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Condolences from a Grieving Nation
HarperCollins
March 2010
On Sale: March 2, 2010
384 pages
ISBN: 0061969842
EAN: 9780061969843
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
It is perhaps the most memorable event of the twentieth
century, a moment that left a family and a nation mourning,
one that many Americans recall as their first historical
memory-the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Within seven weeks of the President's death, Jacqueline
Kennedy received more than 800,000 condolence letters. Two
years later, the volume of correspondence would exceed 1.5
million letters. For the next forty-six years, the letters
would remain essentially untouched. Now historian Ellen Fitzpatrick has selected approximately
250 of these letters for inclusion in Letters to Jackie, a
remarkable human record that perfectly preserves the
heart-wrenching grief and soul searching of the nation in a
time of crisis. Capturing the extraordinary eloquence of
so-called ordinary Americans across generations, regions,
race, political leanings, and religion-in messages written
on elegant stationery, scraps of paper, in pencil, type, ink
smudged by tears, and in barely legible handwriting-the
letters capture what John F. Kennedy meant to the country,
and how his death for some divided American history into
Before and After. In Letters to Jackie, Fitzpatrick allows Americans to write
their own history of these tumultuous times. "The coffin was
very small," as one sixteen-year-old girl observed, "to
contain so much of so many Americans." In reflecting on
their sense of loss, their fears, and their striving, the
authors of these letters wrote an American elegy as poignant
and as compelling as their shattered and cherished dreams.
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