Remembered for her impeccable fashion sense,
cosmopolitan lifestyle and repeated brushes with tragedy, Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis captivated the American public both during and after her
time in the White House. On the 85th anniversary of her birth, learn 10
surprising facts about the life and work of one of America’s most
iconic first ladies.
She worked as a reporter and photographer.
After attending Vassar University, the Sorbonne and George Washington
University, Onassis got her first job working as a reporter for the
Washington Times-Herald in 1952. As the paper’s “Inquiring
Photographer,” the future first lady roamed the streets of the nation’s
capital asking strangers their opinions on everything from personal
finance (“Do you approve of joint bank accounts?”) to politics and
relationships (“Do you think a wife should let her husband think he’s
smarter than she is?”). Among the many people she interviewed was
Richard Nixon, the man John F. Kennedy would later defeat in the 1960
presidential election.
She was briefly engaged to another man before marrying John F. Kennedy.
Before ever going on her first date with Kennedy, Onassis very nearly
married another man. In January 1952, the society pages of the
Washington Times-Herald announced her engagement to a Yale grad, World
War II vet and Wall Street banker named John Husted. The 22-year-old
Onassis soon began having doubts about the match, and supposedly
expressed reservations about becoming a housewife. In March 1952, she
abruptly called off the wedding. Only a few months later, she began
dating Kennedy—then a U.S. congressman—after meeting him at a dinner
party. The two were married in September 1953.
She was both admired and criticized for her fashionable clothing.
Onassis was one of the defining fashion trendsetters of the 1960s.
American women eagerly sought out the famous “Jackie look,” and
department stores scrambled to produce affordable imitations of her
sleek, classy dresses. Nevertheless, her chic sensibility was often a
point of contention. Her obsession with pricy French couture was
criticized during the 1960 presidential campaign, and after she became
first lady, the Kennedy camp worried her taste for foreign clothing
could make the family seem out of touch. To solve the problem, her
father-in-law, Joseph Kennedy, helped pair her with American-based
designer Oleg Cassini. Cassini went on to design more than 300 of
Onassis’ most iconic outfits, and later dubbed himself the First Lady’s
“Secretary of Style.”
She launched a massive renovation of the White House.
Shortly after Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election, Onassis
turned her famous eye for style toward overhauling the shabby décor of
the White House. After burning through her $50,000 budget in a matter of
days, she created the Fine Arts Committee for the White House, courted
private donors and went to work acquiring pieces of historically
significant furniture from museums and collectors. She soon transformed
the presidential mansion into a more elegant space adorned with antiques
and artifacts once owned by the likes of George Washington and Abraham
Lincoln. In February 1962, she gave a famous televised tour of the
renovated White House to Charles Collingwood of CBS-TV. The performance
won her a special Emmy Award, and helped cement her celebrity status.
She opened a school in the White House.
Despite her own background as a reporter, Onassis strived to shield
her two children from the media during her time in the White House. When
press scrutiny and security concerns made it difficult for her young
daughter Caroline to travel into the city, Onassis turned the White
House’s third floor solarium into a nursery school and invited other
kids—some of them children of Kennedy administration staff—to attend.
The school later grew into a fully operational kindergarten complete
with around ten students, professional teachers and even a small
collection of rabbits, guinea pigs and other animals.
She spoke multiple languages.
Onassis was a lifelong student of foreign cultures, and became fluent
in French, Spanish and Italian during her school days and European
travels. Her facility with languages often proved a valuable asset to
her husband’s political career. She translated French books on Southeast
Asia for Kennedy when he was still in the senate, and later wowed
campaign audiences by speaking French to voters in Louisiana and Spanish
in Texas. Following a 1961 visit to France, where Onassis won over the
public with her ability to speak the local tongue, her husband jokingly
introduced himself as “the man who accompanied Jackie Kennedy to Paris.”
President Lyndon Johnson—no doubt conscious of her fluency in
Spanish—later considered making her the U.S. ambassador to Mexico.
She refused to change her bloodstained pink dress on the day of the JFK assassination.
On November 22, 1963, Onassis was sitting alongside her husband when
he was killed by an assassin’s bullet while traveling in an open car
through Dallas. Her iconic pink wool suit was spattered with blood, but
the stunned first lady continued wearing the garment even during Lyndon
Johnson’s swearing in as the new president. Lady Bird Johnson asked if
she wanted a fresh outfit, but Onassis supposedly declined, saying, “Oh
no, I want them to see what they’ve done to Jack.” The bloodstained suit
is now held in the National Archives, but its matching pillbox hat was
lost on the day of the assassination and has never been recovered.
She was the first to refer to the Kennedy administration as “Camelot.”
In an interview with Life Magazine a week after her husband’s death,
Onassis described his love for “Camelot,” a musical based on the popular
Arthurian novel “The Once and Future King.” She noted that the
president enjoyed playing a recording of the musical’s title song, which
featured the line, “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot,
for one brief, shining moment, that was known as Camelot.” After
quoting the lyrics, Onassis went on to say, “There will be great
presidents again, but there will never be another Camelot.” The
interview proved hugely popular, and “Camelot” soon became shorthand for
the myth and glamour of the Kennedy administration.
She won a famous court case against a member of the paparazzi.
Following her 1968 marriage to Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis,
“Jackie O” became a favorite target of the paparazzi. Her most
persistent admirer was Ron Galella, a notorious photographer who spent
several years trailing her through the streets of New York to get candid
snaps of her daily life. In 1973, Onassis sued the paparazzo for
harassment and invasion of privacy. After a high profile trial, she won a
court order forbidding him to step within 25 feet of her or 30 feet of
her children. Galella paid little attention to the injunction, and even
began carrying a measuring tape so he could ensure he wasn’t breaking
the law. He only gave up his pursuit in the 1980s, after Onassis took
him to court a second time.
She was a successful book editor.
Onassis had literary ambitions from an early age, and following
Aristotle Onassis’s death in 1975, she moved to New York to pursue a
career as a book editor. The former first lady started out as a
consulting editor at Viking Press before moving to Doubleday, where she
worked as a senior editor until her death in 1994. During her time in
the publishing world she had a hand in several popular books including
the Michael Jackson autobiography “Moonwalk,” Larry Gonick’s “The
Cartoon History of the Universe” and translations of Nobel laureate
Naguib Mahfouz’s “Cairo Trilogy.”
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