Saturday, May 11, 2019

Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln - JFK's Personal Secretary

Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln - JFK's Personal Secretary 


Evelyn Maurine Norton Lincoln (June 25, 1909 – May 11, 1995) was the personal secretary to John F. Kennedy from his election to the United States Senate in 1953 until his 1963 assassination. Lincoln, who was in the motorcade when Kennedy was assassinated, made a point of visiting Kennedy's grave every year on the anniversary of his death.

Personal

Lincoln was born Evelyn Maurine Norton on a farm in Polk County, Nebraska. Her father was John N. Norton, a member of the United States House of Representatives  In 1930, she married Federal worker Harold W. Lincoln, whom she had met as a law student at George Washington University.

Evelyn had always aimed to work on Capitol Hill for a future president, and she achieved this ambition in 1953 by becoming personal secretary to the newly elected senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. She proved exceptionally suitable for the job, and remained close to the president up to the day of his assassination in Dallas, when she was travelling in the same motorcade.[1] She made it a point to visit Kennedy's grave at Arlington National  Cemetery every year afterward on the anniversary of his death.
Many noted the irony of her surname since Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln were succeeded by a President Johnson after they were assassinated. However, despite rumors to the contrary, there is no evidence that President Lincoln employed a secretary named Kennedy.

In 1968, she wrote a book, Kennedy and Johnson, in which she wrote that President Kennedy had told her that Lyndon B. Johnson would be replaced as Vice President of the United States. Lincoln wrote of that November 19, 1963 conversation, just before the assassination of President Kennedy.

As Mr. Kennedy sat in the rocker in my office, his head resting on its back he placed his left leg across his right knee. He rocked slightly as he talked. In a slow pensive voice he said to me, 'You know if I am re-elected in sixty-four, I am going to spend more and more time toward making government service an honorable career. I would like to tailor the executive and legislative branches of government so that they can keep up with the tremendous strides and progress being made in other fields.' 'I am going to advocate changing some of the outmoded rules and regulations in the Congress, such as the seniority rule. To do this I will need as a running mate in sixty-four a man who believes as I do.' Mrs. Lincoln went on to write "I was fascinated by this conversation and wrote it down verbatim in my diary. Now I asked, 'Who is your choice as a running-mate?' 'He looked straight ahead, and without hesitating he replied, 'at this time I am thinking about Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.'

According to the National Archives, Lincoln gave away or sold many of Kennedy's documents and artifacts that she had been entrusted with managing by the Kennedy family after Kennedy's assassination.[2] In 2005, a legal settlement was reached that enabled the National Archives, the Kennedy Library, and Caroline Kennedy to recover thousands of pages of documents and other items.

Lincoln died at Georgetown University Hospital in 1995, after complications that followed surgery for cancer. Her cremated remains were inurned in a niche at a columbarium in Arlington National Cemetery.

Books

Lincoln was the author of two books:

My 12 Years With John F. Kennedy

Kennedy and Johnson, 1968

References

^ New York Times Obituaries. Evelyn Lincoln, Secretary To Kennedy, Is Dead at 85 by Robert McG. Thomas Jr. May 13, 1995
Sources
Evelyn Lincoln, Secretary To Kennedy, Is Dead at 85


By ROBERT MCG. THOMAS JR.MAY 13, 1995


This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems. Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

New York Times Obit

May 13, 1995, Page 001011Buy ReprintsThe New York Times Archives

Evelyn Lincoln, the devoted personal secretary who served President John F. Kennedy from the day he entered the Senate to the day he was assassinated, died on Thursday at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington. She was 85 and lived in Chevy Chase, Md.

Her family said the cause of death was complications after cancer surgery.

If the relationship between an executive and a secretary can be likened to a marriage, the one between John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Evelyn Norton Lincoln was a bond forged in political heaven.

When Mrs. Lincoln, then a 43-year-old Congressional aide, came to work for him in 1953, the new Senator from Massachusetts was everything she had been looking for in a Capitol Hill boss: a charismatic politician with Presidential possibilities.

And when he hired her, Mr. Kennedy, then a 35-year-old bachelor, got the secretary every politician longs for: an efficient, savvy confidante whose devotion to him and his ambitions knew no bounds.

The daughter of John Norton, a member of Congress from Nebraska, Evelyn Norton was born in Polk County, Neb., on June 25, 1909. She graduated from George Washington University in Washington and studied law there for for two years. Her husband, Harold W. Lincoln, whom she met at the university, was a Federal worker.

In 1952, after working for an obscure Georgia Congressman, Mrs. Lincoln began looking for a politician with Presidential possibilities and found Mr. Kennedy.

Within weeks of their first meeting, she had made herself virtually indispensable. In addition to her official duties, she once recalled, she was also required to telephone the women he was interested in to ask them for movie dates with the Senator.

Mrs. Lincoln claimed to be one of the first to know that his romance with Jacqueline Bouvier was serious. "He called her himself," she said.

Mr. Kennedy's election to the Presidency elevated his personal secretary to a public figure. Her office, next to the President's, became a nerve center at the White House, partly because of the candy dish she kept there along with the humidor full of gift cigars not up to Presidential standards, and partly because of the West Wing's layout.

Mrs. Lincoln had a direct view of the President in his office. And the President had to walk through her office to get to Cabinet meetings. Her office also had a television set on which the President and aides watched the nation's first manned space flight and other major events.

(Her office's strategic location, Mrs. Lincoln once revealed, was put to devious use by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. She said he used to cut through her office to give White House aides the impression he had been closeted with the President.)

Mrs. Lincoln, who was in the third bus back of the President's car when he was shot in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, became a macabre footnote to assassination lore linking two slain Presidents elected exactly 100 years apart when it was widely noted that Abraham Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and President Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln.

Although she continued to work for the White House for a while after the assassination, Mrs. Lincoln never hid the disdain she felt for her idol's successor.

Before his trip to Dallas, Mrs. Lincoln later said, President Kennedy had told her that he planned to drop Mr. Johnson from the 1964 Democratic ticket.

The full extent of Mrs. Lincoln's devotion to Mr. Kennedy did not become apparent until after his death when she revealed that she had saved virtually every scrap of paper that had crossed his desk in the White House, including idle doodles and jottings she sometimes had to dig out of wastebaskets.

Mrs. Lincoln, who was one of the seven original incorporators of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, gave the papers to the library, where the doodles and other ephemera are among the most popular exhibits, library officials said yesterday.

Mrs. Lincoln published two volumes of memoirs, "My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy," (1965) and "Kennedy and Johnson," (1968).

She returned to Capitol Hill as a secretary from 1967 to 1973, but always had an eye out for a potential President.

In 1982, convinced she had found one, she campaigned for Senator Gary Hart of orado, telling one crowd, "The people who loved John Kennedy should love Gary Hart." His candidacy collapsed in a scandal triggered by womanizin
Mrs. Lincoln is survived by her husband.

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