前第一夫人賈桂琳1963年11月的便條首公開
他看到『11月22日』,以及『粉紅色香奈兒套裝』他回憶,「我只是胃的深處,有翻攪的感覺。」那是賈桂琳的筆跡,便條紙是她要去達拉斯所列的準備清單,1963年11月那次致命之旅。
威爾先生將這便條紙,正式交給美國政府。之後被存放在甘迺迪圖書館,低調不公開,不見天日。不過,這卻掀起了不同保管單位的小聲論戰。為什麼會引發拔河賽呢?還不是在爭主導權,擁有權,誰才是這片紙的主人。這個爭論點讓人有點啞然失笑。
物件的主人早已去世多年,她在世時或許有很深的創傷陰影,但去世後,當時悲傷的情緒也隨她而逝。也無關隱私權,因為她不在這世上了。留下的東西只是讓人目睹,感受當時事件的前後氛圍,或更實際一點,可給研究人員參考。(不過媒體早已拍照上傳,大家都看到了。沒有人有權利能主張什麼,或許她的女兒可以。)
甘迺迪在德州達拉斯被暗殺,在我出生的前幾天,這讓我對這個事件有點小小的連結感。1963年11月的地球,一定有些很特別的能量,很可能是一種初來乍到的光明能量,想劃破黑暗 (但還是被傷到)。
看著便條紙所寫,會有種淡淡的遺憾。賈桂琳當時忙於達拉斯之旅,寫下日期與衣物時,不知道即將迫近的危險。紀錄片還有事發當時,她趴向前要擦甘迺迪冒出的血,致使身上粉紅色的套裝也染上血漬的畫面。那件套裝也在紀念館的保存下,必須到2103年才能公開出來。(對〜沒想到保存文物,還有這種嚴謹的時間限制)。總之,甘迺迪家族是現代史上的一頁傳奇,讀來總讓人有種感覺。
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原來的內文
很多人不小心會從皮箱裡,找到一小塊有歷史的至寶。威爾先生就是這樣,發生在2015年的夏天。
威爾先生把它們拿出來,翻了其中一張,有點發冷,停下來。
我看到『11月22日』,以及『粉紅色水藍香奈兒套裝』他回憶,「我只是胃的深處,有翻攪的感覺。」
那是賈桂琳的筆跡,便條紙是她為了要去達拉斯所列的清單,1963年11月那次致命的旅程。
威爾先生在2016年3月把這便條紙,正式交給美國政府。從那以後被存放於波士頓的約翰·甘迺迪總統圖書館與博物館:低調不被注意,未公開,甚至可能是禁區。
捐出去以後,一位檔案員兩次告訴威爾先生,甘迺迪夫人的便條紙不能公開。因為她女兒賈洛琳甘迺迪不同意。那並未在他捐出去的合約寫明,讓他很不舒服。
「我感到被竹棍打到」在他把送出去的檔案掃描給紐約時報。
但被時代雜誌問到這問題時,圖書館的主管說,大家誤會了該名檔案人員,甘迺迪夫人的清單會盡快公開。
有關這份捐出去的便條檔案,會造成這些困擾,反映出誰才擁有這幾張便條紙的複雜性。
特別是在甘迺迪家族圖書館,自從2015年就群龍無首,在他的主管與圖書館基金會的董事鬧翻去職後。在這之前,研究人員要借用這裡的檔案,也是受夠當中的複雜性與一大堆限制。
比起任何總統的圖書館,甘迺迪圖書館數十年來就非常嚴格有選擇性,誰可以進來看到甚麼。『總統如何重寫歷史』的作者安東尼說
被暗殺當時,她所穿留有血漬的粉紅色套裝,需要到2103年才能公開。
「這東西是某人給的,他剛好有這東西」她說。可能會引發討論,「這家族有這東西嗎」她說。指的是賈桂琳的家族,「或我們有」
不管文件來源如何,將永久保留在圖書館。Leaming女士所寫前第一夫人的傳記,指出賈桂琳在甘迺迪被暗殺後有創傷後症候群,她了解任何有關這種紀錄的保護性,無傷,但帶有重要意味。
「你必須有人性,又有同情心」她說,暗殺是她想忘記的事,但圖書館卻又是保留記憶的所在。
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Many people fantasize about a valuable piece of history emerging unexpectedly out of a trunk. For Gil Wells, something like that happened in the summer of 2015.
His 79-year-old godmother, who had dementia, had been bringing photographs and papers out of her room to puzzle over since she moved into his home outside Richmond, Va., several months earlier. One day, she emerged with a plastic sleeve holding two small sheets of White House notepaper.
Mr. Wells pulled them out, turned one sheet over and stopped cold.
“I saw ‘Nov. 22’ and ‘pink and navy Chanel suit,’” he recalled. “I just got the sickest feeling in my stomach.”
The handwriting was Jacqueline Kennedy’s, and the notes were a list she had drawn up before the fateful trip to Dallas in November 1963. Prepared for her personal assistant, Providencia Paredes, the document detailed Mrs. Kennedy’s hour-by-hour schedule alongside the clothes and accessories to be packed, including the now-iconic pink ensemble she was wearing when her husband was assassinated as well as carefully planned outfits for parts of the trip that never happened.
Mr. Wells formally deeded the notes to the United States government in March 2016. Since then, they have been housed at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston: unnoticed, unpublicized — and perhaps off-limits.
After the donation, an archivist twice told Mr. Wells that Mrs. Kennedy’s notes could not be made public since her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, had not given permission. It was a condition that went unmentioned in his donor agreement, and one that didn’t sit well with him.
“I feel like I was bamboozled,” he said in January, after sending a scan of the packing list to The New York Times.
But after an inquiry from The Times, library officials said that the archivist had been mistaken, and that Mrs. Kennedy’s list was “slated to be opened ASAP.”
The confusion around the document reflects complicated questions of ownership and archival ethics, not to mention the tangled politics of presidential libraries, government-run institutions where the mission of preserving and presenting impartial history can collide with the legacy-burnishing agendas of family members, political loyalists and the private foundations that help pay the bills.
Those politics are especially complicated at the Kennedy library, which has been without a permanent director since 2015, when its leader, a federal employee, resigned after clashes with the chief executive of the library’s foundation. Even before that, researchers have long contended with a notoriously complex and often opaque thicket of access restrictions.
“More than any other presidential library, the Kennedy library has been known for decades to be restrictive and selective when it comes to who gets to see what,” said Anthony Clark, the author of “The Last Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity and Enshrine Their Legacies.”
The Kennedy library, which is owned and operated by the National Archives and Records Administration, opened in 1979 in a soaring, I.M. Pei-designed structure overlooking Boston Harbor. Downstairs, in the museum galleries, visitors wind their way through relic-filled exhibits telling the story of the president’s life from childhood to the assassination — an event commemorated in a small, almost chapel-like gallery containing only a single line of text: the date “November 22, 1963.”
Upstairs, the research library houses some 400 collections totaling about 25 million pages of documents, including the papers of President Kennedy and various members of the Kennedy family.
Mrs. Kennedy’s personal papers, donated to the library by her and her heirs between 1979 and 2010, have been among the most closely protected, in keeping with her famous desire for privacy, of which Caroline Kennedy is known to be a fierce guardian. In 2014, an auction of Mrs. Kennedy’s deeply personal letters to an Irish priest was halted, and the letters were returned to the family after lawyers for her daughter objected.
In 2012, the library began opening papers relating to her official duties as first lady, but her personal letters remain closed, under the terms of a 2009 deed that gives Caroline Kennedy broad discretion in determining what is released. (Ms. Kennedy declined to comment for this story.)
Meanwhile, the tapes of Jacqueline Kennedy’s interviews for William Manchester’s book “The Death of the President,” the publication of which she sued to halt, are sealed until 2067. And the blood-spattered pink suit itself, kept in a vault near Washington, D.C., is to be kept from view at least until 2103.
“We know that Jackie didn’t want anything to be seen,” said Barbara Leaming, who has written biographies of both President Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy. “But with the assassination, you’re dealing with just about the most highly charged material in the library.”
That’s a stark contrast to the auction market, where buyers snap up anything relating to the former first lady, from her letters to her underwear.
John Reznikoff, a Connecticut-based dealer who has sold many Kennedy-related items, including the white Lincoln in which the Kennedys rode in Fort Worth before flying to Dallas, estimated that the notes Mr. Wells donated might have fetched as much as $75,000.
“It’s a really sexy document,” he said. “It has everything: her poise, her planning, her status as a fashion icon and, of course, the dark side.”
Mr. Wells, 54, who died unexpectedly in May following a medical procedure, was no stranger to Mrs. Kennedy’s mystique or its market value. When this reporter visited him at home, he pointed out a plate with an American eagle motif hanging on the wall — one of two he claimed to have bought at the blockbuster estate sale Mrs. Kennedy’s children held at Sotheby’s after her death in 1994.
Mr. Wells, who worked as a caterer, and his sister sat at a table with their godmother, Shirley Ann Conover, and a housemate, mixing their own family stories with knowing gossip about various Kennedys. After the document surfaced, they recalled, they had tucked it inside a book about the former first lady for safekeeping.
“I’ve always been fascinated by her,” Mr. Wells said.
Just how Ms. Conover, a former employee of the Department of Veterans Affairs, came to have the notes is unclear. During the visit, she offered fragmented memories of her childhood in an orphanage in Washington and of her old apartment near the Russian Embassy, where she lived until moving in with Mr. Wells.
Mr. Wells said that Ms. Conover might have known Ms. Paredes, who died in 2015, possibly through a cousin. Ms. Conover said she wasn’t sure. But asked if she agreed with the decision to donate the document to the Kennedy library, rather than try to sell it, she was emphatic.
She didn’t want money, she said. “It’s not ours,” she added. “It’s theirs.”
But even after the donation, Mr. Wells continued to stew about the notes, which he said he had wanted the library to put on display.
Earlier this year, after he inquired for a second time about their status, Stephen Plotkin, a longtime archivist at the library, reiterated that the document could not be made available, even to researchers, without permission from Caroline Kennedy, who controls her mother’s copyrights.“Although we have sought this permission conscientiously, we have received no reply from her,” Mr. Plotkin said. “We will continue to ask that the notes be open to research, but beyond that there is not anything more we can do.”
Officials at several other archives said they found the invocation of copyright odd. “Intellectual property rights restrict how items can be used, not whether scholars can look at them,” said Bob Clark, the former acting director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, N.Y.
But Kennedy library officials now say Mr. Plotkin misspoke. When The Times emailed him about the document, a response came instead from Rachel Day Flor, deputy director of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the private nonprofit organization that raises money for the library. The document had never been closed, she said, but was simply part of a large backlog of miscellaneous donations that is currently being cataloged.The library’s director of archives, Karen Abramson, speaking in a conference call joined by Ms. Flor, reiterated that the notes would be opened. Caroline Kennedy had been informed about the notes before they were donated, Ms. Abramson added by email, “but has never expressed any concerns” about opening them for research.
To add to the tangle, Ms. Abramson also suggested that the document might have been improperly removed from the White House by Ms. Paredes, and therefore could be seen as having remained the property of Mrs. Kennedy, rather than being Mr. Wells’s to give.
“This item was given to us by someone who happened to have it in their possession,” she said. “There could be some debate about whether the family owned this,” she said, referring to Mrs. Kennedy’s family, “or we did.”
Whatever the provenance of the document, it will be kept in perpetuity at the library. Ms. Leaming, whose recent biography of the former first lady argued that she developed post-traumatic stress disorder after the assassination, said she understood any protectiveness around such an artifact — innocuous, yet charged with grim significance.
“You have to be a human being and have sympathy,” she said. “The assassination is something she wanted to forget. But libraries are about memory.”
Susan Beachy contributed research.
Correction: July 2, 2018
An earlier version of this article misstated where the Kennedys rode in a white Lincoln during their November 1963 trip to Texas. It was in Fort Worth, not Dallas.
Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. @jennyschuessler
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