Remembering Jack
By Jacques Lowe 

     The terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 may have destroyed Jacques Lowe's negatives of the Kennedy family, but not the photographs or the brilliance evident in the camera capturing this shining light that once was Camelot. On the fortieth anniversary of the assassination, which is astutely, not for the first time, linked with September 11, 2001 as a turning point and a loss of innocence in our country's history, the magic of the Kennedys portrayed through Jacques Lowe's wise, perceptive lens makes us mourn for all we've lost.

     Modern pundits and social critics might decry our fascination with the Kennedys, deride our interest in the "American royal family" as a crime tantamount to John Walker Lindh's fighting with the Taliban or Kennedy bringing Catholicism to the White House. But the mocking still doesn't change the fact that the Kennedys rank right up there with Princess Diana for selling magazines and being the subject of ever more reverent and titillating exposes. It's easy to see why when you look at a pre-Chappaquiddick handsome Ted Kennedy playing with his children and gazing adoringly at beautiful bride Joan Bennett, or Jack and Jackie keeping company with Premier Nikita Khrushchev, or Kennedy shaking hands with coal miners. Lowe's close-ups of the miners illuminate the dignity and strength of these men.

     The Kennedys romp through a time of change in social, personal and political home movies. Particularly striking are the unguarded JFK moments, such as the photo of JFK thinking with a cigar (no Clinton jokes, please), or, although Michael Moore (in DUDE, WHERE'S MY COUNTRY?) accuses the US of assassinating Prime minister of Congo Patrice Lumumba, the sequence and closeup illustrating Kennedy's distress over hearing of Lumumba's murder. Also striking are the family photos of Bobby Kennedy and his intense, devoted, playful, roughhousing, praying wife and children. We see the Kennedys, and they are us, with the added weight of John-John's salute---oh, and the adoration of Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald.

     The intimacy, inherent in Lowe's daughter Thomasina's added loving tribute to her father, lends more depth of history to this important, moving book.