Whose Idea of America?

When Jackie Kennedy died, Peggy Noonan distilled America’s love for its First Lady into a little over a dozen paragraphs, nearly all of them perfect. “A nation watched, and would never forget” how Jackie carried herself the weekend of her husband’s murder, Noonan wrote. “The world watched,” too, she said, and “found its final judgement summed up by a young woman, a British journalist who had come to witness the funeral, and filed home: ‘Jacqueline Kennedy has today given her country the one thing it has always lacked, and that is majesty.’”