IT’S ABOUT THE clothes only in the sense that Moby Dick is about the whale. The 70 outfits from Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s White House wardrobe, on display at Boston’s John F. Kennedy Library and Museum through February 28, 2002, first drew large crowds this past summer at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The reasons for the show’s popularity are not hard to grasp: it does nothing less than portray the First Lady’s sartorial savvy as a metaphor for her self-created role as the Kennedy administration’s image-maker and goodwill ambassador. Jacqueline Kennedy’s singular flair for expression while in the spotlight shining on the nation’s highest office is all the more remarkable now, as recent administrations have increasingly resorted to polling and market analysis to make decisions about everything from hairstyles to policy. And now, in view of recent events, Jackie’s uncalculated, highly personal style seems as refreshingly simple as the Cold War itself, which intensified during her husband’s administration. Compared with our current war against elusive terrorists and religious extremists, the Kennedy-era battle against Communism seems somehow clean-spirited, even noble — much like Jackie herself.

Four decades have passed since she became First Lady, and seven years have gone by since her death, yet Jacqueline Kennedy still somehow taps a collective yearning for unvarnished glamour. Judging from comments inscribed in the Kennedy Library guest book just outside the exhibit — "inspiring," "just what we need right now" — people are again finding comfort in a woman whose grace united a grieving nation during a time of tragedy, and thus became a generation’s cultural touchstone. Oddly, Americans still reeling from the horror of September 11 can find sources of pride and solace in the quiet rooms of the Kennedy Library exhibit, which opened September 15. Jackie’s clothes, classic and timeless, testify to her enduring capacity to bind and console us.

In 1961, the public yearned for the promise of youth, vitality, and vision. The Kennedy "mystique" was the antithesis of the stodgy style of the post-war Truman and Eisenhower years. Just 31 years old when her husband won the presidency, Jackie brought toddlers into the White House for the first time in a century. At the same time, she embodied aristocratic elegance, good breeding, and Continental-style glamour. Hers was a decidedly European sensibility: she painted whimsical watercolors, rode horses with aplomb, spoke fluent Spanish and French, appreciated art, architecture, and literature. As a 22-year-old college student, she wrote in an award-winning essay for Vogue magazine that she wished she’d known three people: Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Sergei Diaghilev. That fundamentally aesthetic orientation to the world governed her entire life. Jackie viewed art as the cornerstone of civilization, and she would no doubt be pleased to know that her primary legacy is that of a patron of the arts.

The Kennedy era was liberal in the classic sense: it brought together scholars and philosophers, writers and diplomats for open exchange. At famous dinners orchestrated by Jackie, guests would be seated at round tables, to better facilitate conversation. In this way, her celebrated style blended perfectly with her husband’s political vision.

This sort of modern patrician liberalism has more or less faded from view. Indeed, if the exhibition strikes a chord of nostalgia, it is by its fawning regard for the Kennedys’ ethic of noblesse oblige. Perhaps we are taken with the Kennedys’ aristocratic sense of responsibility because it hasn’t taken root in the White House since — and is unlikely to do so any time soon in this age of pseudo-populism.

How refreshing Kennedy-style liberalism seems in light of recent presidential campaigns. Today it is mandatory for candidates to hold intimate chats with Oprah and to joke good-naturedly with Dave and Jay, just as they must court the conservative religious right and avoid close association with the L-word. As a result, we get George W. Bush in a 10-gallon hat and Al Gore in a pair of stiff jeans — two scions of privilege pretending to be regular Joes. We get Tipper Gore banging away on the drums and Laura Bush seated on a bale of hay chatting away about her husband in a Texas barn. These are the images that play in Peoria, we’re told. And we know that the stars of the Reagan-, Clinton-, and Bush-administration inaugurals were Hollywood celebrities, moneymen, and the nouveau riche.

One wonders whether campaign handlers today would tell a Jackie Kennedy — who felt most comfortable in the cosmopolitan world of musicians, artists, writers, and scholars — that her Cassini-created splendor was too ostentatious for a politician husband trying to avoid the tax-and-spend-Democrat label? Would she be advised that two of the three men named in her award-winning essay for Vogue — Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire — were homosexual, which might cost votes in the Bible belt? Would she be pressured to shrink herself to fit the small screen, and compress her worldly intellectualism into sound bites?