Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis | Biography, Death, & Facts (2024)

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (born July 28, 1929, Southampton, New York, U.S.—died May 19, 1994, New York City) was an American first lady (1961–63), who was the wife of John F. Kennedy, 35th president of the United States, and was noted for her style and elegance. Her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, was one of the wealthiest men in the world.

Early life

Jacqueline was the elder of two daughters of Janet Lee and John (“Black Jack”) Bouvier III, a stock speculator. As a child, she developed the interests she would still relish as an adult: horseback riding, writing, and painting. In 1942, after her parents had divorced and her mother married Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr., a wealthy lawyer, Jacqueline divided her time between the family’s Merrywood estate in Virginia and Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island.

At age 15 she began attending boarding school, and in 1947 she enrolled at Vassar College. During her junior year abroad, while studying at the Sorbonne, she polished her French and solidified her affinity for French culture and style, which she sometimes associated with her adored father. She graduated from George Washington University in 1951 and took a job as a reporter-photographer at the Washington Times-Herald. She notably covered the coronation (1952) of Elizabeth II.

Marriage to John F. Kennedy and 1960 election

In 1951 Jacqueline met John F. Kennedy, son of Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy and a popular congressman from Massachusetts, and two years later, after he became a U.S. senator, he proposed marriage. On September 12, 1953, the couple wed in St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Newport, Rhode Island. The early years of their marriage included considerable disappointment and sadness. John underwent spinal surgery, and she suffered a miscarriage and delivered a stillborn daughter. Their luck appeared to change with the birth of a healthy daughter, Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, on November 27, 1957. Three years later John announced that he was running for president, and Jacqueline initially traveled with her husband. However, after becoming pregnant again, she stayed at home on the advice of her doctors but continued to be involved in the campaign. She notably wrote “Campaign Wife,” a weekly news column. On November 8, 1960, John was narrowly elected president, and weeks later Jacqueline gave birth to a son, John F. Kennedy, Jr.

First lady and tragedy

The youngest first lady in nearly 80 years, Jacqueline left a distinct mark on the job. During the 1960 election campaign, she hired Letitia Baldrige, who was both politically savvy and astute on matters of etiquette, to assist her as social secretary. Through Baldrige, Jacqueline announced that she intended to make the White House a showcase for America’s most talented and accomplished individuals, and she invited musicians, actors, and intellectuals—including Nobel Prize winners—to the executive mansion.

Her most-enduring contribution was her work to restore the White House to its original elegance and to protect its holdings. She established the White House Historical Association, which was charged with educating the public and raising funds, and she wrote the foreword to the association’s first edition of The White House: An Historic Guide (1962). To catalog the mansion’s holdings, Jacqueline hired a curator from the Smithsonian Institution, a job that eventually became permanent. Congress, acting with the first lady’s support, passed a law to encourage donations of valuable art and furniture and made White House furnishings of “artistic or historic importance” the “inalienable property” of the nation, so that residents could not dispose of them at will. After extensive refurbishing, Jacqueline led a nationally televised tour of the White House in February 1962.

During her short time in the White House, Jacqueline became one of the most popular first ladies. During her travels with the president to Europe (1961) and to Central and South America (1962), she won wide praise for her beauty, fashion sense, and facility with languages. Alluding to his wife’s immense popularity during their tour of France in 1961, President Kennedy jokingly reintroduced himself to reporters as the “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” Parents named their daughters after Jacqueline, and women copied her bouffant hairstyle, pillbox hat, and flat-heeled pumps.

In November 1963 Jacqueline agreed to make one of her infrequent political appearances and accompanied her husband to Texas. (She had just returned from a vacation in Greece following the death of her newborn son, Patrick Bouvier.) As the president’s motorcade moved through Dallas, he was assassinated as she sat beside him; 99 minutes later she stood beside Lyndon Johnson in her blood-stained suit as he took the oath of office, an unprecedented appearance by a widowed first lady. On her return to the capital, Jacqueline oversaw the planning of her husband’s funeral, using many of the details of Abraham Lincoln’s funeral a century earlier. Her quiet dignity (and the sight of her two young children standing beside her during the ceremony) brought an outpouring of admiration from Americans and from all over the world.