Jackie Kennedy

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy brought to the White House a combination of cultural sophistication, personal style, and political intelligence that transformed the public image of the presidency in ways that have never quite faded. The daughter of a New York stockbroker, educated at Vassar, the Sorbonne, and George Washington University, she married Senator John Kennedy in 1953 at 24 and arrived at the White House in January 1961 as the youngest First Lady in American history. Her restoration of the White House — a comprehensive project to fill it with authentic American historical furniture and artwork — was the most ambitious renovation the building had seen in a century, and her televised tour of the completed rooms in February 1962 drew 80 million viewers.

On November 22, 1963, she was sitting beside her husband in the presidential motorcade through Dallas when he was shot. She cradled his head in her lap in the car to Parkland Memorial Hospital. She stood beside Lyndon Johnson on Air Force One in her blood-stained pink suit as he took the oath of office, refusing to change because she wanted the world to see what had been done. The state funeral she organized over the following three days — modeled on Abraham Lincoln's funeral, with the horse-drawn caisson, the riderless horse, and the eternal flame she requested at the grave in Arlington — was watched by an estimated 100 million Americans and produced some of the most indelible images in the history of American television.

She remarried in 1968 — Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, a match that shocked Americans who had placed her on something close to a pedestal — and spent her later years as a book editor at Viking and then Doubleday in New York, working until months before her death from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in May 1994. The image that endured was not the glamorous one from the Kennedy years but the one from November 22 — composed, dry-eyed, still wearing the suit. She had shown the country how to grieve with dignity, and it never entirely forgot.