Why the example of Jacqueline Kennedy still matters

Comment published in New York Times blog, in response to Ann Mah, “A year in Paris that transformed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,” June 23, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/travel/paris-jacqueline-bouvier-kennedy-onassis-college.html#commentsContainer&permid=101104302:101104302:

It is remarkable how many "privileged," wealthy people have interests and desires that are far more genuine than flaunting or aggrandizing their wealth and power. (The article fails to mention, among other things, that she ended her life as a book editor in New York. It also mentions a certain side of modern France and its culture; not, e.g., the France of the various artistic and intellectual avant-gardes).

What a contrast the administration that she helped "decorate" and that of our current president, born into wealth but acting always the boorish parvenu, glorying in the untrammeled vulgarity that would scandalize anyone with the least sense of propriety or civility, and so cheapening whatever moral power he perhaps should have if only for the office and its face. Like a child who throws nasty tantrums when not getting its way, he represents America's image as "We will get what we want, no matter how ugly it may be."

Jacqueline brought a sense of style and grace that elevated the office, in a way that bridged the divide between high and low or privileged and common that, despite most modern art, American society has often badly finessed--usually by pretending to a commonness that is so cheap one suspects it as false. She helped confer on her husband's presidency a sense of goodness and civility that subsequent myth rightly recognized as now endangered. Style, like art, matters because people and collectivities model themselves in its mirror.