Phnom Penh, Cambodia
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In 1967, 4 years after her husband President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and he or she grew to become the most recognizable widow in the world, Jacqueline Kennedy visited Cambodia.
When she arrived in the capital metropolis of Phnom Penh amid a generation-defining battle, there was no query the place she would keep — the Hotel Le Royal, the toniest handle on the town. Opened in 1929 and inaugurated by the then-King Sisowath Monivong, the lodge got here by its identify actually.
In honor of the former first woman’s go to, the lodge’s bartender created a particular cocktail: the Femme Fatale. Made with cognac, Champagne and crème de fraise, then garnished with a frangipani flower, it’s served in a long-stemmed coupe glass. It’s fizzy, elegant, and the good factor to drink whereas hiding from Phnom Penh’s scorching, humid climate.
Four many years later, a lot about the lodge has modified — however the Femme Fatale stays on the bar menu.
The story doesn’t cease there.
Much of the lodge’s finery was dumped into storage following the nation’s brutal civil battle, untouched. After the property was bought by the Raffles group in 1996, a employee supposedly discovered the precise glass Kennedy had drunk her Femme Fatale out of — due to a mark from her lipstick on the rim — and rescued it amid the lodge renovations.
Now, the glass, together with a number of images of Kennedy’s journey to Phnom Penh, is displayed in a vitrine outdoors the lodge’s Elephant Bar.
The lodge additionally has a Kennedy suite, the place a portrait of the former first woman hangs, seeming to look admiringly over the pristine white linens and funky tile flooring. A classic copy of the Life journal situation about Kennedy’s Cambodia journey, sourced by Raffles on eBay, is on a hallway desk, already opened to the related web page.
“I call that her transitional period,” says Elizabeth J. Natalle, creator of “Jacqueline Kennedy and the Architecture of First Lady Diplomacy,” of Kennedy’s post-White House, pre-remarriage years.
At that time, Kennedy was arguably the most well-known and talked-about girl on the planet. Her love life was as scrutinized as her outfits.
Accompanying Kennedy on her journey was David Ormsby-Gore, a British aristocrat and former ambassador to the United States. The two visited Angkor Wat, the huge UNESCO-listed complicated in northern Cambodia, collectively.
Though they stored their relationship low profile at the time, letters auctioned off after each their deaths revealed the depth of their love – together with the reveal that Kennedy had turned down Ormsby-Gore’s marriage proposal.
Natalle believes that Kennedy was affected by undiagnosed PTSD after witnessing her husband’s assassination. But whereas Kennedy dreaded the thought of using in an open-top automobile convoy – much like the one she’d been touring in on November 22, 1963 – she agreed to do it as a goodwill gesture towards Prince Sihanouk, her host in the Southeast Asian nation.
Yes, she was a star, however she was not a politician. Therefore, she carried a novel sort of smooth energy, notes Natalle. As a widow, she possessed a revered dignity, and as she was now not the sitting first woman, her place was impartial.
“Soft power is the antidote to military policy and official government diplomacy,” says Natalle. “First ladies have a kind of credibility just because they’re first ladies. They’re not an official part of the government, they don’t have a job description, they’re not in the Constitution.”
Though visiting Cambodia whereas an American-backed battle was raging throughout the border in Vietnam could have appeared like a political gesture, Kennedy insisted that she was merely in the nation to go to Angkor Wat and different historic websites.
Her trip was a rigorously orchestrated efficiency. Public opposition to the Vietnam War in the US was at its peak, and official relations between the US and Cambodia had been reduce off in 1965. As a consequence, Kennedy wanted an official invitation from the king to get into the nation.
Then there was the query of logistics. There had been no direct flights between the US and Cambodia – a reality nonetheless true to today. Finally, an answer: she flew on a business flight to Bangkok, then was taken on to Phnom Penh through a US Air Force C54 that had been granted particular permission to land.
A Francophone, Kennedy had helped her husband throughout his political profession by translating French books and political speeches, together with materials about Cambodia, which had been half of French Indochina. According to Natalle, she was recognized for granting entry and interviews to French-speaking journalists on her travels, even when she snubbed the English-speaking ones.
And she’d lengthy been referred to as a lover of history, artwork and structure following related “transitional era” visits to nations like Greece and Spain.
“She was interested in ancient civilizations,” says Natalle. “Angkor Wat would probably be part of that. It was the way in which she would praise her hosts and the site itself as something of significance.”
Sitting close to the banks of the Ton Le Sap River and two miles from the Royal Palace, the Hotel Le Royal has lived many lives.
It survived the darkest interval in trendy Cambodian history, when the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge managed the nation. From 1975 to 1979, at least 1.7 million Cambodians had been killed by the regime. Many Cambodians had been pushed out of or escaped from Phnom Penh into the countryside.
After the Khmer Rouge years, Hotel Le Royal was renamed the Solidarity Hotel and performed host to worldwide journalists and help staff who had been flowing into the nation. When the Raffles group purchased the lodge in the Nineteen Nineties, they settled on the identify Raffles Hotel Le Royal.
After all these years, the Raffles Le Royal stays an essential handle in Phnom Penh. Angelina Jolie, Charlie Chaplin and Charles DeGaulle have additionally stayed there.
In 2012, President Barack Obama visited Cambodia as the closing cease on a diplomatic tour round Southeast Asia and was photographed sitting on a sofa at the Raffles, speaking on his cellphone.
He wasn’t in the Kennedy Suite, although.