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.
“
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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.'
|
”
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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:
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
James M. Roth, Reclaiming
Pieces of Camelot: How NARA and the JFK Library Recovered Missing Kennedy
Documents and Artifacts, Prologue Magazine, Summer 2006, Vol. 38, No. 2.
Evelyn Lincoln, Secretary To Kennedy, Is Dead at 85
By ROBERT MCG. THOMAS JR.MAY 13, 1995
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/13/obituaries/evelyn-lincoln-secretary-to-kennedy-is-dead-at-85.html
This is a digitized version of an article from The
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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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