"When President Kennedy was shot that fall, I heard the news over the radio while I was alone painting in my studio… I’d been thrilled having Kennedy as president; he was handsome, young, smart – but it didn’t bother me that much that he was dead. What bothered me was the way the television and radios were programming everybody to feel so sad… It seemed like no matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t get away from the thing."
- Andy Warhol
Not long after the assasination, Warhol recognized that the images of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, or Jackie, as she is now known for all time, had become a commodity much like his ubiquitous Campbell soup can. Her image was repeated so many times that it was firly imprinted in the minds of all Americans, if not all of humanity with access to television and print media. Warhol's relentless repetition of her image positioned Jackie as another American icon, the co-star of "the most powerful man in the Western world", ironically as visually memorable as Marylin Monroe, who was romantically linked with JFK.
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