Mean girl

Paula Marantz Cohen explains that she was never really a fan of Jacqueline Kennedy, and certainly doesn't think she'll become one:

Before reading the book and listening to the tapes, most of my impressions of Jackie Kennedy came from having seen that much-lauded televised White House tour. Even as a child — I was 9 at the time — I was confused by Jackie Kennedy. Why was a grown woman speaking like a 4-year-old? What was going on beneath the baby doll surface? In her forward, Caroline Kennedy says that she wanted to publish these interviews so that people would have the chance to see her mother in the round: “They may have a sense of her style and her dignified persona, but they don’t always appreciate her intellectual curiosity, her sense of the ridiculous, her sense of adventure, or her unerring sense of what was right.”

The qualities Caroline mentions were not evident to me in reading the book or listening to the CDs. I read the transcripts first, and what struck me most was the sense of complacency that percolated through the pages. How does one distinguish dignity from hauteur? Is it a fine line, a matter of perspective, a case of one’s own position in the social hierarchy? I felt I was in the presence of a woman who could not see beyond the world in which she was born and raised. And yet there was also something extraordinary middle-class — the French would say bourgeois — about her views. Almost all her comments were personal, something she frankly admitted and seemed proud of.