Caffeinated Politics

Historical trivia relating to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy was reported in late March.

Letizia Mowinckel, an American diplomat’s wife who served as her friend Jacqueline Kennedy’s fashion scout in Paris and who procured the pink Chanel suit that came to symbolize the first lady’s resolve in the wake of her husband’s assassination, died on Feb. 14 in Rome. She was 105.

According to an account that Mrs. Kennedy gave to the Kennedy presidential biographer William Manchester, her husband had asked her before the trip about her attire.

“There are going to be all these rich, Republican women at that lunch, wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets,” he told her, “and you’ve got to look as marvelous as any of them. Be simple — show these Texans what good taste really is.”

She settled on the strawberry-pink bouclé suit from Chanel, with a matching pink pillbox hat and a blue silk collar. She had worn the suit a few times before, including on a 1962 visit to London.

On that day in Dallas, the president and first lady sat next to each other in the rear seat of an open-top Lincoln convertible. About 12:30 p.m., as the presidential motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza, rifle shots were fired. The president was mortally wounded, and Mrs. Kennedy became soaked in his blood.

“I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw, in the president’s car, a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying in the back seat,” Lady Bird Johnson, the vice president’s wife, who was several cars behind the Kennedys’, noted in an audio recollection made soon after the assassination.

The last outfit Mrs. Mowinckel obtained for Mrs. Kennedy, in 1964, was a black Chanel suit for mourning.