There is talk that the current owner of this hat wants to try and sell it at auction

It has been sold behind the scenes several times over the past five decades, but there is talk that the current owner of this hat wants to try and sell it at auction.

That would probably be a bad idea because the family would try and claim it in and then it wouldn’t see the light of day ever again or at least for not another 42 years.

Jacqueline Kennedy’s pink pillbox hat

Jacqueline Kennedy’s pink hat is a missing piece of history

COLLEGE PARK, Md. — In the nation’s collective memory, the assassination of John F. Kennedy is a clash of images and mysteries that may never be sorted out to the satisfaction of everyone.

But if there is a lasting emblem that sums up Nov. 22, 1963, the day America tumbled from youthful idealism to hollow despair, it is Jacqueline Kennedy’s rose-pink suit and hat.

An expanded collection of Kennedy treasures and trivia was unveiled this month on exhibit and online to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his inauguration; it includes the fabric of his top hat (beaver fur) down to his shoe size (10C).

But missing and hardly mentioned are what could be the two most famous remnants of Kennedy’s last day. The pink suit, bloodstained and perfectly preserved in a vault in Maryland, is banned from public display for 100 years. The pillbox — removed at Parkland Hospital while Mrs. Kennedy waited for doctors to confirm what she already knew — is lost, last known to be in the hands of her personal secretary, who won’t discuss its whereabouts.

Looking back at the grainy footage of the first couple as the dark limousine, top down, rounded the turn from Houston to Elm, it’s hard not to hope for a different outcome. As long as she is wearing that hat, the world is still intact. Then, inevitably, comes the lurch of his body, the unforgettable flash of pink scrambling in panic across the trunk.

All that day, her clothing bore witness to history. Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent assigned to protect the first lady, remembered resting his hands on the suit’s trembling shoulders, the left side of the skirt wet with blood where she had cradled her husband’s head.

Lady Bird Johnson, wife of Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who was riding in the motorcade’s third car, recalled for investigators her memory of Secret Service agents frantic to get the president inside Parkland Hospital while his wife bent over him, refusing to let go: “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 on the back seat.”

Inside the hospital, the hat came off. “While standing there I was handed Jackie’s pillbox hat and couldn’t help noticing the strands of her hair beneath the hat pin. I could almost visualize her yanking it from her head,” Mary Gallagher, the first lady’s personal secretary who accompanied her to Dallas, later wrote in her memoir.

Despite urgings from staff and handlers to “clean up her appearance,” Mrs. Kennedy refused to get out of her bloodied clothes, according to biographer William Manchester’s detailed account of the assassination, “The Death of a President.”

“Why not change?” one aide prompted.

“Another dress?” the president’s personal physician suggested.

Mrs. Kennedy shook her head hard. “No, let them see what they’ve done.”

The suit was never cleaned and never will be. It sits today, unfolded and shielded from light, in an acid-free container in a windowless room inside the National Archives and Records Administration’s complex in Maryland; the precise location is kept secret. The temperature hovers between 65 and 68 degrees, the humidity is 40 percent, the air is changed six times an hour.

“It looks like it’s brand new, except for the blood,” said senior archivist Steven Tilley, one of a handful of people to see the suit since that day in Dallas.
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Despite the chaos, aides managed to secure virtually all of the Kennedys’ belongings back at the White House by nightfall. The pink hat seemed to hopscotch from Dallas to D.C., according to Manchester’s account. There it was in a heavy paper sack, cradled in the arms of one of the president’s baggage handlers aboard Air Force One. While Mrs. Kennedy accompanied the coffin to Bethesda Naval Hospital for the autopsy, the hat was taken to the executive mansion.

A White House policeman was instructed to give it to Agent Hill but handed it by mistake to Robert Foster, the agent assigned to protect the Kennedy children. Foster, who died in 2008, told Manchester he took the bag to the Map Room and opened it, immediately recognizing the contents.

Mrs. Kennedy returned to the White House early Nov. 23. She took off the suit and bathed. Her maid, Providencia Paredes, told Manchester that she put the clothing in a bag and hid it.

Sometime in the next six months, a box arrived at the National Archives’ downtown headquarters, where such treasures as the Constitution and Bill of Rights are kept. In it was the suit, blouse, handbag and shoes, even her stockings, along with an unsigned note on the letterhead stationery of Janet Auchincloss, Mrs. Kennedy’s mother: “Jackie’s suit and bag worn Nov. 22, 1963.”

No hat.

The box was the one originally sent by the dressmaker, addressed to “Mrs. John F. Kennedy, The White House,” but wrapped now in brown paper. Archivists put all of it in a climate-controlled vault in stack area 6W3, where it remained for more than 30 years.

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Where is hat?

And the hat? Agent Hill, 79, who famously lunged onto the back of the limousine that day to protect the first lady, had the answer.

“I know what happened to the hat,” he said in a phone interview. “I gave it to Mary Gallagher.”

Gallagher, 83, and Paredes, the maid who boxed up the clothes, together have posted for Internet auction a long list of items that once belonged to Mrs. Kennedy: a pink nightgown: $300-$400; a used tube of “Arden Pink” lipstick and some pale blue stationery: $200-$300; an unopened pack of Greek cigarettes and matchbook: $100-$200. (Mrs. Kennedy was a closet smoker.)

Reached by phone, Gallagher refused to discuss the hat.

The archives’ vast collection includes the president’s shirt as it was cut off by the medical team, the tie nicked by a bullet, his white lace-up back brace. Even the contents of Parkland Hospital’s Trauma Room One, where he was pronounced dead at 1 p.m. Texas time, are in a cave in Kansas.

But the location of the hat is a little-known mystery no one is working to solve. Kennedy historians contacted for this story were surprised to learn it’s missing.

They suspect it was sold to a private collector, or stuck away in somebody’s attic, lost to the nation, a hole in history.- Source