Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

• Born: July 28, 1929
• Birthplace: Southampton, New York
• Died: May 19, 1994
• Place of death: New York, New York

First Lady of the United States

Onassis was one of the most famous First Ladies of the twentieth century. The American people associate her with the glamour and excitement of her husband’s brief presidency, his tragic death, and the troubled history of her celebrated family.

Areas of achievement Government and politics, journalism

Early Life

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (oh-NA-sihs) was born Jacqueline Lee Bouvier to John Vernou Bouvier III and Janet Lee Bouvier. Her father was a stockbroker and a member of a wealthy Roman Catholic family of French heritage. Her mother came from a prominent family in New York whose wealth was based on banking. During her early years, Onassis and her younger sister, Lee, grew up in comfortable circumstances. A local reporter covered her second birthday party, and the press noted her appearances in horse shows with her mother.

The Bouvier marriage encountered problems during the mid-1930’s. After several separations, the couple divorced in 1940. Onassis and Lee lived with their mother but saw their father on weekends. His lessons about social behavior and the way that young women interacted with men made a great impression on Onassis. Her mother later married Hugh D. Auchincloss, also a prosperous stockbroker. Onassis attended Miss Chapin’s School in New York City and entered Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut when she was fifteen. She was presented to society in 1947. One columnist named her his “Debutante of the Year.”

Onassis entered Vassar College in 1947. She spent her junior year in France, attending the University of Grenoble and the Sorbonne in Paris. She finished her college education at George Washington University, from which she was graduated in 1951. She won Vogue magazine’s Prix de Paris contest but declined the award. After a summer trip to Europe in 1951, she worked at the Washington Times-Herald as the Inquiring Photographer, asking questions and taking pictures for a daily feature column. John F. Kennedy was one of the people she interviewed. She was briefly engaged to John G. W. Husted, Jr., but they ended the engagement by mutual agreement.

In 1951, friends introduced Onassis to Congressman John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. They met again the following year, when Kennedy was a candidate for the United States Senate. After his victory in November of 1952, they saw each other more frequently. Their engagement was announced on June 24, 1953. They were married on September 12, 1953, with 750 wedding guests, 3,000 spectators, and extensive news coverage.

Life’s Work

The early years of her marriage to Kennedy were not easy ones for Onassis. She did not like politics or the routine of campaigning, at which her husband excelled. The senator’s health was poor, and she helped him recover from surgery in 1954 and 1955. She provided particular assistance in the writing of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Profiles in Courage (1956). She also had two miscarriages before her first child, Caroline, was born on November 27, 1957.

As Kennedy made his run for the White House in 1960, his wife participated grudgingly in the early days of primary campaigning. Despite her reluctance to campaign, she proved to be very popular with the people who saw her. The announcement of her pregnancy during the summer of 1960 enabled her to limit her campaign activities. A “Campaign Wife” newsletter, written for her by Kennedy aides; radio broadcasts; and several news conferences were her direct contributions to Kennedy’s narrow victory over Richard Nixon. Following the election, her son, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was born on November 25, 1960.

Onassis had mixed feelings about her ceremonial role as the president’s wife. She disliked the term “First Lady” and asked the White House staff not to use it. She was also unwilling to meet on any regular basis the various social and charitable delegations that came to the White House or sought her patronage. In her place she sent Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of the vice president. Onassis’s relations with the press were often strained. She would have preferred that reporters not attend White House parties, and she sometimes referred to female journalists as “harpies.”

Other aspects of her new position engaged Onassis’s enthusiastic interest. She regarded the White House itself as a potential national showplace for art and culture that previous administrations had ignored. She told her staff that she intended to make the mansion a grand place for the American people. Over the next three years, she embarked on an ambitious program to obtain antiques and historical artifacts that would transform the White House into a replica of what existed during the era of Thomas Jefferson.

Onassis called on wealthy friends to assist her in locating antiques suitable for the White House. The mechanism for receiving these funds and carrying on her work was the White House Historical Association. She obtained legislation from Congress that declared White House furnishings to be government property. To finance her campaign, the First Lady arranged for the sale of guidebooks to the White House. She displayed what she had done when she conducted a televised tour of the White House on February 14, 1962. The program received critical praise for her taste and skill. Popular interest in the White House grew dramatically during the early 1960’s because of her efforts.

A related part of Onassis’s agenda as First Lady was to promote cultural events. She and the president hosted more informal evenings than their predecessors had, and noted artists and performers entertained the dignitaries. Among those who appeared were noted cellist Pablo Casals, violinist Isaac Stern, and actor Frederic March. The social side of Kennedy’s “New Frontier” was a glittering success, and invitations to the Kennedy evenings at the White House became highly sought after.

Onassis traveled with the president on some of his foreign tours and made several trips abroad on her own as well. When President Kennedy went to Paris in 1961, she was such a success there that her husband wryly remarked, “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris and I have enjoyed it.” The First Lady’s trip to India in 1962 was another popular triumph for her.

Recent research has revealed that Onassis was more of an adviser to the president than had been known previously. She attended some meetings of the National Security Council as an observer, and Kennedy trusted her judgment on numerous issues. Though their marriage had experienced strain because of the president’s infidelities, the couple drew closer together during their years in the White House. The death of their son, Patrick, in August of 1963, shortly after his birth, was a source of sadness.

Onassis was riding with her husband in Dallas on November 22, 1963, when he was killed by an assassin. She supervised the details of the funeral in a way that made the ceremonies a moment of intense national mourning. Her stoic bearing and graceful dignity during the aftermath of the tragedy and through the funeral that followed impressed the world. In a conversation with a journalist shortly thereafter, she described her husband’s presidency as an American “Camelot” and asked that his memory be preserved.

The five years after her husband’s murder saw Onassis endeavor to build a new life for herself and her children amid unrelenting newspaper publicity about her every move. She left Washington and lived in New York City. A difficult controversy with author William Manchester about the accuracy of his book on President Kennedy’s death underscored her unique position with the public. Seeking to escape the constant scrutiny that followed her everywhere, she married Aristotle Onassis, a wealthy Greek ship owner, on October 20, 1968. The news shocked a nation that had regarded her as a perpetual presidential widow and thus recoiled from what appeared to be a marriage of convenience.

Onassis’s marriage lasted for seven years, until Aristotle Onassis died in 1975. Publicity and photographers still surrounded her, and every aspect of her life was discussed in the media. In the years after the death of her second husband, she worked as an editor for several publishers in New York City and produced some best sellers for these firms. Her two children grew up, and she became a grandmother. In her mid-sixties, she was still a favorite subject for magazine covers and media attention. She refused to give interviews, wrote no memoirs, and made no comments on the many books written about her life and her years married to Kennedy.

In January of 1994, Onassis began to receive treatments for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer. Her lymphoma was highly aggressive, and she died at home in New York City on May 19, 1994. She was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., next to her first husband, Kennedy.

Significance

Onassis was one of the most popular and famous of all First Ladies. She is forever associated in the public mind with the brief years of the Kennedy presidency and its tragic conclusion. During the early 1960’s, her restoration work at the White House, the glittering parties that she and her husband gave, and the image of worldly sophistication that she presented took the role of the First Lady to levels of international prominence that it had never previously attained. Her gallant bearing in the aftermath of her husband’s murder gained for her a unique place in American social consciousness.

During the three decades between November of 1963 and her death in 1994, Onassis saw her public image shift from the negative reaction when she married Aristotle Onassis in 1968 to a more positive assessment since the mid-1970’s. Her success as a mother, editor, and cultural figure kept her in the news. Biographies and articles about her continued to attract a large readership. Her life offers striking evidence of the extent to which fame and celebrity have shaped the way in which Americans evaluate First Ladies as historical figures.

Bibliography

Anthony, Carl Sferrazza. First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents’ Wives and Their Power. 2 vols. New York: William Morrow, 1990-1991. Contains a sympathetic evaluation of Onassis as First Lady.

Baldrige, Letitia. A Lady, First: My Life in the Kennedy White House and the American Embassies of Paris and Rome. New York: Viking, 2001. Baldrige’s autobiography includes her years as social secretary to the former First Lady.

Birmingham, Stephen. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978. A thoughtful and well-written biography that relies heavily on the work of other authors for its factual information.

Bradford, Sarah. America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. New York: Viking, 2000. A detailed and well-balanced account of Onassis’s life in which Bradford, a British historian, neither fawns over nor sensationalizes her subject.

Caroli, Betty. First Ladies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. An overview of the institution of First Ladies with some interesting insights about the performance of Onassis in the White House.

Gutin, Myra G. The President’s Partner: The First Lady in the Twentieth Century. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989. Focusing on First Ladies as communicators and political surrogates for the president, this book appraises the impact of Onassis’s White House years.

Heymann, C. David. A Woman Named Jackie. Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Communications, 1989. A full biography that mixes original research in Onassis’s White House Social Files at the Kennedy Library with an equal amount of gossip.

Kelley, Kitty. Jackie Oh! Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1978. A sensationalized biography that includes every lurid tale about its subject that the author could find. Some anecdotes may be true, but the book should be used cautiously.

Leaming, Barbara. Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years. New York: Free Press, 2001. Focuses on Onassis’s years as First Lady, describing her public activities on behalf of her husband, as well as her private battles to maintain her marriage. Leaming argues that Onassis deserves more credit for the successes of her husband’s administration that she previously has received.

Thayer, Mary Van Rensselaer. Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. This volume draws extensively on Onassis’s Social Office Files at the John F. Kennedy Library. It is a valuable source, since so many of those files are still unavailable for research.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1941-1970: February 14 and 18, 1962: Jacqueline Kennedy Leads a Televised Tour of the White House; November 22, 1963: President Kennedy Is Assassinated; June 5, 1968: Robert F. Kennedy Is Assassinated.