When John F. Kennedy was elected president, I was five years old. That was also the year I started taking horseback riding lessons at Potomac Horse Center in Gaithersburg, Maryland. By the year he was assassinated, I was in my first season at horse shows in Virginia and Maryland. We lived on a farm in Great Falls, Virginia, and I showed my pony every weekend, from March to September, eventually moving on to Hunters as I grew up. Jackie Kennedy, and eventually her daughter and her nieces and nephews (Robert Kennedy's children who lived just up the road in McLean) were just other nice people on the horse show circuit.
I saw Jackie Kennedy Onassis through the eyes of the horse-crazy kid I was in the sixties. She was beautiful, tragic and quite a talented rider -- always perfectly turned out, always on beautiful horses. She was also approachable in that familiar milieu. She had a conversation with my mother one day as I was competing in a Small Pony Hunter Under Saddle class at Upperville. I remember seeing her with a small group of women standing by the rail as the class was being judged. My mother bred Bassett hounds, and she told me later that the women were discussing dog breeding and bloodlines.
This book is a lovely tribute to the quiet passion of horsemanship which was infused in Jackie Kennedy. I share her passion, and I know that my love of horses has helped me through some terrible times in my own life. The book is also a retrospective of a dead era. The photographs are wonderful because they so beautifully depict a time which is sadly long gone. I still compete in horse shows today, but they are nothing like they used to be. Tradition has been replaced by corporate sponsorship, and for the most part the romance of the horse world is found not at the "A"-rated shows, but only in tiny corners of 4-H meetings and Pony Club rallies. The love of horses used to be a great leveler for interaction between riders, spectators and communities. Not so in this celebrity-mad era -- I miss it so.
I loved this book. I admired this woman. The text which accompanies the photographs is evocative and respectful. Perhaps Jackie Kennedy was not the best first lady. She was certainly not a canny politician in the vein of Rosalyn Carter or Nancy Reagan. But she was a lady, to the core, and an icon. And if you want to understand her better, and perhaps understand the last vestiges of early twentieth-century glamour which clung to her, and to the horse world she was a part of, buy this book.
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