1960s, the first lady was a signifier for Americans of cultural sophistication and more specifically, French sophistication. 231 00:28:36,350 --> 00:28:49,370 The pronunciation of her first name, Jacqueline and the EII, are ending of her maiden name, Bouvier were themselves continual reminders of Frenchness. 232 00:28:49,370 --> 00:29:00,160 So, too, were the many Gail Washington dinners over which she presided their menus prepared by the White House master chef, Frenchman Rene. 233 00:29:00,160 --> 00:29:05,900 They don't. For example, the night the world's most celebrated cellist, Pablo Casals, 234 00:29:05,900 --> 00:29:14,480 performed in the East Room, dinner consisted of French cuisine paired with American wine. 235 00:29:14,480 --> 00:29:22,370 That same year in 1961, a former State Department employee turned housewife, Julia Child, 236 00:29:22,370 --> 00:29:29,780 published her first cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which became a bestseller in 1963. 237 00:29:29,780 --> 00:29:36,050 Child introduced her now legendary TV cooking show, The French Chef. 238 00:29:36,050 --> 00:29:43,220 America was indeed becoming to invoke the title of a more recent bestseller, A Fast Food Nation. 239 00:29:43,220 --> 00:29:49,370 McDonald's started up in 1954. Burger King in 1957. 240 00:29:49,370 --> 00:29:55,430 Domino's Hearties, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut all in 1960. 241 00:29:55,430 --> 00:29:58,090 TV dinners, frozen foods, 242 00:29:58,090 --> 00:30:09,290 Angella were ubiquitous at mealtime in suburbia despite or perhaps because of this Bergey of convenience foods geared to a hyper mobile, 243 00:30:09,290 --> 00:30:21,660 hyper active, middle class society. Jackie Kennedy epitomised a slow food ideal to which many Americans, at least in their dreams, aspired. 244 00:30:21,660 --> 00:30:28,980 At Love Field, Jackie wears a double breasted strawberry pink Chanel suit with a midnight blue piping. 245 00:30:28,980 --> 00:30:32,610 It's the most legendary garment in American history. 246 00:30:32,610 --> 00:30:42,840 Even more so, I would say that Monica Lewinsky's blue dress for even after it was soiled by her husband's brain matter. 247 00:30:42,840 --> 00:30:48,120 She refused to change out of it for the long flight with his body back to Washington. 248 00:30:48,120 --> 00:30:56,000 In a famous picture of her departing for the presidential plane at Andrews Air Force Base with her hand class, 249 00:30:56,000 --> 00:31:05,330 Beñat of her brother in law, Robert Kennedy, the splatter of blood across the skirt of the Chanel suit is conspicuous and startling. 250 00:31:05,330 --> 00:31:13,770 Startling not simply because it was the president's blood and because first lady's had until now always existed in a world magically, 251 00:31:13,770 --> 00:31:22,800 mythically sealed off from blood and other messy substances of daily life and suffering such as Greece, grime and dirt. 252 00:31:22,800 --> 00:31:25,380 But also because in 1963, 253 00:31:25,380 --> 00:31:35,970 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. 254 00:31:35,970 --> 00:31:44,020 By wearing a Chanel suit, a woman gave notice that she was smart, classy and independent. 255 00:31:44,020 --> 00:31:51,210 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. 256 00:31:51,210 --> 00:31:58,570 Made it the holy relic it has since become today locked away in storage at the National Archive. 257 00:31:58,570 --> 00:32:03,760 Jacky's Chanel suit came with a great deal of 20th century history attached to it. 258 00:32:03,760 --> 00:32:09,580 The brand name Chanel refers to one of the most impressive and influential women of that century. 259 00:32:09,580 --> 00:32:16,960 Gabrielle Coco Chanel. Born in France in 1883 and reared as a poor orphan in the convent. 260 00:32:16,960 --> 00:32:22,750 Chanel became Paris's leading fashion designer. By the end of World War One. 261 00:32:22,750 --> 00:32:29,770 Like her friends Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, John Cocteau and Sergei Diaghilev. 262 00:32:29,770 --> 00:32:34,210 She was a modernist. And she, more than any other individual, 263 00:32:34,210 --> 00:32:43,690 liberated women from the tight restrictions of Belle Epoque fashions and provided them with a comfortable alternative of modern styles. 264 00:32:43,690 --> 00:32:49,930 Her designs offered women the relaxed freedom of movement previously reserved for men, 265 00:32:49,930 --> 00:32:57,220 eliminating stays, bustles and corsets and substituting silk cotton wool jersey for satin. 266 00:32:57,220 --> 00:33:05,410 Chanel introduced loose fitting sweaters, blazers, pleated skirts, trench coats and the trademark little black dress. 267 00:33:05,410 --> 00:33:10,900 By the 1930s, she was the most famous clothing designer in the world, 268 00:33:10,900 --> 00:33:19,390 arrested as a collaborationist at the conclusion of World War Two and set free only thanks to the intervention of her friend Winston Churchill. 269 00:33:19,390 --> 00:33:28,690 She departed for Switzerland in retirement, living off the revenue of her patented perfume, Chanel Number five, in 1954. 270 00:33:28,690 --> 00:33:36,970 However, at the age of 71, she threw herself back into the fashion business in vexation at the regression of women's 271 00:33:36,970 --> 00:33:44,170 fashions as she saw it toward a socially conservative and physically restrictive style. 272 00:33:44,170 --> 00:33:53,830 In particular, she took aim at Christian Dior, so-called new look, which the couture Kia introduced in the early post-war era. 273 00:33:53,830 --> 00:33:56,830 In an avowed attempt to weight make women feel feminine, 274 00:33:56,830 --> 00:34:03,760 glamorous again after the prolonged period of drab functionality that had characterised the war years, 275 00:34:03,760 --> 00:34:10,900 Chanel accused Dior of treating women like armchairs to be upholstered. 276 00:34:10,900 --> 00:34:14,050 He puts covers on them, she sneered. 277 00:34:14,050 --> 00:34:22,300 Her goal was to treat women as real world beings who reasonably wished to dress in a manner that combined elegance and functionality, 278 00:34:22,300 --> 00:34:29,560 practicality and chic or fashion femininity. And up to date independence. 279 00:34:29,560 --> 00:34:37,970 By the early 1960s, the Chanel suit had become a wardrobe staple of the upwardly mobile American female. 280 00:34:37,970 --> 00:34:44,470 A Chanel suit fit almost every daytime occasion that required a woman to dress stylishly. 281 00:34:44,470 --> 00:34:49,640 It was thus the perfect outfit to wear in a presidential motorcade. 282 00:34:49,640 --> 00:35:01,310 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, 283 00:35:01,310 --> 00:35:06,890 conservatives claim that such devotion was needlessly extravagant and as such, 284 00:35:06,890 --> 00:35:11,960 a harbinger of the liberal overspending that they predicted would become rampant in government. 285 00:35:11,960 --> 00:35:16,370 Were her husband to be elected elected? Moreover, 286 00:35:16,370 --> 00:35:28,220 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? 287 00:35:28,220 --> 00:35:32,630 Kennedy's rival for the presidency, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, 288 00:35:32,630 --> 00:35:43,070 had already years earlier some praise of his wife Pat for being satisfied to wear what he called a good Republican cloth coat. 289 00:35:43,070 --> 00:35:53,330 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, 290 00:35:53,330 --> 00:36:03,140 in which the Kennedy people claim which the Kennedy people claimed was an inexpensive imitation of an original design by she, don't she? 291 00:36:03,140 --> 00:36:11,290 This was tartly disputed by Women's Wear Daily, and the skirmishes over Jackie's skirts continued. 292 00:36:11,290 --> 00:36:19,350 The situation changed, so after, however, after her triumphal visit to Paris and Vienna in 1961, 293 00:36:19,350 --> 00:36:29,140 where the crowds clearly adored her in such rebarbative figures as French President Charles de Gaulle and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, 294 00:36:29,140 --> 00:36:36,360 whom she met in Vienna, were visibly enchanted by her charm. 295 00:36:36,360 --> 00:36:46,110 This is when President Kennedy introduced himself as, quote, the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris commenting on her triumph abroad, 296 00:36:46,110 --> 00:36:52,680 an English newspaper wrote, quote, Jacqueline Kennedy has given the American people from this day on. 297 00:36:52,680 --> 00:36:57,290 One thing they had always lacked majesty. 298 00:36:57,290 --> 00:37:04,040 The American public basked in the reflected glory of its first lady, and now Jackie could wear whatever she pleased, 299 00:37:04,040 --> 00:37:08,870 although she continued to appear in public in American designed an American made clothing. 300 00:37:08,870 --> 00:37:15,450 She occasionally opted for a French outfit such as the Chanel suit. 301 00:37:15,450 --> 00:37:21,180 The colour of the suit, by the way, was not insignificant. It was pink. 302 00:37:21,180 --> 00:37:24,840 Nowadays, we may take pink for granted, but in the 1950s, 303 00:37:24,840 --> 00:37:31,440 it was a new colour in fashion and it was associated most of all with Jackie's predecessor in the White House, 304 00:37:31,440 --> 00:37:37,500 Mamie Eisenhower, as the popular culture historian Carolyn Marlene has noted. 305 00:37:37,500 --> 00:37:45,440 Mrs. Mrs. Eisenhower was such a fan of the new hue that it was popularly called First Lady Pink. 306 00:37:45,440 --> 00:37:48,980 Quote, also known as Mamy Pink, writes Marling. 307 00:37:48,980 --> 00:37:56,030 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 308 00:37:56,030 --> 00:38:05,180 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. 309 00:38:05,180 --> 00:38:12,500 Her private world was a monotone confection. She favoured pink evening gowns and pink hats. 310 00:38:12,500 --> 00:38:23,060 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, 311 00:38:23,060 --> 00:38:25,670 not specifically to Mamie Eisenhower, 312 00:38:25,670 --> 00:38:34,940 but more generally to the traditional femininity with which Fink with which pink had come to be associated in the post-war era. 313 00:38:34,940 --> 00:38:41,030 Perhaps because she was making an appearance in a defiantly conservative part of the country, 314 00:38:41,030 --> 00:38:50,840 Jackie chose Pink as a way of compensating for the foreign origins and suspiciously feminist associations of her Chanel suit. 315 00:38:50,840 --> 00:38:55,400 Because as I mentioned earlier, life's magazines, life magazines, 316 00:38:55,400 --> 00:39:00,560 frame enlargements from the Zapruder film were initially published in black and White. 317 00:39:00,560 --> 00:39:06,050 The only opportunity the public had for seeing Jackie suit in colour was by viewing the photograph. 318 00:39:06,050 --> 00:39:16,700 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, 319 00:39:16,700 --> 00:39:22,580 that the public had the opportunity to see the mayhem in Dealey Plaza in colour. 320 00:39:22,580 --> 00:39:31,010 This time, life printed eight framed enlargements from Abraham Zapruder as home movie, all coloured in vivid hues. 321 00:39:31,010 --> 00:39:36,140 Now, the pink of Jackie's suit was not only visible, it was conspicuous. 322 00:39:36,140 --> 00:39:44,510 Set off against the navy blue. The presidential Lincoln Continental over the trunk of which she lurched whether to escape the onslaught or, 323 00:39:44,510 --> 00:39:53,090 as she later explained, in a half, crazed effort to recede to retrieve a shard of her husband's skull. 324 00:39:53,090 --> 00:39:59,430 The term shocking pink was not invented for this occasion, but it might well have been. 325 00:39:59,430 --> 00:40:07,350 Oddly, the editors for this October 1964 issue of life chose to follow the grizzly sequence of 326 00:40:07,350 --> 00:40:14,040 colour photos of the assassination with an automobile ad spread out over two pages. 327 00:40:14,040 --> 00:40:21,660 This in itself wouldn't be strange, but the new model car that was being advertised was a Lincoln Continental. 328 00:40:21,660 --> 00:40:27,660 Was the ad copy trumpets as America's most distinguished motor car. 329 00:40:27,660 --> 00:40:33,180 Perhaps it would been more appropriate to say America's most notorious motor car. 330 00:40:33,180 --> 00:40:39,450 Sorry, my slide is not the best quality. Here is the Lincoln in a nineteen. 331 00:40:39,450 --> 00:40:44,460 Here the Lincoln is a 1965 model instead of 1961. 332 00:40:44,460 --> 00:40:50,700 It's grey rather than navy blue and it's a hard top sedan rather than a limousine convertible. 333 00:40:50,700 --> 00:40:57,160 But it's ominously parked beside a grove of trees that stand like sentinels in an eerie mist. 334 00:40:57,160 --> 00:41:06,030 And a sign reading Private Road, nailed to a white stake in the ground resembles a simple wooden cross in a military graveyard. 335 00:41:06,030 --> 00:41:13,530 The slender brunette model poised behind beside the new Lincoln Continental wears a Chanel suit. 336 00:41:13,530 --> 00:41:22,590 Not only that, it's unmistakeably pink. All that's missing is the pillbox hat and the armful of roses. 337 00:41:22,590 --> 00:41:30,660 When I saw it, too, when I sought permission to reproduce this ad in my 2003 book about the Kennedys, 338 00:41:30,660 --> 00:41:35,550 the legal department at Ford Motor Company refused. They have. 339 00:41:35,550 --> 00:41:42,780 They may have been as baffled as I was as to why this ad would have been placed where it was in the magazine. 340 00:41:42,780 --> 00:41:49,950 I suspect that with 40 years hindsight, they felt that their placement had not been in particularly good taste. 341 00:41:49,950 --> 00:41:54,990 So let's return to the love field photograph. Jackie's suit is not the only signifier. 342 00:41:54,990 --> 00:41:56,340 Frenchness in the photograph. 343 00:41:56,340 --> 00:42:05,250 We've been examining the presidential jet that stretches white, blue and silver behind the heads of the beautiful couple. 344 00:42:05,250 --> 00:42:15,750 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, 345 00:42:15,750 --> 00:42:24,780 Raymond Loewy, who was born in France in 1893 and has served as a captain in the French army during World War One, 346 00:42:24,780 --> 00:42:30,310 an immigrant to the United States in 1919 with the equivalent of 40 dollars in his pocket. 347 00:42:30,310 --> 00:42:36,240 Loewy became one of the founders of a new profession called Industrial Design, 348 00:42:36,240 --> 00:42:43,290 citing amongst his influences modernist such as Picasso, Diaghilev, Love and yes, Chanel. 349 00:42:43,290 --> 00:42:50,580 Loewy, along with his staff, design the familiar exterior look of innumerable objects of modern life from toasters, 350 00:42:50,580 --> 00:42:59,220 electric shavers, refrigerators and soda fountain dispensers to automobiles, buses. 351 00:42:59,220 --> 00:43:06,480 Steam locomotives and luxury liners in the internationally recognised corporate logos for Exxon TWC, 352 00:43:06,480 --> 00:43:13,740 a United Airlines, Canada, Dry Nabisco and innumerable other brand name consumer products. 353 00:43:13,740 --> 00:43:20,070 He also designed the exterior markings in interior living quarters of Air Force One. 354 00:43:20,070 --> 00:43:26,460 Here's how that came about. Jack Kennedy was not pleased with the look of the Boeing 787. 355 00:43:26,460 --> 00:43:32,250 He had inherited from President Eisenhower and he wanted to give it a fresh new appearance. 356 00:43:32,250 --> 00:43:36,930 Therefore, he invited Loewy to come to the White House and suggest changes. 357 00:43:36,930 --> 00:43:44,730 One week later, Loewy reappeared with sheets of coloured paper, scissors, razor blades and rubber cement. 358 00:43:44,730 --> 00:43:54,240 Quote, Since since the president's desk in the Oval Office was relatively small, Louis recounts incited by autobiography. 359 00:43:54,240 --> 00:43:59,850 We just sat on the floor cutting out coloured paper shapes and working out various ideas. 360 00:43:59,850 --> 00:44:06,500 JFK Airport enjoyed his plunge into industrial design so much that he told his secretary, 361 00:44:06,500 --> 00:44:11,700 Mrs. Lincoln, that we were not to be disturbed while we were working here. 362 00:44:11,700 --> 00:44:20,560 You see the triumphant result of their collaboration. After the Air Force One redesign was completed, 363 00:44:20,560 --> 00:44:29,380 the president suggested to Loewy that together they develop other projects that would use industrial design to modernise and advertise America, 364 00:44:29,380 --> 00:44:37,710 as Loewy put it. The physical appearance of the country could be aesthetically upgraded, but only with governmental help. 365 00:44:37,710 --> 00:44:45,090 What this may suggest is the Kennedy saw the nation's aesthetic style not as something frivolous and inconsequential, 366 00:44:45,090 --> 00:44:49,780 but as integral to its Cold War initiative, 367 00:44:49,780 --> 00:44:57,900 whereas America had divided constantly with the Soviets as to who had the advantage in terms of conventional and nuclear munitions. 368 00:44:57,900 --> 00:45:03,000 There was no question as to which side was superior in the production of consumer goods. 369 00:45:03,000 --> 00:45:14,130 And Kennedy was keen on widening that gap. Jet passenger travel had been introduced to America only as recently as 1959. 370 00:45:14,130 --> 00:45:19,560 Initially, jet travel was considered glamorous, chic and thrilling four years later. 371 00:45:19,560 --> 00:45:27,210 The public's romance with a passenger jet was still in full bloom when Air Force One touched down at Love Field. 372 00:45:27,210 --> 00:45:34,830 And that, of course, is why it made perfect sense for Kennedy to fly the 30 miles from Fort Worth to Dallas. 373 00:45:34,830 --> 00:45:40,740 Rather than drive, I mean, I can imagine that these cities are 30 miles apart. 374 00:45:40,740 --> 00:45:45,890 They get into Air Force One so they can come down like gods out of the sky. 375 00:45:45,890 --> 00:45:53,130 Now, that's the photo we're seeing now. In doing so, he was staging a grand theatrical entrance. 376 00:45:53,130 --> 00:45:59,310 There was about much more than his own godlike prowess, although it certainly was that, too. 377 00:45:59,310 --> 00:46:04,560 It was about the prowess and modernity of America and its forward looking nature, 378 00:46:04,560 --> 00:46:09,810 its ability to soar powerfully and gracefully into the future for all of that. 379 00:46:09,810 --> 00:46:15,420 The presidential plane also beckoned respectfully toward the past because America was settled 380 00:46:15,420 --> 00:46:20,790 by pioneer families who transported themselves across the continent by means of their own. 381 00:46:20,790 --> 00:46:24,510 Self-sufficient modes of travel or at least. 382 00:46:24,510 --> 00:46:31,680 Or so at least, has been the longstanding myth and rugged individualist ideal that Kennedy's arrival by Air Force One, 383 00:46:31,680 --> 00:46:36,810 his own personal intercontinental jet, amply reinforced. 384 00:46:36,810 --> 00:46:42,090 At the very least, the spectacular airborne arrival promoted the American travel business, 385 00:46:42,090 --> 00:46:48,500 which had been more bundes until very recently and was suddenly growing apace into one of the nation's most popular, 386 00:46:48,500 --> 00:46:51,630 warm, profitable capital industries. 387 00:46:51,630 --> 00:47:00,810 Needless to say, it also gave a boost to the aerospace industry in what Dwight Eisenhower had called the military industrial complex. 388 00:47:00,810 --> 00:47:07,620 Today, especially since September 11, passenger jets no longer emit this aura. 389 00:47:07,620 --> 00:47:13,350 They have become, as never before, a potentially nightmarish vehicles of mass destruction. 390 00:47:13,350 --> 00:47:19,410 Even before 9/11, they were no longer glamorous and chic Chariots of the Gods. 391 00:47:19,410 --> 00:47:26,880 Nor were they proud symbols of the American will to settle the land Conestoga wagons of the sky. 392 00:47:26,880 --> 00:47:33,840 Instead, they had become, for many of us, loud, smelly, overcrowded, environmentally destructive, 393 00:47:33,840 --> 00:47:40,800 annoyingly delayed beasts burden that made flying less an adventure than an ordeal. 394 00:47:40,800 --> 00:47:47,100 Here, though, on a resplendent autumn day in Dallas, the sleek, light blue Boeing jet, 395 00:47:47,100 --> 00:47:50,520 the measures, the distance between the president and first lady, 396 00:47:50,520 --> 00:47:58,800 but also unites them and its expansive reach bespeaks the dreams and promises of that long lost era. 397 00:47:58,800 --> 00:48:05,940 The vivid hues of the red roses, the pink sue, the blue necktie, the blue sky, the white gloves, 398 00:48:05,940 --> 00:48:12,000 the blue and white striped shirt, and the white and blue stripes along the fuselage all come together in a single, 399 00:48:12,000 --> 00:48:20,160 compact geometric unit, a fixed high on the tail of the jet, the U.S. flag, 400 00:48:20,160 --> 00:48:26,820 as if to stamp this glorious day with an affirmation of patriotic pride in America. 401 00:48:26,820 --> 00:48:35,550 As a patriotic icon, the love field photograph might be called American Modern, 402 00:48:35,550 --> 00:48:40,080 in contrast with the famous Grant Wood painting of three decades earlier, 403 00:48:40,080 --> 00:48:48,240 American Gothic Wood's painting portrays a pair of Iowans right rigidly posed in front of 404 00:48:48,240 --> 00:48:55,110 a neatly kept farmhouse marked by a Gothic revival upper story window by the late 1950s. 405 00:48:55,110 --> 00:48:59,490 The painting came to symbolise with tongue in cheek irony or otherwise, 406 00:48:59,490 --> 00:49:06,750 depending on the viewer quintessential plain, upstanding, hard working American folk. 407 00:49:06,750 --> 00:49:10,590 As the art historian Wanda Corn has amply demonstrated, quote, 408 00:49:10,590 --> 00:49:17,940 A virtual torrent of Takeoff's of American Gothic began to appear in the 1960s and, quote, 409 00:49:17,940 --> 00:49:36,380 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. 410 00:49:36,380 --> 00:49:42,250 In a left field photo, or what I'm calling American modern, the Kennedys are no farmers. 411 00:49:42,250 --> 00:49:47,560 Jack has a movie stars mean and is clad in Brooks Brothers, not overalls. 412 00:49:47,560 --> 00:49:55,520 Jackie, dressed in Chanel, looks like a million bucks with her luxuriant hair and radiant smile. 413 00:49:55,520 --> 00:50:01,430 The key object in the foreground, the picture is not an old fashioned pitchfork, but a bouquet of roses, 414 00:50:01,430 --> 00:50:06,710 which despite their earlier noted iconographic suggestion of martyrdom to come. 415 00:50:06,710 --> 00:50:14,540 In this context, called in mind instead a beauty pageant queen or a diva laden with flowers at her curtain call. 416 00:50:14,540 --> 00:50:23,390 The Victorian Gothic farmhouse window in the background of Wood's painting is transformed here into a row of jet portholes. 417 00:50:23,390 --> 00:50:28,310 Here we have a snapshot of American modernity circa 1963. 418 00:50:28,310 --> 00:50:36,860 That is every bit as idealised in its own way as was Grant Wood's Depression era tribute to the American yeoman farmer. 419 00:50:36,860 --> 00:50:44,060 I want to conclude with the last comparison, and that's the love field picture of Jackie at the side of one present United 420 00:50:44,060 --> 00:50:51,950 States with a picture from only three hours later of her at the side of another. 421 00:50:51,950 --> 00:51:02,570 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. 422 00:51:02,570 --> 00:51:13,260 Johnson's advisers realise the symbolic importance to the nation, indeed to the world, of showing the peaceful, if hurried, transition of government. 423 00:51:13,260 --> 00:51:23,430 And it was absolutely crucial that Mrs. Kennedy appear in the picture beside him to signal her approval of due process. 424 00:51:23,430 --> 00:51:31,320 Were she absent from the photo, would have left doubt. Observers minds as the legitimacy of the presidential succession. 425 00:51:31,320 --> 00:51:40,890 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. 426 00:51:40,890 --> 00:51:47,220 But she understood her obligation to appear at the swearing in ceremony, and she complied. 427 00:51:47,220 --> 00:51:55,320 She refused to our. She refused, however, to change out of her bloodstained clothing into the white dress and white jacket that 428 00:51:55,320 --> 00:52:00,990 someone carefully laid out for her on the bed in the presidential suite aboard the plane. 429 00:52:00,990 --> 00:52:09,090 The White House photographer who took the picture recognising that this was the most important photo shoot of his life went out of 430 00:52:09,090 --> 00:52:17,700 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. 431 00:52:17,700 --> 00:52:22,290 It was only as mentioned earlier when she arrived at Air Force at Andrews Air 432 00:52:22,290 --> 00:52:27,780 Force Base that the public had an opportunity to glimpse the bloodstained suit, 433 00:52:27,780 --> 00:52:31,500 albeit in black and white, not colour. 434 00:52:31,500 --> 00:52:41,310 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, 435 00:52:41,310 --> 00:52:51,620 standing cramped and solemn inside the same aeroplane, the before and after quality, the pairing is almost unbearable in its poignancy. 436 00:52:51,620 --> 00:53:01,250 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, 437 00:53:01,250 --> 00:53:08,720 popular culture and material culture signification as some of these have remained late in the photo. 438 00:53:08,720 --> 00:53:13,000 All these years, for example, the beauty and vigour the president's body, 439 00:53:13,000 --> 00:53:21,670 the sophisticated and liberated Frenchness of the first lady's garment and the modernity of Air Force One. 440 00:53:21,670 --> 00:53:26,830 These are meanings I contend the viewers have understood about the love field photo all along, 441 00:53:26,830 --> 00:53:31,490 even if until now no one has bothered to spell them out so explicitly, 442 00:53:31,490 --> 00:53:40,910 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. 443 00:53:40,910 --> 00:53:47,640 Hadnot of historical circumstances, that is, the assassination called them forth. 444 00:53:47,640 --> 00:53:51,890 I've tried to show how the analysis of a single visual artefact, 445 00:53:51,890 --> 00:53:58,830 an on the spot news photo can draw upon a series of disparate but concurrent discourses from 446 00:53:58,830 --> 00:54:05,790 across the cultural spectrum in order to discover how that portrait was embedded in its time. 447 00:54:05,790 --> 00:54:14,820 That this portrait remains so fascinating today has to do with the godlike stature of the Kennedys and our society's collective nostalgia, 448 00:54:14,820 --> 00:54:23,600 justified or not, for the antediluvian period, the so-called Camelot that they represent. 449 00:54:23,600 --> 00:54:33,260 But it also, I believe, has to do with the ongoing relevance of these various crucial themes and issues about bodies, beauties, 450 00:54:33,260 --> 00:54:44,070 bodies, beauty, female independence, class modernity and violent martyrdom that this portrait pulls together into its visual field. 451 00:54:44,070 --> 00:54:49,170 More than half a century has passed since this photograph froze in time, 452 00:54:49,170 --> 00:54:56,040 a moment of triumph and glory before a page was forever turned in the history of America. 453 00:54:56,040 --> 00:55:00,720 While in no way does this picture foretell the tragedy that was to come. 454 00:55:00,720 --> 00:55:09,870 In retrospect, it captures the vividness, vibrancy and surging life energy of a nation that on that bright Dallas morning, 455 00:55:09,870 --> 00:55:23,054 was striding confidently, perhaps too confidently into the future.