Caroline Touts Jackie's Love of Words

By C. Young

12/13/2001 at 10:35 AM EST

Caroline Kennedy took a poetry reading Wednesday at the Countee Cullen Regional Library in Harlem as an opportunity to discuss the public's view of her mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the Associated Press reported. "She really did believe in the power of words," said Kennedy to an audience of about 120, made up largely of junior high and high school students. Though Jackie spent years working as an editor at Viking Press and Doubleday, Kennedy said her mother's fashion sense is often what people remember most about her. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art last spring exhibited about 80 items from Onassis's wardrobe from her years as First Lady. "When many people think of her, they think of her style and her image. But those are just the starting point for me. So I really wanted to share with people, now that she's become a part of history, some of the things that I know were what really made her special," Kennedy said, according to the AP. Kennedy read several selections from a new anthology "The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis." Among them: "The Gift Outright" by Robert Frost, which Frost himself read at JFK's inauguration, and "Let America Be America" by Langston Hughes.