Behind the Lens

The making of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy

- By Thomas Mallon

Less than a decade before she became the world’s most photographed woman, Jacqueline Bouvier regularly worked behind a camera for the Washington Times-Herald, soliciting opinions from the capital’s ordinary residents and taking their pictures. “Camera Girl,” Carl Sferrazza Anthony’s new biography of the young Jackie, illuminates this portion of her life; the chapter titled “Inauguration” does not take a reader to the snowy, ask-not-what, pillbox-hatted noontime of January 20, 1961, but to the day, eight years earlier, when Dwight Eisenhower assumed the Presidency. That afternoon, Jxackie was on assignment for the paper, writing a feature about the people who had turned out for Ike’s parade. That night, she attended an inaugural ball as a guest of the new Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy.

The real business of her evening was conducted during a cocktail party at Kennedy’s house. The senator’s friend Lem Billings told Miss Bouvier that anyone who married Jack would “have to be very understanding” about how he “had been around an awful lot” and “known many, many girls.” However delicately put, the message was as clear as a declaration that the United States intended to remain in Berlin: Kennedy’s bride should expect him to continue cultivating and maintaining a vast array of female alliances.