By John Hanchette, Gannett News Service Debutante. Beauty.
Working girl. Betrayed wife. First lady. Global charmer. Multilingual diplomat. Accomplished horsewoman. Cunning politician. Cultural pioneer. Fashion priestess. Noble widow. Brave martyr. Rich patroness. Greedy expatriate. Profligate jet-setter. Professional editor. Society maven. Graceful recluse. Doting mother.
This was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
And much, much more.
Along the way, she changed Washington, politics, U.S. culture, and the way we are governed.
Her death sneaked up on us. To millions of saddened people over 50, the memories of a country first getting hooked on TV images always will summon her forth as young, dark, svelte, mysterious, ultra-lively, wickedly smart, beautiful. She was only 31 when she became first lady and entered our minds on a daily basis.
Sure, we knew she was being treated for lymphoma, but we all know people who've survived that. Not until Wednesday - when the sad, famous family was shown dutifully trooping in and out of her Fifth Avenue apartment - did it really sink in that this was the raging and more deadly type of lymphoma. Thursday, her spokeswoman conceded there was "nothing they can do for her."
Then we knew she had gone home to die.
She had a public persona, and a private one. She was loved. She was hated. She was the target of the most fawning of praise, the most vicious of gossip. People believed almost anything they heard or could hear about her - the wildest things.
Probably because she worked hard at "profile reduction," her huge effect on the USA's culture has dimmed somewhat.
But she was not only the "First Lady of Sorrows" engraved in our TV-saturated memory. She lived at the vortex of a gracious, contradictory, tumultuous life. When she walked into a room, so did history.
Her father was Black Jack Bouvier III, a rich stockbroker and noted rake. Her stepfather was Virginia hunt-country millionaire Hugh D. Auchincloss. She went to all the right schools for rich girls - Miss Porter's, Vassar, the Sorbonne.
At 23, with a degree from George Washington University, she found herself working as the "Inquiring Camera Girl" on the old Washington Times-Herald. She interviewed Richard Nixon. She also interviewed John F. Kennedy - and his attraction was immediate.
She broke up with a Manhattan stockbroker to announce their engagement. They married in September 1953 to immense publicity. There were 26 groomsmen and bridesmaids. She was 24. He was 36. The reception turned into a near-riot. JFK told her he wanted to be president. She told friends it was an "outlandish ambition."
Some remember her White House days - before the assassination - as all huzzahs and rose petals. It wasn't. She drew great criticism on the campaign trail for her designer clothes and aloof elegance. Campaigning made her physically ill. She called the White House a "snake pit" when talking to friends.
She didn't like the title "first lady" - said it "always reminded me of a saddle horse."
But she was the most photogenic one in memory; the great designer Edith Head called her impact on fashion "the greatest single such influence in history."
Everyone copied her look. When the new Miss America was crowned during JFK's first year, she blurted, "If only I looked like Jackie."
Her White House behavior often was criticized at the time as style over substance, but the images that last are lively ones.
Luminaries as diverse as master cellist Pablo Casals and Hollywood recluse Greta Garbo were persuaded to attend. The country's leaders did the twist and the cha-cha in the White House.
When stuffy commissions and committees thwarted her plans to historically refurbish the executive mansion - which had become musty and irrelevantly furnished - she used the power of TV to persuade Congress to declare it an official museum: Jackie's design and taste gave it the look it has today.
Her husband shared much of his power with her. When the Soviet Union put missiles in Cuba and nuclear war loomed in October 1962, JFK took her for a walk in the Rose Garden and confided in her. The CIA tried to get her to split for safety. She hung in.
On the awful day in Dallas, that fall of 1963, the image engraved in history is of Jackie trying to pull a Secret Service man onto the back of the limousine as her husband slumps mortally wounded. What she really was doing was retrieving a shard of her husband's skull from the trunk top. She cradled him on the way to the hospital.
"I tried to hold the top of his head down," she later told friends.
At Lyndon Johnson's plane-cabin swearing in, she remained composed in a blood-soaked pink suit, turning away sedatives and resisting all suggestions she change clothes.
"Let them see what they've done to Jack," she told the Secret Service.
Her public dignity and reserve impressed the nation as noble during three days of sorrow.
Before she departed the White House, she oversaw the answering of 800,000 sympathy letters.
"So now he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man," she wrote at the time.
But the worship ended five years later when she shocked the country by marrying Aristotle Onassis, the unbelievably rich Greek shipping magnate. We wanted eternal mourning. She wanted a new life.
The USA responded with vitriol. How could she marry a man who had solid gold faucets, 42 telephones on his yacht, and barstools reportedly covered with whale scrotum?
The books and articles tumbled forth, acid dripping. Former buddy Truman Capote said her notorious shopping sprees cost $ 100,000 a crack - Jackie all the while "in a daze and hypnotized."
Greed was ascribed to her. Her father-in-law was said to have paid her $ 1 million not to divorce JFK. Onassis was said to have paid her $ 3 million in a pre-nuptial agreement. She received $ 42 million when they divorced.
The history that slipped out about her part of the relationship with Jack Kennedy seemed to support the popular view that - pain or no - she truly loved him.
In 1974, she told their buddy Frank Sinatra "I wish it were all starting again."
To friends, when JFK lived, she constantly compared him to Shakespeare's most romantic king, Henry V. The two often spent two hours around noon in complete privacy in the White House living quarters.
They had big plans. JFK surprised friends by telling them that after his second term, he'd like to be named ambassador to Italy because "Jackie would like it."
Just before he was murdered, they had mapped out a brief mountain vacation in Montana for the summer of 1964.
JFK stuck up for her too, even bawling out good friends like journalist Ben Bradlee, who had complained after Jackie's triumphant trip to India that she didn't visit any poor neighborhoods.
"I don't get all this crap about how she should have been rubbing her nose in the grinding poverty of India," Kennedy hollered at Bradlee. "When the French invite you to Paris, they don't show you the sewers, they take you to Versailles."
Indeed, when Jackie cleaned out her dead husband's desk in November 1963, she found two newspaper clippings. One reported she had outdrawn even President Dwight Eisenhower when traveling in India. The other quoted her as saying she was sad Jack was not there with her.
She leaves a huge influence on the way many conduct themselves in the world of politics.
Neo-feminists may state otherwise, but after Jackie, it became normal to think of first ladies as activist.
One of her cherished goals was the creation of a Cabinet post for the arts. She pestered JFK about it, and he was going to sign it into existence when he returned from Texas. The residue of that hope moved LBJ to create the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
