Jacqueline Kennedy’s pink dress: ‘Let them see what they have done’
“Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.” William Faulkner, “Light in August”
Fair warning: This article is about the blood on Mrs. Kennedy’s pink dress after President Kennedy was assassinated in his Dallas motorcade in 1961.
First lady Jacqueline Kennedy declined to change her bloodstained pink dress even at the hurriedly arranged swearing in on Air Force One of Vice President Lyndon Johnson as the new president hours later.
“Let them see what they have done,” she said using biblically vague pronouns for others to fill in.
Sixty-one years later, after an 18-year-old boy gunned down 19 junior high school students in Uvalde, Texas, in May, the former head of homeland security Jeh Johnson wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post calling for an “Emmett Till moment,” in effect saying, “Let them see what they have done.”
Emmett Till was a Chicago 14-year-old Black boy in 1955 who was “sassy” to a white woman in Money, Miss., and was shot, killed and dumped in the river by the woman’s husband and brother-in-law.
Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till, insisted that his mutilated body be displayed in an open casket.
Jeh Johnson in his op-ed asks parents of the dead to consider releasing photos of the bulletridden bodies of their children at Robb School in Uvalde to shock people’s moral conscience.
But an 11-year-old fourth-grade girl who survived the shootings, Miah Cerrillo, has done something more powerful than the “Emmett Till moment” Jeh Johnson proposes.
She has described for a reporter how she survived the teenage murderer’s machine gun bullets by smearing blood of a deceased classmate on her own body then playing dead.
A decade before Emmett Till’s murder, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower viewed the corpses of thousands of Jewish prisoners in the Dachau concentration camp in April 1945 and he ordered residents of the nearby German towns to line up and file by the bodies of the dead. Eisenhower’s instinct was the same as Mrs. Kennedy’s: “Let them see what they have done.”
Unfortunately, we became a nation of the numb after the Kennedy assassination. Martin Luther King and Sen. Robert Kennedy would be assassinated seven years later. Then four college students would be killed by Ohio National Guardsmen at a Kent State University demonstration in 1970, beginning decades of American school shootings of helpless children: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland and now, in 2022, Uvalde.
Consider the words of William Faulkner in his novel “Light in August.”
“Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.”
Days after President Kennedy was murdered, his widow, no longer in pink but now in black mourning dress and veil, bravely held the hands of her two children — 5-year-old Caroline and 3-year-old John Jr. — as they walked in the president’s funeral procession.
Mrs. Kennedy’s dignity and courage erase her image immediately after the shooting when, still in white gloves and pink pillbox hat and pink dress, she crawled on hands and knees out onto the trunk of the open convertible limousine speeding to Parkland Hospital.
She was trying frantically to retrieve part of president Kennedy’s skull which the assassin’s bullets had shattered and spewed onto the trunk of the topless limousine.
Mrs. Kennedy was 33 at the time, and hailed for her glamorous charm and elegant style. Murder had reduced her to a frantic creature on all fours reaching in desperation to retrieve the shattered head of her loved one to try to hold him together.
“Let them see what they have done” deals only with the visible damage of violence. Mrs. Kennedy knew that. And so did Faulkner. The other part — the pain part — no one ever sees.