“Mr. President, as the Nation mourned, and continues to mourn, the death of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, many of us have tried, in private and public reflections, to define and explain her enduring place in our common history and our shared consciousness. It is a difficult, if not an impossible task, as it always is when we try to put into words the meaning of a life that has touched our very spirit and left us forever changed. It never was the ambition of the woman we knew, and will always remember, as ‘Jackie’ to have the kind of fundamental public influence. It was a part of her style that she did not cherish celebrity, a part of her grace that she did not succumb to its temptations, and a part of her dignity that she did not surrender to fame, but sought — in the end, it seemed, successfully — to make peace with it on her own terms.”