In Mrs. Kennedy's pink suit, an indelible memory of public grief

WASHINGTON — Not long after that terrible day in Dallas — no one knows exactly when — a brown paper box arrived at the National Archives.

The return address was on O Street, the Georgetown home of Jacqueline Kennedy's mother. Packed inside was the pink Chanel suit first glimpsed Nov. 22, 1963, when the first lady joined JFK at a Fort Worth breakfast, and which, covered in his blood, she still wore the next morning to escort the slain president's casket into the White House.

There in the Archives, the suit remains. Stored in a custom-designed corrugated board box, it rests on a gray steel shelf in a secured area of a suburban warehouse. It has never been cleaned. The wool skirt and jacket lie flat, with a suggestion of human form created by acid-free tissue paper folded inside the sleeves.

Only recently was a deed of gift obtained from the Kennedys' sole surviving child, Caroline. But one hundred years will have to pass before the suit can again come before the American public. This condition is consistent with Mrs. Kennedy's determination to balance her obligations to history with her family's privacy. Archivists' interests, moreover, are not only the past and present, but the future.

"Once it can be displayed it will really bring the '60s to the present — whatever that present is," said Steven Tilley, who oversees the Archives' JFK Assassination Records Collection.

The Archives also has JFK's jacket, shirt and tie — exhibits in the Warren Commission investigation of the shooting. But aside from the Brooks Brothers overcoat Abraham Lincoln wore to Ford's Theater on April 14, 1865 — the lining embroidered with an American eagle and the words "One Country/One Destiny" — perhaps no clothing in American history carries the iconic power of that pink suit.

Even out of sight, it is an indelible image in public memory. The first lady made sure of that. She purposefully bore the horror and brutality of the president's murder for a shattered nation to see. Had she changed or shielded her appearance, Americans' experience of the assassination would have been fundamentally altered.

"Everybody remembers the pink suit," Tilley said.

Mrs. Kennedy brought nothing new to Texas, her press secretary, Pamela Turnure, recalled in Carl Sferrazza Anthony's book, "As We Remember Her." She took two suits, a cocktail dress, and a day dress already in her wardrobe. Her clothes stole the show on foreign trips; on a domestic political trip, Turnure said, she didn't want to deflect attention from the president.

The morning of Nov. 22, a crowd gathered at the president's Fort Worth hotel.