The Many Lives of Jackie Kennedy
At age thirty-four, Jackie feared her life was over. “I don’t have much to live for,” she admitted in a letter to Nikita Khrushchev written in the week after Jack’s death. “But for my husband’s dreams.” But it wasn’t over. She had so much more life—or many more lives—to live.
After a brief period in Averell Harriman’s Georgetown home, Jackie moved herself and the children to New York City, which, except for the first couple years of her marriage to Aristotle Onassis, would be her primary home for the rest of her life.
She set herself immediately to memorializing her husband. In December 1964, President Johnson broke ground on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington. Jackie was active on the Program Committee of the center, which was tasked with formalizing the center’s artistic and cultural mission. She also served, with Lady Bird Johnson and Mamie Eisenhower, as an “honorary chairman” of its Board of Trustees. The Edward Durell Stone–designed building—an elegant, perfectly proportioned horizontal marble matchbox—is one of the most recognizable buildings in the world.
The same can be said of I. M. Pei’s design for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, though its road to completion was not as smooth. Jack had wanted his presidential library to be connected to Harvard, his alma mater, and Jackie, with the help of Bobby Kennedy and architect Jack Warnecke (who created the final design of Jack’s gravesite in Arlington), acquired a spot for it near Harvard Yard in 1970. Cambridge residents, fearing additional congestion around the university area, protested. After years of attempting to negotiate with the people of Cambridge, plans to build the JFK Library there were abandoned in 1975.
The library’s foundation instead settled on a twelve-acre plot of land near the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Located on Columbia Point, a small peninsula on Dorchester Bay not far from Honey Fitz’s Dorchester home, the structure—monolithic, interlocking, geometric figures in glass and poured white concrete—perches on the shore, evoking a giant sailing ship. Jackie was present when it finally opened on October 20, 1979, more than fifteen years after her husband’s death. Though the library would not end up situated on the Harvard campus, the university’s Graduate School of Public Administration was rededicated, in October 1978, as the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Jackie worked closely with professor and former Kennedy adviser Richard Neustadt in creating a place where students could think imaginatively about aspects of politics and government.
In addition to memorializing Jack’s life, Jackie saw it as her mission to protect his legacy. This meant, in the years following his death, tangling with a series of Kennedy friends and associates who decided to write books about their time with him. The children’s nanny Maud Shaw, JFK’s Navy buddy Red Fay, and Jack and Jackie’s mutual friend Ben Bradlee each wrote memoirs that, though largely benign and complimentary, earned them permanent excommunication from Jackie’s good graces. Others, such as Arthur Schlesinger, cut material at her request. In each work, she objected not only to any content she found unflattering about her husband, but also any intimate information about the life they shared.
“There won’t be one shred of his whole life that the whole world won’t know about,” Jackie wrote to Schlesinger. “The world has no right to his private life with me—I shared all those rooms with him—not with the Book of the Month readers—I don’t want them snooping through those rooms now . . .”
Jackie’s largest clash was with a writer that she herself had recruited. Shortly after Jack’s death, she and Bobby had asked Wesleyan University Professor William Manchester to write the authoritative account of the assassination. He spent three years—and his life savings—producing the eight-hundred-page manuscript. But as The Death of a President neared publication, Jackie and Bobby both requested many changes, deletions, and rewrites; when Manchester would not agree to all of the cuts they demanded, Jackie sued him, his publisher, Harper and Row, as well as Look magazine, where the book was to be serialized. They eventually settled out of court, with Manchester agreeing to cut certain passages from the book and forego some of the revenues he might otherwise have received from its publication. In the court of public opinion, it was a misstep for Jackie. Many Americans thought less of the former first lady for censoring a professor she herself had commissioned.
Jackie remained close with the Kennedy family after she moved with Caroline and John to New York, but her income from the family fortune decreased greatly. Though the $200,000 a year she received ($150,000 from a Kennedy trust fund and another $50,000 from Bobby) would’ve sustained most families of three very handsomely, it would not go very far in meeting Jackie’s exorbitant needs. Her situation was reminiscent of where her mother had found herself in the late 1930s: with a young family to support and suddenly bereft of a fortune. Jackie had the additional burden of being one of the most recognizable and sought-after people in the world. She wanted privacy for herself and her children, and a large fortune could certainly buy her a great deal of that.
Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, one of the richest men in the world, could fulfill all those needs. Though the short, stocky, and not conventionally handsome man was in some ways an odd choice for Jackie, he did offer much beyond his wealth. “Jackie and Ari did have a lot in common,” Lee later insisted. “They both shared a great love of the sea, they both had a great knowledge and love of Greek mythology . . .”And in some ways he was exactly the type of man that Jackie was programmed to like: in the Joe Kennedy mold, Onassis was powerfully charming and charismatic, a generous friend and hospitable host, a loyal friend and a fun companion. He also had the ability to be ruthless and cruel in personal and business dealings. His positive qualities had made a strong impression on Jackie as far back as her time aboard his yacht in the aftermath of of her son Patrick’s death in 1963.
Onassis had been courting Jackie for some time, but her decision to marry him came after Bobby’s assassination. The marriage was an attempt by Jackie to escape the grief-filled orbit of the Kennedys; it was also an attempt to make impregnable her family’s privacy and financial stability. For the most recognizable woman in the world, a man who owned an airline and a private Greek island was a sensible choice. Their marriage gave her the freedom to travel, live, and spend as she desired.
Onassis was sixty-two years old and Jackie thirty-eight when they married in October of 1968. “He was dynamic, irrational, cruel I suppose,” Lee—who had been Onassis’s lover during Jack’s administration—would later say. “But fascinating.” Though the marriage was initially warm, in short order it grew distant and unhappy. After a couple of years, Jackie lived separate from her husband for the majority of the time. Onassis died in 1975 after a long illness. After a court battle with her stepdaughter Christina, Jackie inherited twenty-six million dollars.
Jackie was now independently wealthy and free to live as she chose. She surprised everyone by starting another life as a career woman. She went to work as a book editor, first at Viking and then at Doubleday, bringing the eye for detail—the eye that had transformed the White House and made so many state dinners so memorable—to literature. She was, by all accounts, respected and prolific until her death, from a swiftly moving cancer, in 1994.
She found a longtime companion in Maurice Tempelsman, a wealthy New York diamond merchant, who carefully administered her fortune. Together they shared a luxurious, if low-key, life. She used her name and fame sparingly, appearing as a public figure only rarely, and usually in the name of the preservation of historic buildings, such as Grand Central Station, in her beloved New York City.
Jackie lived to see her children grow into intelligent, attractive, successful adults: John, after a few tries, passed the New York bar exam, but after her death in 1994 he would become more well known as the founder of political magazine George, as well as a mainstay on lists of the world’s best-looking men, before his own premature death in a 1999 plane crash. Caroline became a lawyer, author, editor, and mother to three children, upon whom Jackie doted. In November 2013, Caroline became a diplomat, when President Barack Obama appointed her the twenty-ninth US ambassador to Japan.
Jacqueline Kennedy the woman continued long after the death of Jack Kennedy. But the mythic figure we remember today was forged largely in that week in November 1963, when, though a disoriented and grief-stricken widow, she used her own brilliant alchemy to create, with simple words and stark imagery, an enduring, heroic, romantic picture of what our country could be.