Her fake pearls which she had bought for $35 would, after her death, be sold at an auction for more than $200,000
FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER HER death, one understands better that Jacqueline Kennedy?s carefully nurtured image was the result of her own efforts as well as an artifact fabricated by the broader culture in which she was embedded.

The existence of so many versions of events in her life is a tell-tale sign that so much about Jackie was a myth, propagated by media. For example, the New York Times and the Kennedy Center cite different dates for the now legendary initial meeting of the future First Couple.

Roland Barthes, in his seminal analysis of the fashion system, describes what he calls the Woman of Fashion as someone who vacations in foreign climes, travels with her husband and knows little of budgets. She represents the ?compromise between mass culture and its consumers? in that she projects an image of innocence which helps attract readers who feel that she represents them even as she also represents who they want to become.

Ironically, much of what Barthes says rings true for Jackie. Her manufactured persona was actually a powerful weapon that America may use to assert its dominance in world affairs. Mrs Kennedy could be deployed to project an image of a victorious country capable of going anywhere it wanted, conquering hearts and markets.

Just like Graham Greene?s Quiet American who secretly spoke Vietnamese, Jackie was presented in news accounts as felling whole nations with her knowledge of community history and a few whispered words in the native tongue.

America was mastering the global by winning over the local.

In this light, my smugness at knowing her birthday could now be seen as a manifestation of how I had been led to feel that I had a connection with Jackie. Yet, what I was unwittingly revealing was that, just like her millions of fans all over the planet, I was now fertile ground for the commercial messages which she also represented.

Exploitation

Jackie?s image is, after all, a potent instrument of the consumerist world machine, exploited, beyond her control, by fashion empires. This is best illustrated by the fact that her fake pearls which she had bought for $35 would, after her death, be sold at an auction for more than $200,000.

Moreover, the buyer would later parlay ownership of this iconic piece of jewelry to build a great fortune, selling duplicates to the tune of 26 million more dollars.

To her credit, Jackie tried to distance herself from this global orgy of mass media and consumption. Later in life, she refused to give interviews, fiercely guarding her privacy and that of her family.

Perhaps she knew that interviews would only add to the global industry that had sprung up around her. She fought those that tried to benefit commercially from her husband?s legacy. She even sued a writer who she had initially agreed to assist, possibly because he may not have disclosed that he would earn more than half of a million dollars from his work on the Kennedy assassination.

Mrs Kennedy, the ultimate fashion icon, came to favor the simplest of clothes to the extent that she went to the office in slacks and sweaters. I myself am too young to recall what she wore while at the White House. What I vividly remember instead is this luminous image of a Jackie resplendent in modest jeans, hair disheveled, energized by the wind.

Future generations will be kind to Jacqueline Kennedy. For she was a woman who made history because she tried her best to assure that history would not unmake her and all that she stood for.