Jacqueline Onassis: A Profile in Courage

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If she set out to weave an elaborate mystery, she could not have used a better tactic. But those who know her deny that that was her aim. A friend since Vassar days says Jackie had no idea how to answer questions and was scared of the press: "People thought she was stuck-up, but she just didn't have much confidence." Said author Manchester (The Death of a President): "After Kennedy died, she was exposed to a pitiless spotlight, and she did not know how to handle it." But another observer from White House days claims that Kennedy himself engineered the Garboesque stance: he knew that if she ever began talking, she would reveal how little she knew or cared about politics or public issues.

In truth she was apolitical. She supported the campaigns of Bobby and other Kennedys, but that kind of ambition was not in her blood. After her second husband, the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, died, some would-be kingmakers got together in New York and, hoping to advance Democratic Party prospects, came up with a grand plan to have her run for the Senate. Her reply said it all: "If I could do it three days a week."

Her interests were always arty. During her senior year in college she won Vogue's Prix de Paris, a contest that awarded the winner a year in Paris and an internship with the magazine. Her essay was on the great Russian ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev, among others. Diaghilev was a shrewd, sophisticated choice, bound to knock the glossy's one-upping editors back on their heels. Says a Jackie watcher of impeccable credentials: "You could talk with her about Baudelaire, but not about Cromwell."

Jacqueline Bouvier's world was far from the wheel-and-deal politics that her future husband cut his teeth on. Hers was a background of manicured lawns, riding lessons and outings at the ballet. The Bouviers were an old Catholic family entrenched in New York society; her father, known as "Black Jack" because of his dark good looks, lived recklessly both in the stock market and in his dashing private life. Several of the men whom Jackie later found attractive -- her husband, her father-in-law Joseph Kennedy and, later, Aristotle Onassis -- bore some resemblance to her glamorous papa. Her mother Janet was steelier, both more conservative and more ambitious. Black Jack was an exuberant but careless investor; the Wall Street crash of 1929 finished his market ride. His marriage began to falter then, and it ended when Jackie was nine. Janet then married into one of the richer branches of the vast Auchincloss clan.

It is possible that Jackie's quest for money -- probably the reason behind her unhappy marriage to Onassis -- is rooted in her father's financial troubles. But her stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss, was generous; she headed off to Miss Porter's School, an ultra-posh boarding school, with her own horse. Two years at Vassar followed, but Jackie was too restless to thrive in the leafy confines of a Poughkeepsie, New York, campus. She finished college at George Washington University and, spurning the Prix de Paris offers, began her job as the Inquiring Photographer for the Washington Times-Herald.