The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  If the initial response to Jacqueline Kennedy as First Lady was rather cool, what really swung not just Seventh Avenue but the grassroots American public behind her was the extraordinary reception she received from the people of France on the Kennedys’ state visit there in May 1961. She completely stole the show from her husband, charming not only President de Gaulle but the entire French nation with her fluent French and her famous pill-box hats. On the final day of the visit, her husband began his farewell speech, not entirely without justification: “I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”

  For the next two years she was taken unconditionally to the nation’s heart and idolised by press and public alike. She became Washington’s premier hostess, not just in name, as previous Presidents’ wives had been, but in fact, holding fashionably informal parties at a White House which she had restored to its former elegance. But the idyll ended abruptly on November 22, 1963, when Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Kennedy in Dallas.

  Her extraordinary show of courage and dignity in the days immediately following his death — especially as displayed at the President’s funeral — endeared her to the world. For the next few years, she was still prominent in high society, still consistently voted one of the most admired women in America. But in October 1968 the announcement of her engagement to Aristotle Onassis profoundly shocked the American people, not because her remarriage was unexpected, but for her choice of a man more than 20 years her senior, a rough-mannered, jet-setting Greek shipping tycoon.

  Jacqueline Bouvier was the daughter of John Vernou “Black Jack” Bouvier III, a wealthy Wall Street stockbroker. He was a hard-drinking man and a philanderer, but she adored him and it was perhaps for this reason that she tolerated her husband’s later infidelities. Her father and her mother, Janet Lee Bouvier, an attractive society woman, separated when she was eight, divorcing in 1938. Her mother went on to marry Hugh D. Auchincloss, a wealthy lawyer and stockbroker from Washington. From then on Jacqueline played the two men off against each other, enjoying holidays both with her father and her horses in East Hampton, Long Island, and at her stepfather’s estates.

  It was her stepfather’s third marriage. His second had been to Nina Gore Vidal, the mother of the writer, and for this reason, Jacqueline saw a good deal of the young Gore Vidal as a child. Her other early companion was her younger sister Lee, who was to marry an ex-Polish nobleman, and later London businessman, Prince Stanislas “Stas” Radziwill.

  Jacqueline was educated at the fashionable Chapin School in New York, where her mischievousness earned her the label of “the very worst girl in school,” and at Holton-Arms, a blue-chip girls’ school in Washington. She was soon displaying an unusual degree of social poise. When she came out in New York at the age of 17, the society columnist, Igor Cassini, described her as the “Queen Deb of the Year… a regal brunette who has classic features and the daintiness of Dresden porcelain.” But she had no intention of being married off too soon to any of the young men she had grown up with. After two years at Vassar, she spent a year in Paris at the Sorbonne, an experience which gave her a lasting love for the country and put the final polish on her fluent French. Her education was completed at George Washington University.

  Afterwards she won the first prize in a Vogue talent contest, with essays on Diaghilev, Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde. Her prize consisted of spending six months working in the New York office of the magazine and six months in Paris, and, because of the latter period away from home, she decided to turn the offer down. But she was sufficiently interested in journalism to approach Arthur Krock, a friend on The New York Times, who found her a job on the Washington Times-Herald in 1952. This lasted for 18 months and led to interviews as a photojournalist. Jacqueline had her difficulties with the job — “I always forgot to pull out the slide,” she admitted — but pulled off some minor coups, interviewing Pat and Richard Nixon, and the junior senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy.

  It was not the first time they had met. Indeed, by the time of her interview, they had known each other for a year or so, having been brought together by a matchmaking friend at a dinner party in Washington. Their relationship began to intensify after Kennedy had launched his bid for the Senate in 1952 — he was beginning to realise that marriage to the right woman would enhance his political prospects though even then he never played the devoted lover. He once sent her a rather perfunctory postcard from Bermuda saying “Wish you were here. Cheers, Jack,” which Jacqueline held up to friends as her sole piece of courtship correspondence.

  That was not entirely true, for the following year, when she was sent to England to cover the Coronation in 1953, he sent her a telegram: “ARTICLES EXCELLENT. BUT YOU ARE MISSED.” The day after she returned they were engaged and they married in September that year in an extravagant wedding attended by 1,700 friends and family, and officiated over by Archbishop Richard Cushing of Boston, who brought with him the blessing of Pope Pius XII. Not everything went smoothly: Jacqueline’s father, who had planned to walk his daughter down the aisle, had started celebrating a little too early in his hotel room before the ceremony, and, being deemed unfit for the task by Jacqueline’s mother, was replaced by Hugh Auchincloss.

  Jacqueline devoted her early years of marriage to her husband — grooming his appearance, teaching him about art and encouraging him to mend his occasionally abrupt social manners. Already there were early signs of strain: Jacqueline was not particularly interested in politics and saw her role as being primarily one of supporter. She was happy enough to switch from Republican — her family’s party — to Democrat for her husband, though there was no evidence that she ever really understood the politics involved: “She breathes all the political gases that flow around us, but she never seems to inhale them,” Jack once complained. She was also, even at this point, notoriously extravagant with her personal expenditure, particularly on clothes.

  For her part, though she had had no illusions about his cavalier attitude to women before the wedding, she was hurt by her husband’s frequent infidelities. But what rocked the marriage most was Jack’s reaction in 1956 following the ending of her second pregnancy (the first had resulted in a miscarriage in 1955) in a premature and stillborn birth. Jack was then enjoying a Mediterranean cruise and, on being told the news, was reluctant to return home and comfort his wife. It was only when a friend bluntly put it to him, “You better haul your ass back to your wife if you ever want to run for President,” that he caught the next plane out. His behaviour was bad enough to prompt a rumour — never denied — that she had been offered $1 million by her father-in-law, Joe Kennedy, to stay with his son.

  Eventually they did have three children — Caroline in 1957, John in 1960, and later Patrick in 1963, though the latter died almost immediately after his birth. Jacqueline became pregnant with John early in 1960 just after her husband had declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy at first rebuffed his wife’s offer to help him with his campaign — “The American people just aren’t ready for someone like you,” he told her, “I guess we’ll just have to run you through subliminally in one of those quick flash TV spots so no one will notice”.

  This rather unflattering appraisal of her usefulness was not borne out by events. Jacqueline grew, over the next few months, into a very effective campaign wife, holding fund-raising teas and the occasional press conference, even delivering a couple of pretty speeches in her famously whisper-soft voice, and providing her husband with an endless source of campaign jokes on the subject of her heavily pregnant condition. Above all, she was visually pleasing to the electorate and the prospect of a young family in the White House at the dawn of a hopeful new decade was an invigorating one.

  Jackie Kennedy on a family holiday in Ireland in 1967, the year before her marriage to Aristotle Onassis

  Her husband was sworn in as 35th president of the United States on January 20, 1961. At first Jacqueline foun
d it more difficult than she had foreseen to accustom herself to the loss of privacy that went with being First Lady — she complained of feeling like a fish in a fishbowl, or a moth on a windowpane. But she adapted by trying to define her own areas of responsibility. Typically for the period, these centred around the First Lady’s traditional domain, the home, although in her case they went far beyond a little light redecoration.

  She decided to take on the complete restoration of the White House which, she complained, looked as though it had been furnished from “discount stores” — launching a campaign to restore it to its former glory and to make it a “national historical object” which would reveal something of the history of the Presidency, back to Lincoln’s day, through its furnishings, paintings and sculpture. To this end, she persuaded Congress to designate the building a national museum, and enlisted the help of museum directors and historians, forming committees to supervise and fund the project. Finally she published an Historic Guide to the White House, and appeared on television in 1962, watched by 48 million viewers, giving a guided tour through the newly-restored rooms. The success of the project produced an enormous increase in the numbers of visitors to the White House, and proved to be another breakthrough in the public’s growing estimation of her.

  She became a successful political hostess, bringing together in informal dinner parties a stimulating mixture of artists, musicians, businessmen and politicians. But it was perhaps abroad that she was most appreciated. The sort of adulation she received in France set a pattern for future foreign visits, where her poise, charm and effortless linguistic skills endeared her also to the Canadians, to Nikita Khrushchev, who was then holding talks with her husband in Vienna, to the Queen in London, and to the peoples of India and Pakistan which she toured in 1962. She became, for the American public, the nearest thing they had ever had to a queen.

  For all the adulation she was receiving, she could still insist at times on withdrawing from the public gaze, much to her husband’s annoyance. Once she even refused to appear at a Distinguished Ladies’ Reception held in her honour (Jack eventually went in her place). And as rumours about her husband’s infidelities continued to circulate around Washington, Jacqueline and her children, perhaps in retaliation, began to spend more time away from the White House, visiting friends and relatives, hunting from her country estate in Middleburg, Virginia, and spending holidays in Greece and Italy. But the death of her third child, Patrick, in August 1963, less than two days after his birth, drew the family close again, though Jacqueline became depressed.

  To try to raise her spirits, her sister Lee Radziwill invited her in October to join a group for a short break in the Mediterranean on the yacht belonging to the Greek shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis. She accepted, travelling without her husband again, but chaperoned this time by Franklin Roosevelt Jr, then under-secretary for commerce, and his wife Suzanne. It was not the first time she had been on board Christina. That had been in 1957 in Monte Carlo, when the Kennedys had been invited to meet Winston Churchill, Onassis’s guest. The meeting had not been a success — Churchill, then very old, was not on his best form, and Jacqueline later teased her husband, “Maybe he thought you were a waiter”. Nor did Kennedy approve of his sister-in-law’s infatuation with Onassis (who was invited to stay at the White House during Kennedy’s funeral).

  Jacqueline returned from the trip restored and eager to give the world a most ostentatious show of marital happiness for the President’s final public appearance, in Dallas in November that year. The full horror of the scene in Dallas after the shooting — Jacqueline’s suit being drenched with the blood of her dying husband — was captured by television cameras and relayed around the world. Afterwards the fact that she was still wearing the suit during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s swearing-in on Air Force One was seen by a grieving nation as an extraordinarily poignant and fitting tribute to her husband, as too was her quiet dignity at his funeral, when she stood frailly by his graveside supported only by their two small children. In those days immediately following the president’s death and after her very statesman-like television performance when she thanked the American nation for their words of support, she became fixed in the mind of a traumatised nation as the necessary symbol of chief mourner.

  Even after it was all over, it remained difficult for her to escape the attentions of the press, who were now more than ever intent on examining her private conduct, eager for proof of some indiscretion. She decided to move to a New York apartment with her children, and set to work on building up the memorial to her husband. She persuaded President Johnson to change the name of Cape Canaveral to Cape Kennedy (it was changed back in 1973), and launched the project of a John F. Kennedy Memorial Library in Boston.

  She found it hard to completely escape the possessive attentions of the Kennedy clan. She became particularly close to Jack’s brother, Bobby Kennedy, supporting him in his 1968 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. His murder in June that year, which shook her badly, may well have precipitated her rush into marriage with Aristotle Onassis, a man of whom Bobby strongly disapproved. The fact that she managed to keep their romance a secret for so long was partly because of the physical and social incongruities between them — it seemed impossible to outsiders — and partly because she had been seen very publicly with other men — the widowed Lord Harlech, a former ambassador to the United States, and Roswell Gilpatric, under-secretary of defense in the Kennedy administration.

  They were married, after some hard bargaining on Jacqueline’s part over the fine print of a marriage contract, on October 20, 1968, less than a week after word of their engagement had been broken on the front page of the Boston Herald-Traveler. The uproar with which the news was greeted was not the only complication. Onassis was a divorced man, whose first wife was still living, and a member of the Greek Orthodox Church. The Vatican was extremely critical of the match, announcing that Jacqueline Kennedy would be living in a state of mortal sin, despite a refusal to condemn the marriage by Cardinal Cushing who had officiated at her first wedding. Maria Callas, the opera singer, with whom Onassis had been conducting a very open affair for years, was also enraged.

  Ignoring the outcry, the couple were married on Onassis’s private Greek island of Skorpios, ejecting some 90 passengers from a scheduled flight of the bridegroom’s Olympic Airways in order to make the trip.

  It was a measure of the public disapproval of the marriage that stories now began to circulate, indicating that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had been something less than perfect, even as First Lady. Her former personal secretary, Mary Barelli Gallagher, published a book, My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy (1969), in which Jacqueline was portrayed as both extravagant and tight-fisted; a woman who spent more than her husband’s entire salary on herself, yet insisted that her staff shop at stores that gave trading stamps. The book was serialised world-wide.

  The marriage to Onassis, meanwhile, was not going well and before he died, in March 1975, he was reported by The New York Times to be intending to sue for divorce. His bequest to Jacqueline — an income of $250,000 a year — was considerably less than the lump sum of $250 million she had expected, and the will contained a clause that would stop the allowance if she tried to lay claim to the estate. Instead, Onassis left the bulk of his fortune to his daughter Christina, who had never been on friendly terms with her stepmother.

  It was not until September 1977 that the legal wrangle between Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her stepdaughter over the provisions of Aristotle Onassis’s will was finally resolved when Christina, who had reportedly inherited about $250 million, agreed to pay Jacqueline $20 million to settle the matter. This virtually doubled her inheritance, and was considerably more than the $3 million which Onassis had reportedly told friends he was offering for a divorce settlement.

  In her own way, she continued to support the Kennedy clan, turning out for Ted Kennedy in his 1980 bid to win the Democratic nomination from Jimmy Carter, and putting in an appe
arance with the family in Florida in 1991 when William Kennedy Smith was charged with rape — although she always refused to allow her children to be exploited politically. She had never been like any of the other Kennedy women — she was too dignified to join in with the rough family games of touch football — but beneath the elegant, slightly vulnerable façade she shared their survivor instincts.

  She returned, after her second husband’s death, to New York and found her niche there in the last two decades of her life as a publisher, first as an editor at Viking — a connection she severed after a disagreement — and later as an associate editor at Doubleday, where she worked up to her death.

  Her companion in later years was Maurice Tempelsman, whom she had first met in the late 1950s when he had arranged a meeting between Jack Kennedy and Harry Oppenheimer. She tried to protect their privacy and that of her family to the end, although even the smallest appearance or public comment was considered worthy of intense press speculation. Gradually she retired from public view as, in the last few months, she succumbed to the cancer that killed her. One of her last public appearances was hosting a party on board a yacht in Martha’s Vineyard for one of Jack Kennedy’s greatest admirers, Bill Clinton.

  Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is survived by her daughter Caroline and her son John.

  Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, widow of President John F. Kennedy, was born on July 28, 1929. She died from lymphatic cancer on May 19, 1994, aged 64

  DOROTHY HODGKIN

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