Mourning John F. Kennedy

This exhibit explores the power of black cloth as part of public and private displays of bereavement at the White House. Between 1841 and 1963, eight American presidents died while in office. By examining the fabrics used to decorate the White House for their funerals, as well as the mourning fashions of their spouses, one can track displays of grief through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and observe the mourning traditions that were either preserved or discarded to meet the needs of a growing, modernizing nation.

John F. Kennedy
Died on November 22, 1963

First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy understood the power of visual communication and arranged for President Kennedy’s funeral to be based on Abraham Lincoln’s, to indelibly tie her husband’s legacy to that of one of the greatest American presidents. The highly ceremonial State Funeral returned, including the practice of using black fabric to decorate the People’s House, to symbolically convey the extent of the nation’s bereavement.

As first lady, Mrs. Kennedy was compelled to choose a designer in the United States to make her White House wardrobe, although she preferred French fashion houses. She chose Oleg Cassini, an American dressmaker, who helped create her signature simple and elegant “American-International” style. Mr. Cassini and Mrs. Kennedy insisted that he alone dressed the first lady during the White House years; Mrs. Kennedy’s social secretary, Letitia Baldridge, even sent a stern letter to the editor of the fashion trade publication Women’s Wear Daily, asking he desist in publishing rumors that the French designer Hubert de Givenchy was making some of Mrs. Kennedy’s clothes: “For the next four years Mrs. Kennedy’s clothes will be made by Oleg Cassini. They will be designed in America. She will buy what is necessary without extravagance…” Mr. Cassini would later insinuate that he was the designer of the black suit that eventually became Mrs. Kennedy’s mourning clothes, but it is more likely that Mrs. Kennedy bought the suit prior to her White House years, and the ensemble is almost certainly Givenchy’s design, as most sources claim.

Gallery

North Door Draped for President Kennedy's Death

Date: November 1963
Creator: Abbie Rowe
Medium: Photograph

Although the columns of the North Portico were not wrapped with black crape as they were during the mourning periods for nineteenth-century presidents, the decorating of the North Door with black cloth after President Kennedy’s death recalled those solemn traditions. The cloth is possibly black cambric—a lightweight, closely-woven cotton or linen fabric—that White House Upholsterer Larry Arata already had in stock.

National Archives and Records Administration

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President Kennedy Lying in State

Date: November 23, 1963
Creator: Bates Littlehales
Medium: Photograph

The draping of the East Room and parlors in mourning was reinstated. Mirrors, mantels, chandeliers, and doorways all featured swaths of black fabric. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy requested staff use the 1868 Harper’s Weekly woodcut engraving that depicted the East Room during President Lincoln’s funeral as a guide.

White House Historical Association

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First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and Family at John F. Kennedy’s Funeral

Date: November 24, 1963
Creator: Unknown
Medium: Film

First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy stands on the steps of St. Matthew’s Cathedral with her two young children by her side, as John F. Kennedy, Jr. salutes his father’s casket. She wears a long veil over her face. The choice of a veil was unusual; by 1963, mourning veils had fallen completely out of fashion. Like the mourning drapery she reinstated at the White House, she may have called upon the power of tradition—with the veil that tied her to the seven veiled widows of the nineteenth and early twentieth century that came before her.

Shutterstock

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