Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

my work on children’s issues and to visit P.S. 115, a local public school, to promote voluntary tutoring. But I was also making a private stop to have lunch with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at her beautiful apartment on Fifth Avenue.

I had met Jackie a few times before and had visited her once during the 1992 campaign.

She had been an early supporter of Bill’s, contributing financially and attending the convention. She was a transcendent public figure, someone I had admired and respected for as long as I could remember. Not only had Jackie Kennedy been a superb First Lady, bringing style, grace and intelligence to the White House, she also had done an extraordinary job raising her children. Months before, I had asked her advice about bringing up children in the public eye, and on this visit I hoped to hear more from her about how she dealt with the established culture at the White House. It had been thirty years since she lived there, but I sensed that not much had changed.

The Secret Service dropped me off at her apartment shortly before noon, and Jackie greeted me at the elevator door on the fifteenth floor. She was impeccably dressed, wearing silk pants in one of her signature colors―a combination of beige and gray―and a matching blouse with subtle peach stripes. At sixty-three, she remained as beautiful and dignified as she was when she first entered the national consciousness as the glamorous thirty-one-yearold wife of the second-youngest President in American history.

After President Kennedy’s death in 1963, she had receded from public view for many years, married Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis and later launched a successful career as a literary editor for one of the finest publishing houses in New York City. The first thing I noticed about her apartment was that it was overflowing with books. They were stacked everywhere―on and under tables, beside couches and chairs. Books were piled so high in her study that she could rest her plate on them if she was eating at her desk. She is the only person I’ve met who literally decorated her apartment with booksand pulled it off. I’ve tried to duplicate the effect I saw in Jackie’s apartment and her Martha’s Vineyard home with all the books Bill and I own. Predictably, ours never look quite as elegant.

We sat at a table in the corner of her living room overlooking Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and continued the conversation we had begun at our lunch the summer before. Jackie gave me invaluable advice about how to deal with my loss of privacy, and she told me what she had done to protect her children, Caroline and John.

Providing Chelsea with a normal life would be one of the biggest challenges Bill and I faced, she told me. We had to allow Chelsea to grow up and even make mistakes, while shielding her from the constant scrutiny she would endure as the daughter of a President.

Her own children, she said, had been lucky to have so many cousins, natural playmates and friends, many of them with fathers in the public eye, too. She felt it would be much harder for an only child.

“You’ve got to protect Chelsea at all costs,” Jackie said. “Surround her with friends and family, but don’t spoil her. Don’t let her think she’s someone special or entitled.

Keep the press away from her if you can, and don’t let anyone use her.”

Already, Bill and I had taken a measure of the public’s interest in Chelsea and the national fascination with a child growing up in the White House. Our decision about where to send Chelsea to school had inspired passionate debate inside and outside the Beltway, largely because of its symbolic significance. I understood the disappointment felt by advocates of public education when we chose Sidwell Friends, a private Quaker school, particularly after Chelsea had attended public schools in Arkansas. But the decision for Bill and me rested on one fact: Private schools were private property, hence off-limits to the news media. Public schools were not. The last thing we wanted was television cameras and news reporters following our daughter throughout the school day, as they had when President Carter’s daughter, Amy, attended public school.

So far, our instincts and Jackie’s prescriptions had served Chelsea well. She was adjusting to her new school as comfortably as could be expected, although she missed her friends from Arkansas. She was settling into her two rooms on the second floor. They had been Caroline’s and John’s and then Lynda and Luci Johnson’s, so Jackie knew exactly where they were. One was now Chelsea’s bedroom with twin beds so she could have sleepovers, and the other was a den where she could do homework, watch television, listen to music and entertain friends.

I told Jackie how grateful I was that she had created a dining room upstairs and that we were converting the butler’s pantry into a small kitchen where we could eat our family meals in a more relaxed and in formal atmosphere. One night, I sparked a culinary crisis.

Chelsea was not feeling well, and I wanted to make her soft scrambled eggs and applesauce, the comfort foods I had always provided in our pre-White House years. I looked in the small kitchen for utensils and then called downstairs and asked the chef if he could provide me with what I needed. He and the kitchen staff were completely undone at the thought of a First Lady wielding a frying pan with no supervision! They even called my staff to ask if I was cooking myself because I was unhappy with their food.

This incident reminded me of Eleanor Roosevelt’s similar experiences of adjusting to living in the White House. “Unconsciously, I did many things that shocked the ushers,” she wrote in her autobiography. “My first act was to insist on running the elevator myself without waiting for one of the doormen to run it for me. That just wasn’t done by