Evelyn Maurine Norton Lincoln was the personal secretary to John F. Kennedy from his election to the United States Senate in 1953 until his 1963 assassination. Lincoln, who was in the motorcade when Kennedy was assassinated, made a point of visiting Kennedy's grave every year on the anniversary of his death.
Life
Lincoln was born Evelyn Maurine Norton on a farm in Polk County, Nebraska. Her father was John N. Norton, a member of the United States House of Representatives. In 1930, she married Federal worker Harold W. Lincoln, whom she had met as a law student at George Washington University. Lincoln had always aimed to work on Capitol Hill for a future president, and she achieved this ambition in 1953 by becoming personal secretary to the newly-elected senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. She proved suitable for the job, and remained close to the president up to the day of his assassination in Dallas, when she was traveling in the same motorcade. She made it a point to visit Kennedy's grave at Arlington National Cemetery every year afterward on the anniversary of his death. His personal position about this historic event was the following: in a letter written on 7th October, 1994, she wrote: In 1968, she wrote a book, Kennedy and Johnson, in which she wrote that President Kennedy had told her that Lyndon B. Johnson would be replaced as Vice President of the United States. Lincoln wrote of that November 19, 1963 conversation, just before the assassination of President Kennedy, Lincoln went on to write "I was fascinated by this conversation and wrote it down verbatim in my diary. Now I asked, 'Who is your choice as a running-mate?' 'He looked straight ahead, and without hesitating he replied, 'at this time I am thinking about Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.'" According to the National Archives, Lincoln gave away or sold many of Kennedy's documents and artifacts that she had been entrusted with managing by the Kennedy family after Kennedy's assassination. In 2005, a legal settlement was reached that enabled the National Archives, the Kennedy Library, and Caroline Kennedy to recover thousands of pages of documents and other items. Lincoln died at Georgetown University Hospital in 1995, after complications that followed surgery for cancer. Her ashes were placed in a niche at a columbarium in Arlington National Cemetery.
