Letitia Baldrige, 1926–2012

For decades, Letitia Baldrige was the nation’s leading arbiter of etiquette. In her syndicated newspaper column and some 20 books, the former social secretary to the Kennedy White House set out the basics of modern manners. Whoever reached a door first—man or woman—should open it. It was acceptable to cut salad with a knife, but impolite to end an email with an abbreviated “All best.” Baldrige firmly believed that the key to good manners was consideration for others rather than a strict set of rules. “There are major CEOs who do not know how to hold a knife and fork properly,” she said in 1992, “but I don’t worry about that as much as the lack of kindness.”

The daughter of a Republican congressman from Nebraska, Baldrige started her career in the late 1940s with the State Department. As social secretary at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, she made her first faux pas “by unknowingly seating a Frenchman next to his wife’s lover at a dinner party,” said The New York Times. On her return to the U.S., Baldrige was appointed public-relations director at New York jewelry firm Tiffany & Co. Then, in 1960, she received a phone call from a former classmate at Miss Porter’s School, Jacqueline Kennedy, who asked if Baldrige could help out at the White House.

Baldrige oversaw the glamorous state dinners and social gatherings—from jazz concerts to Shakespeare performances—for which the Kennedy White House became famous, said The Washington Post. She resigned in the summer of 1963, exhausted by the long hours. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy brought Baldrige back to the White House less than six months later. She assisted the First Lady in planning her husband’s funeral, “helping to create indelible, dignified images of a nation and a family at grief,” said the Los Angeles Times.

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Baldrige later set up her own public-relations firm and became the nation’s go-to authority on good manners. But she worried she was fighting a losing battle. “We are not passing values on to our children,” Baldrige said in 1999. “[Families] are not sitting down at the dinner table talking about the tiny things that add up to caring human beings.”