J.F.K. The Unseen Photographs

By Text by Hugh Sidey

The unique and intimate alliance of the boyish and eccentric photographer Jacques Lowe, then 26, and the Kennedy clan, the most power-hungry and wealthy family on the national stage, was at first unnoticed. But as it began in the mid-1950s, the Kennedy-Lowe relationship helped define, more than any record of the period, the Jack and Jackie Kennedy mythology. Lowe's Remembering Jack, which appears on the eve of the 40th anniversary of J.F.K.'s death, is in many ways the most complete account of that youthful political insurgency and the magic it left behind.

Lowe was swept into the Kennedy glamour circle before most people knew there was such a thing. He was a half-Jewish kid born in Cologne, Germany, who hid from the Nazis with his mother in World War II and headed for America as soon as the war was over. When he arrived, he worked as an intern for some of the great LIFE photographers and developed a skill with the honest eye of the 35-mm camera.

Bobby Kennedy, as counsel to the Senate subcommittee investigating racketeering in the Teamsters, noticed Lowe's vivid and intimate pictures of the famous hearings and invited the photographer into the tumultuous households of Hickory Hill and Hyannis Port. His pictures of the family of Bobby and Ethel given to Old Joe for his birthday wowed the patriarch, who called Lowe and said he wanted him to do the same for his other son, Jack.

Lowe's first pictures of the Senator and his family, taken when Jack was stiff and rushed by the campaign schedule, disappointed the photographer. But they impressed Jack and Jackie, who summoned Lowe to the family's New York City apartment one evening in the fall of 1958. For hours the three of them crawled over the floor examining the contact sheets, choosing pictures to be used for the campaign and the family Christmas card. Lowe was stunned by his reception and left at 1:30 in the morning, after a convivial drink and the promise of more work ahead.

From then on, he was the only photographer allowed into the Kennedy inner circle, where he captured the tough primary battles, the nomination at the Democratic National Convention, the triumphant national campaign and first months of the White House. Through his camera's quiet and unblinking eye, the nation became aware of Jack Kennedy's profile, his indestructible mat of hair, his smile and the winsome and soft beauty of Jackie.

Lowe, like the Kennedys, was pursued by tragedy. Once Kennedy won the White House, the world pressed in and Lowe felt elbowed aside. When both Jack and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, a distraught Lowe moved to Paris and free-lanced throughout Europe. He died in 2001, after having moved back to New York City and publishing five books that only skimmed the surface of his collection of 40,000 negatives. At his death, Lowe had plans for a complete Kennedy record. But five months after he died, all his Kennedy negatives stored in a vault at 5 World Trade Center were baked to dust by the fires of 9/11. Friends, former colleagues, his children and publishers saw the possibility of a new book in the surviving prints and contact sheets that had remained in his loft. There began two years of an epic publishing struggle first to resurrect the images and then to order them into a narrative. That story shows the tranquil days of a newly married and youthful Senator from Massachusetts at home with a toddler in Georgetown, the moments of total loneliness on airport ramps and in strange motels when few people knew who Jack and Jackie really were, the dejected Kennedy who thought he was losing it all in West Virginia or Oregon, the hoopla of the convention and the moment when Jack asked Lyndon Johnson to take the vice-presidential nomination.

The photographs of the surging crowds in the frayed streets of old industrial cities, the "jumpers and screamers" along the motorcade route, may be the most intensely revealing history of this collection. Kennedy would later recall how the people pressing around him at street level were wildly supportive, while some white-collar workers high up in the buildings above were making obscene gestures at him. He knew he had to win it down below, and Lowe was there.