Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Early Life

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, née Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, also called (1953–68) Jacqueline Kennedy, byname Jackie, was an American first lady (1961–63), the wife of John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, who was noted for her style and elegance. Her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, was one of the wealthiest men in the world.

Jacqueline was the elder of two daughters of Janet Lee and John (“Black Jack”) Bouvier III, a stock speculator. As a child she developed the interests she would still relish as an adult: horseback riding, writing, and painting. In 1942, after her parents had divorced and her mother married Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr., a wealthy lawyer, Jacqueline divided her time between the family's Merrywood estate in Virginia and Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island.

From age 15 she attended boarding school; she enrolled at Vassar College in 1947. During her junior year abroad, while studying at the Sorbonne, she polished her French and solidified her affinity for French culture and style, which she sometimes associated with her adored father. She graduated from George Washington University in 1951 and took a job as a reporter-photographer at the Washington Times-Herald.

In 1951 Jacqueline met John F. Kennedy, a popular congressman from Massachusetts. On September 12, 1953, they wed in St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church in Newport, Rhode Island. The early years of their marriage included considerable disappointment and sadness. John underwent spinal surgery, and she suffered a miscarriage and delivered a stillborn daughter. Their luck appeared to change with the birth of a healthy daughter, Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, on November 27, 1957. John Kennedy was elected president in 1960, just weeks before Jacqueline gave birth to a son, John F. Kennedy, Jr.

The youngest first lady in nearly 80 years, Jacqueline left a distinct mark on the job. During the 1960 election campaign she hired Letitia Baldrige, who was both politically savvy and astute on matters of etiquette, to assist her as social secretary. Through Baldrige, Jacqueline announced that she intended to make the White House a showcase for America's most talented and accomplished individuals, and she invited musicians, actors, and intellectuals—including Nobel Prize winners—to the executive mansion.

As an Icon

Her most enduring contribution was her work to restore the White House to its original elegance and to protect its holdings. She established the White House Historical Association, which was charged with educating the public and raising funds, and she wrote the foreword to the association's first edition of The White House: An Historic Guide (1962). To catalog the mansion's holdings, Jacqueline hired a curator from the Smithsonian Institution, a job that eventually became permanent. Congress, acting with the first lady's support, passed a law to encourage donations of valuable art and furniture and made White House furnishings of “artistic or historic importance” the “inalienable property” of the nation, so that residents could not dispose of them at will. After extensive refurbishing, Jacqueline led a nationally televised tour of the White House in February 1962.

During her short time in the White House, Jacqueline became one of the most popular first ladies. During her travels with the president to Europe (1961) and Central and South America (1962) she won wide praise for her beauty, fashion sense, and facility with languages. Alluding to his wife's immense popularity during their tour of France in 1961, President Kennedy jokingly reintroduced himself to reporters as the “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” Parents named their daughters after Jacqueline, and women copied her bouffant hairstyle, pillbox hat, and flat-heeled pumps.

In Dallas 1963

In November 1963 Jacqueline agreed to make one of her infrequent political appearances and accompanied her husband to Texas. (She had just returned from a vacation in Greece following the death of her newborn son, Patrick Bouvier.) As the president's motorcade moved through Dallas, he was assassinated as she sat beside him; 99 minutes later she stood beside Lyndon Johnson in her blood-stained suit as he took the oath of office, an unprecedented appearance by a widowed first lady. On her return to the capital, Jacqueline oversaw the planning of her husband's funeral, using many of the details of Abraham Lincoln's funeral a century earlier. Her quiet dignity (and the sight of her two young children standing beside her during the ceremony) brought an outpouring of admiration from Americans and from all over the world.

Post-Kennedy

Jacqueline moved to an apartment in New York City, which remained her principal residence for the rest of her life. In October 1968 she married the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, but she continued to spend considerable time in New York, where her children attended school. Although the bulk of his estate went to his daughter after his death in 1975, she inherited a sum variously estimated at $20 million to $26 million.

Returning to an old interest, Jacqueline worked as a consulting editor at Viking Press and later as an associate and senior editor at Doubleday. She also maintained her interest in the arts and in landmark preservation. Although her name was linked romantically with different men, her constant companion during the last 12 years of her life was Maurice Tempelsman, a Belgian-born diamond dealer.

Soon after she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 1994, she died in her New York City apartment. After a funeral at St. Ignatius Roman Catholic Church on Park Avenue, she was buried in Arlington National Cemetery beside John F. Kennedy and the two children who had predeceased them. After her one surviving son, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was killed in a plane accident in July 1999, many books and articles assessed the recurring role of tragedy in the Kennedy story. But it had been a story of luck and glamour as well, and the name she applied to her husband's short administration, “Camelot,” seemed to capture much of her essence as well.

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