The Kennedys with their children Caroline and John Jr. in the White House nursery in 1962. Cecil Stoughton/White House Photographs/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy left the White House with her two children under the most tragic of circumstances. But just days after her husband’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, Kennedy penned a little-known eight-page letter to her successor, Lady Bird Johnson. She asked Johnson to continue several initiatives close to her heart: preserving the White House, making it sparkle and transforming it into a place where the best of everything greets anyone who enters.

In her own handwriting (with an apology for using a standard-issue yellow legal pad) Kennedy shares who would make a disastrous White House curator, where to hang John F. Kennedy’s portrait, how to deal with the Fine Arts Committee and whom Johnson could count on “for loyalty, devotion and efficiency.”

Kennedy, who was 31 when her husband was inaugurated, spent just three years in the White House — a time that came to be known as Camelot. But her work has had an outsize and lasting effect: on how restoration projects are chosen and paid for, how state dinners are staged and how visitors experience the White House. Every first family that followed has been influenced by her approach to decor and preservation.

“She was so young,” says Stewart McLaurin, president of the White House Historical Association. “She had every reason to believe she would be first lady for four or eight years. But she was a woman in a hurry.”

The first lady brought back history with elegant American antiques and paintings. She set up the White House Historical Association, a nonprofit educational institution to care for and preserve the presidential home and fund acquisitions and refurbishments. She handpicked a curator and launched an official guidebook. And she set the White House on a trajectory to become a showcase for American decorative arts and history.

“My mother was a patriot and she wanted the President’s House to tell the story of American history and the families that shaped it,” Caroline Kennedy, Jackie’s daughter and the U.S. ambassador to Australia, wrote in an email to The Washington Post. “She also wanted to set up the structures to allow it to evolve with the times ahead.”

Sixty years later, the Jackie effect endures. Through her foresight, Kennedy, who died of cancer in 1994 at age 64, continues to shape one of the most recognizable symbols of American history and power.

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THE LETTER

The memorandum that Kennedy shared with Johnson is now in the archives of the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin. Kennedy wrote, “Maybe I will be remembered as the person who started redoing the White House, but you will be remembered as the person who PRESERVED it.”

“The letter was self-effacing but in her own way, she was trying to give a nudge to the momentum she had created,” says McLaurin. He finds it remarkable that she was able to write this with all the emotion of leaving and helping her children get through those painful days. “It puts in her own context what she thinks is important and that she is passing the baton,” he says.

In a 1987 interview published in Prologue Magazine, Johnson told interviewer Nancy Kegan Smith, former director of the presidential materials division of the National Archives and Records Administration, that she realized how important preservation was to Kennedy. Johnson said she also cared deeply about it and would carry it on, although she was terrified to meet the members of the newly established Committee for the Preservation of the White House (the permanent successor to the Fine Arts Committee) as she was not an expert on 18th-century furniture.

No other first lady has asked her successor to carry on her causes in this way, as far as we know, says Smith. “It’s very unusual since a first lady is not a constitutional role, she has a role with no rule book. They have no legal authority to ask one first lady to carry on something for another.”

Kennedy had worried about this. “This was the moment I was always scared of,” she wrote in the letter. “Would the next President’s wife scrap the whole thing as she was sick to death about hearing about Jacqueline Kennedy — or would she forget about me and insure [sic] that the White House will always be cared for.”

Turns out it was neither. No one would ever forget Kennedy. If people got tired of hearing about her, they never let on. And although the interiors continue to evolve, preservation has continued to be a priority.

Kennedy only returned to the White House once after she packed her things and wrote that letter; she turned down multiple invitations. But in 1971, Pat Nixon invited Kennedy (by then married to Aristotle Onassis) to view the newly completed official portraits of the Kennedys in private. She, along with her kids, Caroline and John, made a secret visit, also getting a tour and dinner with the Nixons.

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THE WORK

From the beginning, Kennedy had a vision of what she wanted to accomplish as first lady.

As a young girl, she had visited the White House with her mother. “She remembers walking through the rooms and not understanding what was in there and wishing there had been a guidebook,” says Anita McBride, former chief of staff to first lady Laura Bush and co-author of a new college textbook, “U.S. First Ladies: Making History and Leaving Legacies,” along with Smith and Diana B. Carlin.

When she arrived as first lady, Kennedy found the interiors in her new home surprisingly uninspiring. The state rooms — the Red, Green and Blue Rooms and the State Dining Room and East Room — for example, were forlorn. Kennedy wanted to acquire more 19th-century furniture and art, including things that had once been at the White House, and she knew they needed a way to make sure items were bought and taken care of without using taxpayer dollars, McLaurin says. That’s why she created the WHHA as a source of private funding.

Kennedy was not the only first lady to leave her mark inside the White House, but her undertaking looked to return integrity and accuracy — and important pieces. “She loved the search for objects that were historical, and the people she met,” Caroline Kennedy says. Jackie Kennedy used her connections to bring historians and antique experts and wealthy donors on board through a Fine Arts Committee. Winterthur’s Henry Francis duPont, an avid collector of Americana whose family home Winterthur became a museum, was tapped to chair the effort.

“She was not a historian as much as a story teller, but she understood how history works and how stories were told not just in books but with furniture,” says historian Carl Sferrazza Anthony, author of the 2023 book “Camera Girl: The Coming of Age of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy.” Anthony says Kennedy saw the White House as “a symbol of democracy.”

One of the ways she shared her work with the nation was on the 1962 “A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy,” televised on CBS. The broadcast invited viewers to see how history was being brought back into the executive mansion.

“I just think everything in the White House should be the best,” says Kennedy as she leads Charles Collingwood around and shares her acquisitions. “It just seemed to me such a shame when we came here to find hardly anything of the past in the house, hardly anything before 1902.”

In the Red Room, she points out sofas that belonged to Dolley Madison and Nelly Custis (George Washington’s step-granddaughter). She shows a pair of antique chairs that Mary Todd Lincoln sold “because she was destitute” that had been recently donated back to the White House.

The show was a defining moment for Kennedy.

Many visitors had watched the TV special and memorized all the details and remembered them years later. “They would come in for a tour here and just assume that nothing would be changed,” says William Allman, former White House curator.

Kennedy also believed the White House should be an authentic and beautiful backdrop for diplomacy and made significant changes to gatherings. President Kennedy was not a fan of receiving lines, so he and Jackie mingled casually with guests over cocktails in the state rooms. She hired a French chef and cut the number of courses served. She ditched the traditional, massive U-shaped banquet tables lined with tall flower arrangements in favor of chic round tables that seated eight to 10 people on gold ballroom chairs. She liked to pair simple crystal stemware with the more formal china and flatware, and ordered a set in 1961 from the Morgantown Glass Guild in West Virginia.

Those dinners were the hottest ticket in town. “She made an effort to make sure that when you attended the dinner it was the experience of a lifetime,” says Tham Kannalikham, who was the Trumps’ White House designer. “That is how it is now.”

Kennedy created the first office of chief floral designer in 1961, requesting more informal arrangements that reflected her taste. “Her sensibility was that White House floral arrangements should feature seasonal flowers arranged simply and naturally — as if the first lady had just gone out into the garden and brought them in,” says Laura Dowling, former White House chief floral designer.

Dowling says that after Kennedy left the White House, Lady Bird Johnson — whose own passions were the environment and beautification — paid a visit to the flower shop and told them “she liked everything they were doing and to continue doing exactly the same thing.”

The Kennedys threw a black-tie White House dinner for Nobel Laureates on April 29, 1962. Abbie Rowe/White House Photographs/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

Kennedy’s idea of treating guests to a five-star performance after dinner — a tradition carried on by subsequent administrations — reflected her commitment to arts and culture. She hosted the American Shakespeare Theatre and the Joffrey Ballet; the Reagans had Isaac Stern, Ella Fitzgerald and, of course, Frank Sinatra; the Clintons had Whitney Houston and Jessye Norman; the George H.W. Bushes had the Broadway production from Phantom of the Opera; and the Obamas had Beyoncé, James Taylor, and Earth, Wind and Fire.

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THE LEGACY

Kennedy started a whole movement, making “the idea of collecting and preserving fashionable,” says Allman. Her influence and presence continue to be felt daily.

“It all goes back to Jackie,” Kannalikham says. “She made the White House the gold standard of preservation.”

White House designers in later administrations carried on some of the traditions of the Kennedys and their decorators, Sister Parish and Stéphane Boudin.

“Most of our decorating decisions were influenced by the same sense of history demonstrated by Mrs. Kennedy,” says Kaki Hockersmith, the Clintons’ Little Rock-based designer. “We focused on bringing many objects of historical influence out of storage and into view.” Some rooms were deemed just perfect as they were. “Mrs. Clinton and I made a decision to preserve the Queen’s Sitting Room as Mrs. Kennedy and her French designer Boudin had left it. In fact, I was thrilled to learn that a decorative wood box in that room was lined with the only remaining wallcovering from the original White House.”

The Obamas’ designer, Michael S. Smith, says they were influenced by the other young family that had lived in the White House. “The very American sense of style and formality that is part of many things at the White House can be traced back to the Kennedys,” he says. The Obamas, he says, shared many parallels with the Kennedys, such as bringing in contemporary art, being inclusive and treating the White House as a place to highlight the best aspects of American culture.

Most presidents since John F. Kennedy have used the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, another tradition that can be traced to Jackie Kennedy. She knew the Oval Office was one of the most photographed rooms in the White House and wanted it to convey a sense of history and personality. She discovered the Resolute, a gift from Queen Victoria in 1880 to President Rutherford B. Hayes, in the basement. Its nautical connection — it was made of wood from an old ship — reflected her husband’s love of sailing, so Kennedy had it moved.

“She made sure that it was restored and installed in the Oval Office,” says Alan Price, the director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. A photograph of young John F. Kennedy Jr. crawling out from under the desk became one of the iconic images of the Kennedy years.

The WHHA honors its founder in many ways. In 2015, it instituted an annual lunch in New York around Jackie Kennedy’s birthday on July 28. Last year, it released the 26th edition of “The White House: An Historic Guide.” Constantly updated, it has sold more than 5 million copies. In 2021, the WHHA published “Designing Camelot” by James Archer Abbott and Elaine Rice Bachmann to commemorate the restoration of the White House that Kennedy masterminded.

“She would be so proud that artists and writers of today are represented in the White House and White House Library, alongside the craftsmen and painters of the past,” Caroline Kennedy wrote in an email. “Her instinct was to keep the WHHA independent of politics and self-supporting, and that has been an important legacy.”

Anthony says Jackie was an extraordinary agent of change. “She understood the power of education and the power of image. And she used it in the White House in a huge way and on the global stage. The White House project is her greatest legacy,” he says. “What is astounding is that 60 years later it still works.”

Caroline Kennedy says the most emotional moment for her at last month’s White House state dinner for the prime minister of Australia was when she heard the Army and Air Force Strolling Strings, a military ensemble that plays at many official White House events.

“My mother always talked about how much my father loved them and how they were her favorite part of State Visits,” she wrote in an email, “and by chance, as my husband and I were walking toward the tent, they were playing Camelot, and so I felt she was there with me.”