Jackie Kennedy’s lipstick-stained glass is just one piece of the history at Phnom Penh’s Raffles Le Royale Hotel

By Lilit Marcus, CNN

Phnom Penh, Cambodia (CNN) — In 1967, four years after her husband President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and she became the most recognizable widow in the world, Jacqueline Kennedy visited Cambodia.

When she arrived in the capital city of Phnom Penh amid a generation-defining war, there was no question where she would stay — the Hotel Le Royal, the toniest address in town. Opened in 1929 and inaugurated by the then-King Sisowath Monivong, the hotel came by its name honestly.

In honor of the former first lady’s visit, the hotel’s bartender created a special 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 perfect thing to drink while hiding from Phnom Penh’s hot, humid weather.

Four decades later, much about the hotel has changed — but the Femme Fatale remains on the bar menu.

The story doesn’t stop there.

Much of the hotel’s finery was dumped into storage following the country’s brutal civil war, untouched. After the property was purchased by the Raffles group in 1996, a worker supposedly found the exact glass Kennedy had drunk her Femme Fatale out of — thanks to a mark from her lipstick on the rim — and rescued it amid the hotel renovations.

Now, the glass, along with a few photos of Kennedy’s trip to Phnom Penh, is displayed in a vitrine outside the hotel’s Elephant Bar.

The hotel also has a Kennedy suite, where a portrait of the former first lady hangs, seeming to look admiringly over the pristine white linens and cool tile floors. A vintage copy of the Life magazine issue about Kennedy’s Cambodia trip, sourced by Raffles on eBay, is on a hallway table, already opened to the relevant page.

From First Lady to global celebrity

“I call that her transitional period,” says Elizabeth J. Natalle, author of “Jacqueline Kennedy and the Architecture of First Lady Diplomacy,” of Kennedy’s post-White House, pre-remarriage years.

At that point, Kennedy was arguably the most famous and talked-about woman on the planet. Her love life was as scrutinized as her outfits.

Accompanying Kennedy on her trip was David Ormsby-Gore, a British aristocrat and former ambassador to the United States. The two visited Angkor Wat, the massive UNESCO-listed complex in northern Cambodia, together.

Though they kept their relationship low profile at the time, letters auctioned off after both their deaths revealed the depth of their love – including the reveal that Kennedy had turned down Ormsby-Gore’s marriage proposal.

Natalle believes that Kennedy was suffering from undiagnosed PTSD after witnessing her husband’s assassination. But while Kennedy dreaded the idea of riding in an open-top car convoy – similar to the one she’d been traveling in on November 22, 1963 – she agreed to do it as a goodwill gesture toward Prince Sihanouk, her host in the Southeast Asian country.

Yes, she was a celebrity, but she was not a politician. Therefore, she carried a unique kind of soft power, notes Natalle. As a widow, she possessed a respected dignity, and as she was no longer the sitting first lady, her position was neutral.

“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 while an American-backed war was raging across the border in Vietnam may have seemed like a political gesture, Kennedy insisted that she was simply in the country to visit Angkor Wat and other historical sites.

Her vacation was a carefully orchestrated performance. Public opposition to the Vietnam War in the US was at its height, and official relations between the US and Cambodia had been cut off in 1965. As a result, Kennedy needed an official invitation from the king to get into the country.

Then there was the question of logistics. There were no direct flights between the US and Cambodia – a fact still true to this day. Finally, a solution: she flew on a commercial flight to Bangkok, then was taken on to Phnom Penh via a US Air Force C54 that had been granted special permission to land.

A Francophone, Kennedy had helped her husband during his political career by translating French books and political speeches, including material about Cambodia, which had been part of French Indochina. According to Natalle, she was known for granting access and interviews to French-speaking journalists on her travels, even if she snubbed the English-speaking ones.

And she’d long been known as a lover of history, art and architecture following similar “transitional era” visits to countries 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.”

A changing hotel for a changing Cambodia

Sitting near 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 period in modern Cambodian history, when the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge controlled the country. From 1975 to 1979, at least 1.7 million Cambodians were killed by the regime. Many Cambodians were 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 played host to international journalists and aid workers who were flowing into the country. When the Raffles group bought the hotel in the 1990s, they settled on the name Raffles Hotel Le Royal.

After all these years, the Raffles Le Royal remains an important address in Phnom Penh. Angelina Jolie, Charlie Chaplin and Charles DeGaulle have also stayed there.

In 2012, President Barack Obama visited Cambodia as the final stop on a diplomatic tour around Southeast Asia and was photographed sitting on a couch at the Raffles, talking on his phone.

He wasn’t in the Kennedy Suite, though.

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