Kitty Kelley - Capturing Camelot: Stanley Treticks Iconic Images of the Kennedys

I MET S TANLEY T RETICK IN 1981, AND UNTIL THE DAY HE DIED, HE WAS AN IRREPLACEABLE PART OF MY LIFE. WHICH IS NOT TO SAY THAT I KNEW EVERYTHING THERE WAS TO KNOW ABOUT STANLEY.

I remember once asking what he kept in the Marine Corps locker that served as a coffee table in his study. He winked and said, nude pictures. I took him at his word, but when he died in 1999, I inherited that battered old trunk and found instead a treasure of keepsakes from his days with John F. Kennedy. Stanley had saved the PT boat tie clasp that JFK had given him and the Lucite box with the gold airplane that was Kennedys gift to those who had flown with him on the Caroline during the 1960 presidential campaign. There were signed photographs from the President and his wife, plus all their handwritten notes and letters and the telegram of congratulations they had sent to his wedding reception. In addition to the Kennedy buttons and bumper stickers, campaign schedules and press credentials, I found a sheaf of personal memos he had typed during those years, illustrating how he gained such personal access for his photographs.

One memo was Notes on JFK, another was Impressions of JFK, and the most amusing was a nine-page memo entitled Two Weeks of Agony with Jacqueline Kennedy in England, about his frustrations in trying to accommodate the former First Lady during her trip to dedicate the JFK Memorial at Runnymede.

The PT boat pin was distributed by the Kennedy campaign as a reminder of JFKs military service aboard PT-109 during World War II, when his patrol torpedo boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. Lieutenant Kennedy saved one of his men, towing him ashore with a life jacket strap clenched between his teeth. Six days later native islanders found them and went for help, delivering a message Kennedy had carved into a piece of coconut shell. The next day the crew was rescued. When he returned home, JFK was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his leadership and courage.

The Lucite box with a gold airplane engraved Caroline presented to those who traveled with the candidate during the 1960 campaign. This box says: Stanley Tretick: Presidential Campaign1960. John Kennedy.

Perhaps the most intriguing item in the trunk was a yellow linen guest towel cross-stitched in sky blue with JFKs initials that might have hung in a powder room. None of Stanleys memos mentions the towel or how he came by it, nor is it referred to in any of the letters he saved. I began to wonder if maybe he had pinched it on one of his visits to the Kennedy estate in Hyannis Port. Perhaps Jacqueline Kennedy had given it to him? Either is possible, I suppose, but it seems unlikely the former First Lady would bestow such a delicate personal item on a photographeralthough after the Presidents death she gave her secretary, Mary Barelli Gallagher, one of JFKs white shirts and sent one of his ties to Cecil Stoughton, the White House photographer, so it is conceivable that she may have given Stanley the monogrammed guest towel. I found a handwritten note in the trunk that said simply: StanleyThank you. Love, Jackie, which could have accompanied the towel; then again, that note could have been for one of the many photographs hed given her over the years.

O F ALL THE STORIES S TANLEY told me I dont recall him ever mentioning the JFK towel, but I do remember him driving me through a ghetto corridor in Washington, D.C., and pointing to a building that looked abandoned to rats.

See that towel? he asked, indicating a broken window stuffed with a filthy terry-cloth rag. Thats where I lived. He shook his head with dismay. That towel says it all.

It was hard to equate the man wearing a Cartier watch and driving a sleek BMW with ragged poverty, but by then Stanley had traveled a long way from grinding impoverishment. The son of an itinerant salesman and an emotionally unstable mother, he was born Aaron Stanley Tretick, the oldest of three children, on July 21, 1921. He was reared by his mothers parentshis grandfather was a rabbi who read him the Torah every day, while his pragmatic grandmother tried to steer him toward something her family had never known: financial security. After he graduated from high school, she pushed him to marry the jewelers daughter.

When I told my grandmother I wanted to be a photographer, she spat on the floor. Pa-tooey on pictures, she said. Bernice has diamonds.

The towel soon became a kind of shorthand between us, a way to define someones street cred. One day Stanley ran into Ben Bradlee, then executive editor of The Washington Post, who mentioned in passing that one of his star editors was a Yalie. Months later