Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

I

Introduction

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929-1994), wife of the 35th president of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Admired for her elegance and taste while in the White House, she won further admiration for her courage following the assassination of her husband in 1963. Five years after his death, she married Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, known as Jackie, was born to wealthy parents in Southampton, Long Island, New York. She attended a fashionable boarding school in Connecticut, Miss Porter’s School, and went on to Vassar College. After a junior year abroad in Paris, she spent her senior year at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., graduating in 1951 with a major in French literature. She soon took a job as a photojournalist for the Washington Times-Herald newspaper and met John Kennedy, then a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts. Kennedy had won election to the Senate by the time he and Bouvier were married in 1953. She gave birth to their daughter Caroline Bouvier Kennedy in 1957 and to their son John, Jr., in 1960, shortly after her husband’s victory in the U.S. presidential election. A previous daughter was stillborn in 1956, and a son, Patrick, died two days after his birth in 1963.

II

White House Years

John Kennedy, at 43, was the youngest man ever elected to the U.S. presidency, and Jackie Kennedy was only 31 when she became First Lady. The couple brought youth and glamour to the White House. Jacqueline Kennedy impressed her own style on state occasions, to which she frequently invited writers, scientists, artists, and musicians, thereby raising the status of the arts and sciences in the United States. Her stylish wardrobe also drew much publicity.

Caroline and John, Jr., were the first youngsters to live in the White House in nearly 50 years. Magazines and newspapers often published pictures of the photogenic family, and television took Americans on a White House tour with Jacqueline Kennedy as their host. Many people became enamored of this vibrant young family. Such was Jackie’s own popularity that her husband quipped, on a state visit to France, that he was the man who had accompanied Jackie Kennedy to Paris.

---

---

While living at the White House, Kennedy devoted herself to restoring the building and turning it into the national treasure she believed it should be. Over the years, many of its historic furnishings had been dispersed or put into storage. She searched through basements for stored or discarded items, encouraged donations of American and European period furniture, and oversaw publication of a tour guide for White House visitors.

In 1963 Kennedy was at her husband’s side as his presidential motorcade wound through Dallas, Texas, and an assassin’s bullet pierced his skull. Millions mourned with her as television broadcast the state funeral that she planned.

III

After the White House

In 1968 she surprised many of her admirers by marrying jet-setting multimillionaire Aristotle Onassis. Some claimed that only he could provide the privacy she craved from the paparazzi (celebrity photographers) who dogged her after she left the White House. Although rumors circulated that the couple spent more time apart than together, they were still married when Onassis died in 1975. His widow moved to New York City, where she worked as a book editor from 1978 until her death from lymphatic cancer.