Within just a week of the tragic assassination in Dallas, the widowed Jackie Kennedy summoned the presidential chronicler Theodore H. White to a midnight conference at the family compound on the stormy Cape Cod shore. For four hours her whispery voice mesmerised him as she set out her vision of the Kennedy White House as Camelot, and, against his better judgment, White went along with it. Within years, as Jackie’s own image as Camelot’s widowed queen was defaced by her ‘gold-digging marriage’ to Onassis, and more and more scandal from the Kennedy years bubbled to the surface, the image of Camelot became a target for Kennedy critics, notably Seymour Hersh in The Dark Side of Camelot.
As always, the revisionists went too far; their muckraking obscured the real achievements of Jack and Jackie in making the White House the glamorous focus of the international social and political world. Sally Bedell Smith is an accomplished, supremely well-connected Beltway biographer and she has used her reputation and her connections to redress the balance.
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