John F. Kennedy's Legacy Through The Eyes Of The First Lady's Top Assistant, Providencia Paredes

Barely hours after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 50 years ago, Providencia Paredes received a call.

It was First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

She needed an outfit right away – she was still wearing the now famous pink suit stained with the president’s blood. She also wanted Paredes to be ready to go downstairs with George Thomas, the president’s valet, when the coffin with Kennedy’s body arrived.

“I got a blue outfit and sent it to her right away,” Paredes, 89, said in Spanish in an interview with Fox News Latino on Thursday. “I had just found out earlier about what happened to the President.”

Paredes was the First Lady’s go-to person at the White House.

She was her special assistant — the one who kept meticulous records of her appointments, her thousands of outfits, her telephone calls and postal correspondence.

Paredes, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic as a young woman, spoke to her in Spanish whenever the First Lady, who was fluent in the language, had a speech approaching in a Latino community or in Latin America and wanted to practice.

She traveled with the First Lady on both official and personal trips.

But she was unable to accompany the President and his wife to Dallas because of a family obligation.

“It was rare, because they took me all over the country and the world,” she said.

President Kennedy called Paredes before the Dallas trip, asking her to make sure that the First Lady had an outfit that would be light enough for the city’s warm weather. The result was the pink outfit.

Paredes was a confidante, one to whom Jacqueline Kennedy turned when she mourned as a world watched from a distance.

Jacqueline Kennedy, intensely private, let her tears stream in a conversation with Paredes after she returned to the White House at 4:30 a.m.

“We went into a room, just she and I, and she broke down,” Paredes said. “She said ‘They could have killed me too.’ She said she was very afraid.”

It was her job to give the First Lady support and comfort.

“She always trusted me,” Paredes said. “We were always together.”

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