Miscellaneous Articles about First Ladies
Miscellaneous Articles
Florence Harding voice recording
During the years of my research on Florence Harding I found reference to her making a voice recording in private with Evalyn McLean - for fun, apparently on a "talkie" device given to Mrs. McLean by her friend D.W. Griffith. However, there was also a gramaphone recording device in the Harding's home in Washington when he was a U.S. Senator and read one of his campaign speeches to be sold in 1920, during the campaign. In all my my adventures and explorations for material on her, I never once came across it. I quite thoroughly went through every box and item in the McLean papers, etc. Nothing.
A few years ago, someone sent me a recording was made of a woman who seemed to "sound" regionally like Mrs. Harding on a record that was made of historical sound recordings during the 1976 Bicentennial. The suggestion was that the President had participated in some ceremony on the South Lawn in which he ignited a rocket and Mrs. Harding was recalling the event. The brief voice recording begins, "My husband placed the rocket on the lawn, lit it and it took off...."
After some extensive research, all indications were that it was, in fact, Esthert Goddard, wife of fuel-rocket inventor Robert Goddard and she was speaking of his first launching successful rocket launcing experiment which he conducted on the lawn of his aunt in Massachusetts - in 1926. Mrs. Gooddard died at age 95 in 1998.
Jackie Kennedy Interview/Overview
1.) What impact did Jackie have on her husband while he was in office?
She broadened his perspective on the performing arts and fine arts, encouraged him to take a more active role as a father, and often offfered her opinion on the personalities of political and world leaders.
2.) Was Jackie a role model to women around the U.S.? Why?
Yes, as a mother and a wife and also an intelligent woman who spoke several languages, read, wrote and spoke with perfect grammar, travelled, took interest in other cultures - and certainly with her clothes.
3.) Did Jackie change the future first ladies by the things that they should be responsible for?
She was so popular that those which came after her were always being compared to her and so many of those First Ladies staffs tried to get attention with the press for their clothes, their projects and foreign travel - also her White House historic restoration and her work in historic preservation set a pattern for them to also adopt a signature social cause or issue that was intended to help a large constituency of people, be they women with breast cancer, environmentalists and those interested in nature, those with mental health issues, etc.
4.) Did Jackie have an impact on women trying to become less traditional?
Yes and no. No during the early time as First Lady when she defined herself pretty much as wife, mother and hostess but more so as she began to travel, discuss issues like nuclear armament reduction, etc. And definitely yes after the White House - almost too much so because her marriage to Onassis seemed so shocking to traditionalists because of their difference in age and national citizenship.
5.) Did John treat Jackie as an equal to him while he was in office?
Hard to know the full truth on that since she really kept that aspect of their life as private as she could; he did not initially think of women as posessing the same intellectual capacity because many women did not have the level of professional experience that men did - it was very segregated in that women were still being socialized along the accepted rule that their place was in the home and with children, not in politics; all that said, the more Jackie expressed her opinion, made observations about political situations, and shared what she witnessed in foreign countries without him, the more he grew to respect her intellect.
6.) Was the way Jackie was raised bring out her independent and confident women ways?
I think it was in part just the way she was, no matter how she was raised - she was highly, highly individualistic and even though she seemed to follow all the rules of polite society and etiquette on the surface, beneath the surface she admitted to having a bit of a subversise thinking and did not want to follow the rules - that really outraged and horrified her mother who was very old-school.
7.) Did Jackie's fashion impact the women of the U.S.?
Very much so - hat, dresses, sunglasses, gloves, were all copied and were more youthful and even those who were older adapted the "Jackie Look" for themselves.
8.) Did Jackie have a positive impact on the U.S?
This is a tough one to answer - I would say definitely yes at the time she was in the White House and now she is becoming such an icon that she is almost mythological like Napoleon or Cleopatra - the one-named legend of Jackie.
9.) Has Jackie impacted your life or the way you live?
Besides my two-volume history on the First Ladies, I also wrote a book on the Kennedy family in the White House and also a biography of her - from all that research and writing, I think that I worked on expanding the range of historical subjects beyond just American history as a result of the way she thought; also my understanding of mythology and the way public figures all play a specific role in the imagination of the general public as part of a large and shared narrative story; also, perhaps my efforts to always improve the quality of my writing.
10.) How did Jackie impact society?
Her husband's funeral and the way she conducted herself was considered to be as Charles De Gaulle put it, "gave the word an example of how to mourn" - she created a system to forever keep the White House preserved, she also gave respect to the American arts and encouaged the idea that the US was equal in many areas of the arts, and finally her work on historic preservation in Washington was copied in many other large cities and small towns.