November 25, 1963. John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. turned three years old. The photograph the world has never been able to forget — the little boy in the short pants and the blue coat, raising his small hand in a salute to his father's casket — was taken on his birthday. His mother stood beside him. She was wearing the pink Chanel suit she had refused to change since Dallas, three days before. "Let them see what they've done," she had said. The blood had dried. She wore it deliberately, as a statement, as a witness. And then she stood beside her son on his third birthday and watched them lower his father into the ground at Arlington National Cemetery. She was 34 years old. She had a six-year-old daughter — Caroline had turned six five days after the assassination — and a son who had just turned three on the day of the funeral. She had two weeks to pack up her life. On December 6, 1963, two weeks after the president's death, the Kennedys departed the White House. In those two weeks, she did something that history remembers very quietly, if at all. She went through her husband's desk — the Oval Office desk, the one he had sat at for a thousand ordinary days — and chose small personal objects to send to the people who had served him. She wrote handwritten notes to each of them. Not one was rushed. Not one was generic. Each note was specific to the person who received it: a word about a memory, a detail that told them she knew who they were and what they had given. She was grieving. She was also paying attention to the people around her who were also grieving. And then she wrote the letter. Just days after her husband's assassination, Kennedy penned a little-known eight-page letter to her successor, Lady Bird Johnson. Eight pages. Handwritten.