Once, In Camelot

By HUGH SIDEY Washington contributing editor Hugh Sidey covered the Kennedy White House.

SHE WAS A BUTTERFLY CAUGHT IN THE POLITICAL TORRENTS OF WASHINGTON, detesting many of its coarse rituals but fascinated by its drama.

Jackie Kennedy went to Milwaukee when Senator John Kennedy announced for the crucial Wisconsin primary in the winter of 1960, and the temperature was near zero. She sat in a jammed and tacky hotel hall, stiff-backed in a short- sleeved designer sheath with delicate leather gloves up to her elbows, eyes wide and smile frozen. A New York and Washington thoroughbred in the land of < parkas and beer. She never yielded.

The night before Jack flew to Los Angeles for the Democratic Convention, where he would be nominated for President, the two retreated into a stark hotel suite. After months of delegate hunting, the real game was afoot, and she knew that ahead lay surging crowds and screaming groupies. The moment was almost desolate, the beginning of something strange and maybe not nice. It was in Jackie's circled eyes. She could not raise room service. She found Cokes, remade the bed while her husband talked Vice Presidents with a friend.

She was tortured in those first days in the White House. Just when the idea of making the White House a living stage of American history and beauty seized her is hard to say, but within days she had called friends to try out her idea, to hustle funds to restore the old mansion as it had been in the days of Jefferson and Madison. There was Jackie prowling government warehouses for old furniture and diving into the White House basement, smudging herself with dust but scrounging up desks, tables and chairs.

The White House began to take on its historic designs; the place shone with new paint and gardens. She was ecstatic to find the original woodcuts for wallpaper ordered in the early days. New panels were printed. She relished the great view down toward the Mall from the Truman balcony. "This is what it is all about," she told a visitor, sweeping her arm from the Washington Monument to the Jefferson Memorial. "This is what these men fight so hard for."

Let the skeptics snort about Camelot, but there was something during the Kennedy years that was magic. Jackie was more of that than anyone admitted for a long while. She smoothed the rough Kennedy edges. As much as anyone in those heady days, she grasped the epic dimensions of the adventure. No small portion of the glamour of the Kennedy stewardship that lives on today came from her standards of public propriety and majesty.

She could be naughty, perhaps acting out of knowledge of her husband's indiscretions. Before the brutal end of the New Frontier came, there was the feeling that the two had grown closer together because of the inexorable public pressure that surrounded the White House. But in the summer of 1963 she went off with her sister Lee Radziwill for a European cruise, stayed twice as long as scheduled as stories of nocturnal sightings filtered back. Jack was sore. That was one of the reasons she went to Dallas in November on that . doomed political junket, a gesture of contrition for the summer sins.

She came out of Parkland Memorial Hospital after the most terrifying public tragedy in history, pink suit splattered with her husband's blood, her hand resting on the garish coffin where his shattered body lay. She walked that way down an ugly loading ramp with her back straight and her chin up, carrying immeasurable grief. She never yielded.