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Caroline Kennedy's 'Christmas' comes earlyUpdated 2d ago | Comments39 | Recommend20E-mail | Save | Print | Reprints & Permissions |
EnlargeBy Richard Avedon, Collins Design/Smithsonian Institution
Father and daughter: President John F. Kennedy holds Caroline in The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family, with photos by Richard Avedon.
EnlargeBy Richard Avedon, Collins Design/Smithsonian Institution
Baby love: Caroline Kennedy cradles her 6-week-old brother, John Jr.
EnlargeBy Joseph Moran, Hyperion
Kennedy: A Family Christmas includes a letter from her father.
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
On Dec. 19, 1962, in what would be her last Christmas in the White House, Caroline Kennedy, then 5, dictated a letter to her mother.
It began "Dear Santa" and requested silver skates, Susie Smart and Candy Fashion dolls, a "real" pet reindeer and "some noisy thing or something he can push or pull for (little brother) John."
Researchers for Kennedy's latest anthology, A Family Christmas (Hyperion, $26.95, out today), found Caroline's letter in the family archives. She finds it "really embarrassing, but everyone else insisted we use it in the book."
And did she get all those gifts?
"I doubt it," she says and laughs.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: White House | John | Christmas | Kennedy | Santa | Father | Smithsonian Institution | Kennedys | Portrait | Caroline Kennedy | Richard Avedon
Kennedy, the mother of three, turns 50 this month. In the book's introduction, she describes how her father helped her phone Santa Claus via the White House switchboard. That Santa "had the same soft Southern accent common to many White House workers of the day escaped me completely," she writes.
Kennedy, whose last anthology was A Family of Poems, chose a wide range of Christmas poems, songs, Biblical verse and essays, from David Sedaris, the satirist, to Cotton Mather, the puritan. The book includes a 1961 letter from her father, reassuring a girl in Michigan that the Russians wouldn't bomb Santa Claus.
Does she think he actually wrote it, or was it drafted by a presidential aide?
COLD WAR CHRISTMAS: Read a letter from John F. Kennedy
"I'm sure he wrote it and that he talked to Santa," she says.
A then-3-year-old Caroline also is featured in a new collection of poignant photographs — most previously unpublished — by Richard Avedon, The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family (Collins, $29.95). They show Caroline with her father and holding her 6-week-old brother, John Jr., at the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach on Jan. 3, 1961, a few weeks before the Inauguration.
She hasn't seen the book or the spread from it in the new Vanity Fair. "I'm busy. It's usually nice to look at old photographs, but I don't do it that much."
In that book's introduction, historian Robert Dallek writes that the photos by Avedon, who died in 2004, "humanized Kennedy" and helped him establish his family "as the country's democratic royalty."
To which Caroline Kennedy says, "We don't have royalty, but I understand what he's saying."
Caroline Kennedy's 'Christmas' comes earlyUpdated 2d ago | Comments39 | Recommend20E-mail | Save | Print | Reprints & Permissions |
EnlargeBy Richard Avedon, Collins Design/Smithsonian Institution
EnlargeBy Richard Avedon, Collins Design/Smithsonian Institution
EnlargeBy Joseph Moran, Hyperion
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY
On Dec. 19, 1962, in what would be her last Christmas in the White House, Caroline Kennedy, then 5, dictated a letter to her mother.
It began "Dear Santa" and requested silver skates, Susie Smart and Candy Fashion dolls, a "real" pet reindeer and "some noisy thing or something he can push or pull for (little brother) John."
Researchers for Kennedy's latest anthology, A Family Christmas (Hyperion, $26.95, out today), found Caroline's letter in the family archives. She finds it "really embarrassing, but everyone else insisted we use it in the book."
And did she get all those gifts?
"I doubt it," she says and laughs.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: White House | John | Christmas | Kennedy | Santa | Father | Smithsonian Institution | Kennedys | Portrait | Caroline Kennedy | Richard Avedon
Kennedy, the mother of three, turns 50 this month. In the book's introduction, she describes how her father helped her phone Santa Claus via the White House switchboard. That Santa "had the same soft Southern accent common to many White House workers of the day escaped me completely," she writes.
Kennedy, whose last anthology was A Family of Poems, chose a wide range of Christmas poems, songs, Biblical verse and essays, from David Sedaris, the satirist, to Cotton Mather, the puritan. The book includes a 1961 letter from her father, reassuring a girl in Michigan that the Russians wouldn't bomb Santa Claus.
Does she think he actually wrote it, or was it drafted by a presidential aide?
COLD WAR CHRISTMAS: Read a letter from John F. Kennedy
"I'm sure he wrote it and that he talked to Santa," she says.
A then-3-year-old Caroline also is featured in a new collection of poignant photographs — most previously unpublished — by Richard Avedon, The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family (Collins, $29.95). They show Caroline with her father and holding her 6-week-old brother, John Jr., at the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach on Jan. 3, 1961, a few weeks before the Inauguration.
She hasn't seen the book or the spread from it in the new Vanity Fair. "I'm busy. It's usually nice to look at old photographs, but I don't do it that much."
In that book's introduction, historian Robert Dallek writes that the photos by Avedon, who died in 2004, "humanized Kennedy" and helped him establish his family "as the country's democratic royalty."
To which Caroline Kennedy says, "We don't have royalty, but I understand what he's saying."
