An Evening with Jackie Kennedy: Being an Essay in Three Acts
Mailer's essay on Jacqueline Kennedy occasioned by her 14 February 1962 televised tour of the White House — 'A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy,' CBS — recast by Mailer as an essay in three dramatic acts. Together with 'Superman Comes to the Supermarket' (60.9), Mailer's two essays anchor the Kennedy years for the New Journalism period. Retitled 'The Existential Heroine: An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, or, The Wild West of the East' for collection in The Presidential Papers (63.37) and reprinted (without subtitle) in The Idol and the Octopus (68.11), and partially in 98.7, 13.1, 14.4.
“An Evening with Jackie Kennedy: Being an Essay in Three Acts.” Esquire, July 1962, 56–61. Essay.
Mailer’s essay on Jacqueline Kennedy is occasioned by her televised tour of the White House on 14 February 1962 — A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, broadcast simultaneously on CBS and NBC, watched by an audience of some eighty million — and recast by Mailer as an “Essay in Three Acts” structured as a dramatic monologue with stage directions. Together with “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” (60.9) on the September 1960 Hyannis Port visit with JFK, this is the second of Mailer’s two Kennedy-cycle Esquire essays — the diptych that anchors the Kennedy years for what will come to be called the New Journalism.
The essay is at once a portrait of the First Lady, an act of half-mocking dramaturgy (“ACT I: The Stage,” “ACT II: The Tour,” “ACT III: The Mind”), and a meditation on the way television had begun to insert itself between American political life and the felt reality of those who lived it. Mailer’s interest in Jackie is partly aesthetic — the carriage, the voice, the staged informality — and partly diagnostic: she becomes for him a figure through whom the question of “the existential” can be put to American power.
Reprintings and retitling
The essay enters the canon under a longer title. Reprinted as “The Existential Heroine: An Evening with Jackie Kennedy, or, The Wild West of the East” in The Presidential Papers (63.37); reprinted without the subtitle (“The Existential Heroine”) in The Idol and the Octopus (68.11); reprinted partially in 98.7, 13.1, and 14.4.
Related pages
- 1962 | Esquire | Superman Comes to the Supermarket | The Presidential Papers
- Jackie, the Prisoner of Celebrity (83.54)
- The Idol and the Octopus: Political Writings by Norman Mailer on the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations (68.11) | The Time of Our Time (98.7) | The Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays of Norman Mailer (13.1)