First Families
The Impact of the White House on Their Lives
Chapter OneStepping into History
Washington sparkled like anicicleafterablizzard roared in as the 1961 inaugural celebrations were beginning. On any other day a snowstorm would have paralyzed the city, but on this day it was an opportunity to show the resilience, fortitude, and jaunty spirit of the New Frontier. At the White House the near-endless inaugural parade straggled by the presidential reviewing stand, the trumpeters in the marching bands struggling to make their fingers and the valves function in the brutal cold-while trying, like the thousands who lined Pennsylvania Avenue, to catch a glimpse of the new President and his wife.
Never in its long history had the White House welcomed a presidential couple as storybook young and glamorous as John Fitzgerald and Jacqueline Kennedy. He was forty-three, the youngest elected President; she was thirty-one, mother of an infant son and three-year-old daughter. Together they made a family who would beguile the nation. The new President, whose mop of sandy hair was the cartoonists' delight, wor ... read full excerpt from: First Families ebook
