She was the first lady of TV politics, her style transformed the White House, she helped hold a grieving nation together and, despite her sorrow, she lived her life her own way to the very end
by Harrison Rainie, Matthew Cooper, James Popkin, Viva Hardigg, Johnson, Katia Hetter, Warren Cohen, Betsy Wagner
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During the summer of 1960, in the midst of John Kennedy's presidential campaign and while she was pregnant with John Jr., Jacqueline Kennedy retreated to her in-laws' compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., and read Henry Adams's novel Democracy -- a cynical portrait of the mixing of love and power in 19th-century Washington. One of the passages she commended to others was this: "The old is going; the new is coming. Wealth, office, power are at auction. Who bids highest? who hates with most venom? who intrigues with most skill? who has done the dirtiest, the meanest, the darkest, and the most political work? He shall have his rewards." At times Jackie added a fillip of her own: "What? Nothing about the press?"
Adams's Washington did not seem far away from the Washington over which she was soon to reign. What the latter part of the 20th century added to the picture was a quenchless yearning to probe the lives of the powerful. When she died last Thursday in New York at age 64 from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was the most famous and most mysterious woman in the world. The two traits fed each other. But her meaning to Americans far exceeds her fame. She was an instrumental player in one of the great social transformations in history: the shift to an instant mass media culture.
The arrival of Jack and Jackie Kennedy on the national stage perfectly coincided with the growing ubiquity of television. Together, these two new forces -- a technology of intimacy and a glamorous, cosmopolitan, handsome, young couple worthy of fascination -- fused and redefined politics and culture. If Kennedy was elected, wrote Norman Mailer after the 1960 Democratic convention, "myth would emerge once more, because America's politics would now be also America's favorite movie, America's first soap opera, America's bestseller."
In control. At first, the couple's relation to the new fame-making machinery was relatively happy. Although Jackie loathed publicity and feared its potentially malevolent impact on her children, the media's portrayal of the family was so saccharine that she had little ground for complaint. She controlled the things that mattered most to her -- her exposure, her image and the privacy of her children. But the assassination of John Kennedy tore away everything that could protect her, 6-year-old Caroline and 3-year- old John Jr.
Racked with grief, many citizens felt almost as vulnerable as Jackie as they communed at their television sets during that awful weekend in November 1963. It was at her moment of rawest exposure and emotional devastation that Jacqueline Kennedy performed a miracle. At the astonishingly tender age of 34, she held a wounded nation together with her transcendent dignity and grace. Without uttering a word in public, she lifted up the nation by not breaking down herself. The hands she held at the funeral were her children's, but they might as well have been those of the hundreds of millions who grieved with her.
The widow followed this extraordinary feat with one of the greatest public relations triumphs of all time. Days after John Kennedy was buried, Jackie sat down with author Theodore White and set about defining what her husband's legacy ought to be. The results were published in the next issue of Life magazine. "For a while I thought history was something that bitter old men wrote," White quoted her in the story. But Jack had a "hero idea of history, the idealistic view." And Jackie believed her slain husband fit that mold. White wrote of how she was transfixed by the thought that one of the president's favorite songs at the end of his life was from a Broadway show. She recited:
Don't let it be forgot That once there was a spot For one brief shining moment That was known as Camelot. Then she concluded: "And it will never be that way again."
The idea was so indelible that it survived to last week's headlines about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's death -- she was called the "First Lady of `Camelot'" by the Los Angeles Times. The show tune was broadcast again and again last week on every network. Of course, the heroic imagery has been tarnished by time and ugly revelations about John Kennedy's womanizing and his plottings against worldwide enemies. But the survival of the Camelot iconography marks Jackie's continuing triumph over those "bitter old men."
The dark side. She learned, though, that fame was not always synonymous with goodwill, especially when she married Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. After Onassis's death in March 1975, she made peace on her own terms with the celebrity clerisy. She parceled out access to reporters and the public on terms that suited her and offered especially acute advice to others who found themselves in similar predicaments, especially the Clintons.
In several phone calls since the families met at the 1992 Democratic convention, Jackie Onassis urged Hillary Rodham Clinton to do everything she could to keep her daughter Chelsea's life as private as possible. Chelsea, 14, and Jackie's daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, now 36, spent hours together during a gathering at Martha's Vineyard last summer. They talked about what it was like to grow up in the White House -- a kindness that endeared Jackie's family even more to the Clintons.
Clinton connection. Jackie looked more favorably on President Clinton and his family than she did on his recent Democratic predecessors Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter. "She loved that the Clintons love the Kennedys," says one friend. "And she was intrigued with the continuity, the idea that her husband in some way launched Bill Clinton's political career." Hillary Clinton returned the sentiment, reminding her staff in the hours before Jackie Onassis died that she was not just a first lady but a towering public figure.
It was that very sentiment that baffled Jackie. She was especially bedeviled by the perverse laws governing fame that made her more desirable as an object of curiosity the more she resisted. Last winter, one of her oldest intimates was surprised to get a letter from her that included a copy of a story about comedian Steve Martin that appeared in the New Yorker magazine. A lengthy quote from Martin about the dark side of fame was highlighted: "There is nothing good about it. What's so demoralizing is that it has nothing to do with me. It could be Oliver North. It could be Jack Ruby. It has nothing to do with my work. It becomes more and more abstract all the time. It has to do with recognition, and a weird kind of laying on of hands. It's not that your presence lets them get in touch with their fantasies. It's that your presence lets them get in touch with reality." On the margin of the page was Jackie's very distinct, tiny script with this annotation: "That's the truth."
In the beginning. The process by which Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis learned to be a celebrity survivalist began quite innocently. Reared to a life of privilege in high New York society, she began her work life in 1952 as the "Inquiring Camera Girl" on the Washington Times-Herald. It was a job that perfectly suited her genteel sense of how the press ought to function. She'd ask a celebrity or somebody on the street an innocuous but clever question, she'd snap the person's picture and a cute little story would appear in the paper. No harm done. A job like that had the added benefit of bringing her into the social orbit of the likes of Sen. John Kennedy. They met, courted and in 1953 were married.
Her virginal sense about the role of the media in the political world was as quaint as her notion about the proper role of a political wife. "You have to do what your husband wants y
