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.