100 PHOTOGRAPHS 27
Before they could become American royalty, America
needed to meet John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Jacqueline
Lee Bouvier. That introduction came when Hy Peskin
photographed the handsome politician on the make and
his radiant fiancée over a summer weekend in 1953.
Peskin, a renowned sports photographer, headed to
Hyannis Port, Mass., at the invitation of family patriarch
Joseph Kennedy. The ambassador, eager for his son to
take the stage as a national figure, thought a feature in
the pages of life would foster a fascination with John, his
pretty girlfriend and one of America’s wealthiest families.
That it did. Peskin put together a somewhat contrived
“behind the scenes” series titled “Senator Kennedy Goes
A-Courting.” While Jackie bristled at the intrusion—
John’s mother Rose even told her how to pose—she went
along with the staging, and readers got to observe Jackie
mussing the hair of “the handsomest young member of the
U.S. Senate,” playing football and softball with her future
in-laws, and sailing aboard John’s boat, Victura. “They just
shoved me into that boat long enough to take the picture,”
she later confided to a friend.
It was pitch-perfect brand making, with Kennedy on
the cover of the world’s most widely read photo magazine,
cast as a self-assured playboy prepared to say goodbye to
bachelorhood. A few months later life would cover the
couple’s wedding, and by then America was captivated. In
the staid age of Dwight David Eisenhower and Richard
Milhous Nixon, Peskin unveiled the face of Camelot,
one that changed America’s perception of politics and
politicians, and set John and Jackie off on becoming the
most recognizable couple on the planet.CAMELOT Hy Peskin, 1953