Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

• 1. Introduction

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  Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis appeared 27 times on the annual Gallup list of the ten most admired people of the second half of the twentieth century. Only Billy Graham and Queen Elizabeth II appeared more often. No American president matched her count.

  She was born Jacqueline Lee Bouvier on the 28th of July 1929 and died on the 19th of May 1994. Along the way she was a debutante, a newspaper photographer, the wife of the 35th president of the United States, a widow, the wife of a Greek shipping magnate, and a book editor in New York City.

  Her admirers have called her the most intriguing woman in the world. Her critics once branded her a public sinner. How did a woman who spent barely a day at her first magazine job end up shaping the way the nation looked at its most famous house? Why did the country turn against her, and what brought it back? And what did she build in the years when the cameras refused to leave her alone?

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• 2. Bouvier Beginnings

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  Southampton Hospital, on Long Island, was where Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born in 1929. Her father was a Wall Street stockbroker nicknamed Black Jack, and her mother was a socialite named Janet Norton Lee. A sister, Caroline Lee, followed four years later.

  Her earliest years unfolded in Manhattan and at Lasata, the family's country estate in East Hampton. Her father adored her. He called her the most beautiful daughter a man ever had, and relatives later credited his praise for her independence. She rode horses competitively, took ballet lessons, read constantly, and picked up French, Spanish and Italian. French got special attention at home.

  In 1935 she started at Manhattan's Chapin School. One teacher remembered her as a darling child, the prettiest little girl, very clever, very artistic, and full of the devil. Her mother blamed boredom, since she finished lessons before her classmates did. A warning from the headmistress that her talents would count for nothing without good behavior set her straight.

  Home was less settled. Her father's drinking and affairs strained the marriage, and money worries followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The couple separated in 1936 and divorced four years later, and the press printed intimate details of the split. A cousin, John H. Davis, said she grew prone to withdrawing into a private world of her own.

  Her mother then married Hugh D. Auchincloss Jr., a stockbroker and lawyer. The sisters missed the ceremony because it was arranged in a hurry and wartime rules limited travel. Three stepsiblings arrived, and she grew closest to Hugh, called Yusha, who became a trusted confidant. The family's base shifted to his Merrywood estate in McLean, Virginia, with summers at Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island. Among the Auchinclosses she sometimes felt like an outsider, a Catholic and a child of divorce in a circle where neither was common.

  She attended the Holton-Arms School in Washington from 1942 to 1944, then Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut, from 1944 to 1947. She picked Miss Porter's partly because boarding there put distance between her and the Auchinclosses. Her senior yearbook praised her wit, her horsemanship, and her unwillingness to become a housewife. A friend from childhood, Nancy Tuckerman, later became her social secretary at the White House.

  In the fall of 1947 she entered Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She had wanted Sarah Lawrence, closer to the city, but her parents insisted on Vassar. She disliked the location and spent weekends back in Manhattan. Hearst columnist Igor Cassini had already named her debutante of the year. Her junior year, 1949-1950, took her to the University of Grenoble and the Sorbonne in Paris. She then transferred to George Washington University and graduated in 1951 with a degree in French literature.

  While still a student she won a twelve-month junior editorship at Vogue, chosen over several hundred other women. Before starting, she toured Europe with her sister Lee. That trip became One Special Summer, her only autobiography and the only published work with her own drawings. On her first morning at Vogue, the managing editor told her to quit and go back to Washington. Biographer Barbara Leaming says he worried about her marriage prospects, since at 22 she was thought old to be unmarried. She took his advice and left after a single day.

  Back at Merrywood, a family friend steered her to the Washington Times-Herald. Editor Frank Waldrop hired her as a part-time receptionist. Within a week she asked for harder work, and city editor Sidney Epstein made her the paper's Inquiring Camera Girl at $25 a week. She asked passersby a witty question and photographed them for print beside their answers.

  In January 1952 she announced an engagement to a young stockbroker, John Husted, after only a month of dating. Three months later she ended it, having decided he was immature and boring. Her assignments that autumn included an interview with six-year-old Tricia Nixon, a few days after the girl's father, Richard Nixon, won the vice presidency. Eight years later he would face her future husband for the presidency.

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• 3. Marrying a Senator

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  A dinner party hosted by journalist Charles L. Bartlett in May 1952 brought her together with Congressman John F. Kennedy. She liked his looks, his wit and his wealth. They also shared Catholicism, a love of reading and writing, and time spent living abroad. He was busy running for the Senate in Massachusetts, and after the November election he proposed.

  She did not answer at once. The Times-Herald had sent her to London to cover the coronation of Elizabeth II, and she spent a month in Europe before saying yes. She then resigned from the paper. The engagement was announced on the 25th of June 1953, when she was 24 and he was 36.

  The wedding took place on the 12th of September 1953 at St. Mary's Church in Newport, with Boston's Archbishop Richard Cushing celebrating Mass. An estimated 700 guests attended the ceremony and 1,200 the reception at Hammersmith Farm. New York designer Ann Lowe made the bride's dress and the attendants' gowns, though Jacqueline Kennedy never credited her. The dress is now held at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. After a honeymoon in Acapulco, the couple settled at Hickory Hill in McLean.

  The early marriage brought hard luck. John Kennedy suffered from Addison's disease and chronic back pain made worse by a war injury, and in late 1954 he survived a near-fatal spinal operation. His wife miscarried in 1955. In August 1956 she gave birth to a stillborn daughter, Arabella. The couple sold Hickory Hill to his brother Robert and bought a townhouse on N Street in Georgetown.

  Daughter Caroline was born on the 27th of November 1957, while her father was campaigning for reelection to the Senate. The family posed for the cover of Life magazine dated the 21st of April 1958. Campaigning together was partly a way to end the physical separation that marked their first five years. Kenneth O'Donnell recalled crowds twice as big when she came along. Her mother-in-law, Rose Kennedy, saw a shy woman who was no natural-born campaigner. After his reelection in November 1958, John called her simply invaluable.

  In July 1959, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. met her for the first time at Hyannis Port. He found tremendous awareness, an all-seeing eye and a ruthless judgment. That year she also advised her husband on his wardrobe for the coming presidential run, and she traveled to Louisiana to help win support from Edmund Reggie.

  John Kennedy announced his candidacy on the 2nd of January 1960 at the Russell Senate Office Building. Soon after, she became pregnant. Because earlier pregnancies had been high-risk, she stayed home in Georgetown and contributed by writing a weekly syndicated column called Campaign Wife. She also answered mail and gave interviews. Her clothes drew intense attention anyway. Women's magazines ranked her among the twelve best-dressed women in the world, while her taste for French designers earned bad press.

  She watched the first televised presidential debate, on the 26th of September 1960, from Hyannis Port. A few days afterward she called Schlesinger to ask for his help, and John Kenneth Galbraith's, with ideas and speeches for the third debate. On the 29th of September, she and her husband gave a joint interview on Person to Person.

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• 4. Restoring the White House

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  In 1941 a grade-school tourist named Jacqueline Bouvier walked through the White House. Two decades later, shortly before her husband's inauguration, Mamie Eisenhower showed her around again, and she was dismayed. The rooms held undistinguished furniture with little historical meaning. Making the house historically authentic became her first big project as first lady.

  She started on her first day in residence, with interior decorator Sister Parish. Together they added a kitchen on the family floor and new rooms for the children. The $50,000 appropriated for the work was nearly gone at once. To keep going, she created a fine arts committee to oversee and fund the restoration and consulted Henry du Pont, an expert in early American furniture. A White House guidebook was published, and its sales paid for the work.

  With Rachel Lambert Mellon, she oversaw the redesign and replanting of the Rose Garden and the East Garden. She also helped halt the demolition of historic buildings around Lafayette Square, including the Renwick Building, now part of the Smithsonian Institution. Her concern reached abroad too. She drew international attention to the thirteenth-century BC temples of Abu Simbel, which the Aswan Dam threatened with flooding.

  Departing presidents had long taken furnishings home, which explains why so few original pieces remained. She wrote personally to potential donors to track down missing items. She also started a Congressional bill making White House furnishings the property of the Smithsonian Institution. The institutions she created included the White House Historical Association, the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, the White House Endowment Trust and the White House Acquisition Trust. She was also the first presidential spouse to hire a White House curator.

  On the 14th of February 1962, she walked CBS News correspondent Charles Collingwood through the house for American television. She told viewers the White House should hold as fine a collection of American pictures as possible, because it is the setting in which the presidency is presented to the world. Some 56 million Americans watched, and the film was later sent to 106 countries. It won a special Trustees Award at the 1962 Emmys, accepted on her behalf by Lady Bird Johnson. No other first lady has won an Emmy.

  She said her first duty was looking after the president and the children. She still hired the first press secretary any presidential wife had employed, Pamela Turnure, and tightly controlled her children's exposure to photographers. Academic Maurine Beasley later noted that the idealized image of her set an unrealistic expectation that her successors would struggle to meet. One of her goals went unrealized, a Department of the Arts. She did help lay the groundwork for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, both established under Johnson.

  Abroad, she traveled more than any earlier first lady, sometimes alone. Before the 1961 state visit to France, a television special was filmed in French on the White House lawn. In Paris she showed off her French and her knowledge of the country's history, and she gave a speech in French at the American University in Paris. Time magazine summed up the trip by noting that there was also that fellow who came with her. The president joked that he was the man who had accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and that he had enjoyed it. France awarded her the Legion of Honor, making her the first first lady and first American woman to receive it.

  The next stop was Vienna, where Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was asked to shake the president's hand for a photograph. He replied that he would like to shake hers first. He later sent her a puppy named Pushinka, the offspring of Strelka, a dog that had flown on a Soviet space mission.

  In 1962, at the urging of Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, she toured India and Pakistan with her sister Lee Radziwill. Life correspondent Anne Chamberlin judged that she conducted herself magnificently, though her crowds were smaller than those drawn by Dwight Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth II. She also visited Afghanistan, Austria, Canada, Colombia, the United Kingdom, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Turkey and Venezuela. Unlike her husband, she spoke fluent Spanish and used it with Latin American audiences. Pakistan's president, Ayub Khan, had learned of her love of horses during a visit to the White House. He sent her a horse named Sardar.

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• 5. The Jackie Look

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  Oleg Cassini, a French-born American designer and Kennedy family friend, received the commission to build her first lady wardrobe after the 1960 election. From 1961 to 1963 he dressed her for many occasions, including the fawn coat she wore on Inauguration Day, her inaugural gala gown, and outfits for Europe, India and Pakistan. In 1961 she spent $45,446 more on clothes than her husband's $100,000 presidential salary.

  Her own taste ran to French couture, especially Chanel, Balenciaga and Givenchy. When the press criticized her Paris fashions, she wrote to fashion editor Diana Vreeland asking for American designers who could reproduce that look. Her letter said she disliked prints and preferred terribly simple, covered-up clothes. Vreeland suggested Norman Norell, regarded as America's first designer, along with tailor Ben Zuckerman and sportswear designer Stella Sloat. She had originally wanted a purple wool Zuckerman coat for Inauguration Day, based on a Pierre Cardin design. She wore it instead on her tour of the White House with Mamie Eisenhower.

  The look itself was clean-cut. It featured knee-length skirts, three-quarter sleeves on notch-collar jackets, sleeveless A-line dresses, above-the-elbow gloves, low-heel pumps and pillbox hats. Commercial manufacturers and a large number of young women copied it. Her bouffant, described as a grown-up exaggeration of little girls' hair, came from Mr. Kenneth, who worked for her from 1954 until 1986. Her bespoke sunglasses, designed by French designer François Pinton, gave rise to the term Jackie O glasses.

  Her jewelry had its own names. A triple-strand pearl necklace by Kenneth Jay Lane became her signature piece. Her husband chose the berry brooch himself and gave it to her several days before his inauguration in January 1961. Jean Schlumberger designed the brooch for Tiffany & Co., with strawberries of rubies and stems and leaves of diamonds. She wore Schlumberger's gold and enamel bracelets so often in the early and mid-1960s that the press called them Jackie bracelets. Her sentimental favorite, though, was a Van Cleef & Arpels wedding ring from her husband.

  Television picked up on the style. Laura Petrie, the Dick Van Dyke Show character played by Mary Tyler Moore, often dressed like her. She wore a mantilla to Mass and in the presence of the Pope. After the White House she moved to wide-leg pantsuits, silk Hermès headscarves and large, round, dark sunglasses. She also began wearing jeans in public.

  The International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame inducted her in 1965. In 2001 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York staged an exhibition titled Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years, using clothes preserved at the Kennedy Library. Time magazine named her to its All-TIME 100 Fashion Icons list in 2012, and Forbes listed her among fashion icons in 2016.

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• 6. Dallas and Camelot

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  Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born on the 7th of August 1963, five weeks before his due date. He arrived by emergency Caesarean section at Otis Air Force Base, near the family's Cape Cod compound. His lungs were not fully developed. Doctors moved him to Boston Children's Hospital, where he died of hyaline membrane disease two days later. The president was with him. His mother, still recovering at Otis, fell into a deep depression, though the loss drew the couple closer.

  Aristotle Onassis, a friend, invited her to recover aboard his yacht. President Kennedy hesitated but agreed, believing it would be good for her. The trip was widely disapproved of in the administration, in Congress and among the public. She returned on the 17th of October 1963 and later said she regretted staying away so long but had been melancholy after the death of her baby.

  On the 21st of November 1963, she and the president left for a political trip to Texas. It was the first time she had joined him on such a trip within the United States. On the morning of the 22nd they flew the short hop from Fort Worth to Dallas's Love Field, accompanied by Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie. She wore a bright pink Chanel suit and a pillbox hat that her husband had chosen. A 9.5-mile motorcade was to carry them to the Trade Mart, where he was due to speak at a lunch.

  She sat to his left in the third row of the presidential car, behind the Connallys. On Elm Street in Dealey Plaza, she heard what she took for a motorcycle backfiring. She understood it was a gunshot only when Governor Connally screamed. Two more shots came within 8.4 seconds, and one struck her husband in the head. She began to climb onto the back of the limousine. Secret Service agent Clinton J. Hill leapt aboard and pushed her back into her seat. Associated Press photographer Ike Altgens captured the moment, and newspapers around the world ran the picture. She later testified that she remembered none of it.

  The car raced 3.8 miles to Parkland Hospital. At her request she was allowed into the operating room. The president never regained consciousness and died at age 46. She declined to change out of her bloodstained clothes. She told Lady Bird Johnson she wanted them to see what they had done to Jack. Still in the pink suit, she stood beside Lyndon Johnson as he took the oath of office on Air Force One. Biographer Robert Caro wrote that Johnson wanted her there to show the legitimacy of his presidency. The suit went to the National Archives in 1964. Under an agreement with her daughter, it will not go on display before 2103.

  She took an active role in planning the state funeral, modeled on Abraham Lincoln's. She insisted on a closed casket, overruling Robert Kennedy. The service was held at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, with burial at nearby Arlington National Cemetery. She walked at the head of the procession and lit the eternal flame at the grave, a flame created at her request. Reporting for the London Evening Standard, Lady Jeanne Campbell said she had given Americans something they had always lacked: Majesty.

  A week after the shooting, Johnson created the Warren Commission under Chief Justice Earl Warren. Ten months later it concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. In private she cared little, saying that even with the right suspect nothing would bring her husband back. She nonetheless gave a deposition.

  On the 29th of November 1963 she gave an interview at Hyannis Port to Theodore H. White of Life magazine. She compared her husband's White House years to Camelot, the mythical court of King Arthur, from the Lerner and Loewe musical. He often played the title song before bed, she said, and she quoted Queen Guinevere to express the loss. White described a magic moment when gallant men danced with beautiful women and artists, writers and poets met at the White House. Historian Robert Dallek suggested the image was a shield against grief that would otherwise have immobilized her. White himself later called it a misreading of history. Whatever its accuracy, the image has been said to tie her family forever to the idea of royalty.

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• 7. Widow, Brother-in-Law, Onassis

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  Lyndon Johnson, hoping to do something nice for Jackie, offered her the ambassadorship to France, a country she loved. She refused, and she also turned down later offers of the posts in Mexico and the United Kingdom. At her request, Johnson renamed the Florida space center the John F. Kennedy Space Center a week after the assassination. She and her children left the White House after two weeks.

  On the 14th of January 1964, she appeared on television from the attorney general's office to thank the public for hundreds of thousands of messages. She spent that winter at Averell Harriman's home in Georgetown. She bought a Georgetown house for her family but sold it the same year. Seeking privacy, she paid $250,000 for a 15th-floor penthouse at 1040 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. She also oversaw the creation of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, designed by I.M. Pei.

  In December 1966, she and Robert Kennedy sued the publisher Harper & Row to block William Manchester's The Death of a President, an account she herself had authorized. The suit settled the next year after Manchester removed passages on the late president's private life.

  In November 1967, Life magazine called her America's unofficial roving ambassador when she visited Cambodia with David Ormsby-Gore, Britain's former ambassador to Washington. They toured Angkor Wat with Chief of State Norodom Sihanouk. Historian Milton Osborne called the visit the start of repair to badly strained relations between Cambodia and the United States. In April 1968 she also attended the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta, despite her reluctance about the crowds.

  Robert Kennedy had been her main support. She noticed that he was the least like his father among the brothers. After her early miscarriage, he, not her husband, had stayed with her in the hospital. After Dallas he became a surrogate father to her children, until his own family and duties pulled him away. He credited her with persuading him to stay in politics. When Art Buchwald asked in 1968 whether he would run for president, he replied that it depended on what Jackie wanted. She encouraged him, though she privately feared for his safety, saying there was so much hatred in the country. She campaigned for him.

  Just after midnight on the 5th of June 1968, a gunman named Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy minutes after he celebrated winning the California Democratic primary. She flew to Los Angeles and joined the family at Good Samaritan Hospital. He died the next day, at 42. Her depression returned. She said that if they were killing Kennedys, her children were targets, and she wanted to leave the country.

  On the 20th of October 1968 she married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek shipping magnate and old friend who could offer the privacy and security she wanted. The wedding took place on Skorpios, his private island in the Ionian Sea. Under her new legal name she lost the Secret Service protection due a president's widow. Speculation that the Catholic church might excommunicate her, since his former wife was still alive, was dismissed by Cardinal Richard Cushing as nonsense. Some still condemned her as a public sinner. Photographers who followed her everywhere nicknamed her Jackie O.

  Public opinion turned sharply against her, since many Americans saw the marriage as a betrayal of the murdered president. The press cast her as a spendthrift and reckless woman, a stark contrast to the shy, selfless mother they had admired. During the marriage the couple divided their time among six residences, including a 15-room Fifth Avenue apartment, a horse farm in Peapack-Gladstone, New Jersey, and Onassis's yacht Christina O. Ted Kennedy visited her children often, and she grew close to him.

  After Onassis's son Alexander died in a plane crash in 1973, his health declined fast. He died in Paris on the 15th of March 1975, aged 69. Greek law sharply limited what a non-Greek spouse could inherit. After two years of legal wrangling, she accepted $26 million from his daughter and sole heir, Christina, and gave up all other claims.

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• 8. Editor and Legacy

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  Viking Press made her a consulting editor in 1975, after she returned for good to the United States. She split her time among Manhattan, Martha's Vineyard and the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port. In 1976 she stunned delegates at the Democratic National Convention by appearing in the visitors' gallery. She resigned from Viking in 1977, after John Leonard of The New York Times faulted her for the publisher's novel Shall We Tell the President? by Jeffrey Archer. Set in a fictional presidency of Ted Kennedy, it described a plot to assassinate him. Two years later she stood beside Rose Kennedy at Faneuil Hall in Boston as Ted announced his challenge to President Jimmy Carter, and she joined the unsuccessful campaign.

  Doubleday then hired her as an associate editor under an old friend, John Turner Sargent, Sr. There she edited Larry Gonick's The Cartoon History of the Universe and the English translation of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, with Martha Levin. She also edited autobiographies by ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, singer-songwriter Carly Simon and fashion icon Diana Vreeland. Dorothy West, a neighbor on Martha's Vineyard and one of the last surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance, finished her novel The Wedding at her urging. A 1998 miniseries starring Halle Berry and Lynn Whitfield adapted it.

  She also persuaded Michael Jackson to write his 1988 memoir Moonwalk and wrote its foreword, though reluctantly. The book topped the New York Times best seller list and sold 1 million copies. By 2010 the Wall Street Journal called it her most successful book. Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers's The Power of Myth was also created under her direction before her death.

  Her activism had a physical footprint in New York. In the 1970s she led a campaign to save Grand Central Terminal from demolition, and a plaque inside acknowledges her role. In the 1980s she helped lead protests against a planned Columbus Circle skyscraper that would have shaded Central Park, and the project was canceled. A later twin-towered building, the Time Warner Center, went up anyway and opened in 2003. She also helped campaign to save Olana, Frederic Edwin Church's home in upstate New York.

  Photographer Ron Galella followed her and took candid pictures without permission. She eventually obtained a restraining order against him, which drew attention to paparazzi photography.

  From 1980 until her death she kept close company with Maurice Tempelsman, a Belgian-born diamond merchant and industrialist who became her adviser. His wife Lilly had been a guest at the Kennedy White House. Their relationship drew little press coverage, and People reported in July 1994 that he had lived in her Fifth Avenue home since 1988. In 1988 her daughter Caroline, married to designer Edwin Schlossberg, had a daughter named Rose. A son, John Bouvier, came in 1993. Caroline recalled never seeing her so happy as when she was around the kids. In the early 1990s she backed Bill Clinton's campaign and advised Hillary Clinton on raising a child in the White House. Hillary Clinton wrote that she was a source of inspiration and advice.

  In November 1993 a fall from her horse during a fox hunt in Middleburg, Virginia, led to the discovery of a swollen lymph node. Doctors diagnosed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma that December, and chemotherapy began in January 1994. By March the cancer had reached her spinal cord, brain and liver. She came home from the hospital on the 18th of May 1994 and died in her sleep at 10:15 the next night, aged 64, with her children beside her. Her son John F. Kennedy Jr. told the press she had been surrounded by friends, family, her books and the things she loved. He said she went in her own way, on her own terms. A funeral Mass was held on the 23rd of May at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, her baptismal parish, with no cameras allowed. President Bill Clinton gave the eulogy at her grave at Arlington, where she lies beside her husband, Patrick and Arabella. Her estate was valued at US$43.7 million.

  By the time she died, she had rebuilt a damaged reputation through a return to New York, her editing work, her grandchildren and charitable causes, and she had mended ties with the Kennedy family. Since 1982 the Siena College Research Institute has asked historians to rank first ladies. She placed 8th of 42 in 1982 and 3rd of 38 in 2008. In the 2008 survey she ranked first for public image. In 1982 she ranked lowest on integrity, but historians' views of her integrity improved markedly in later surveys. Time magazine also named her Woman of the Year for 1962.

  New York named a high school for her in 1995, and the main reservoir in Central Park carries her name. So does the foyer on East 42nd Street at Grand Central. The Municipal Art Society of New York awards a medal in her name, and she made her last public appearance there two months before she died. In 2007 her name and her first husband's traveled to lunar orbit on a list aboard Japan's Kaguya mission, launched on the 14th of September, and aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

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