Letters to Jackie

Within seven weeks of President Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, 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. Historian Ellen Fitzpatrick reveals a remarkable human record of that devastating moment of Americans across generations, regions, races, political leanings and religions, in mourning and crisis. Reflecting on their sense of loss, their fears, and their hopes, the authors of these letters wrote an elegy for the fallen president that captured the soul of the nation.