Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Essay Research Paper Jacqueline

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Essay, Research Paper

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis received enormous amounts of publicity because of her youthful beauty and great sense of style. People everywhere were captivated by her. In Paris, France such huge crowds turned out to see her that her husband, John F. Kennedy, told a group of international leaders “I don.t think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”1 Jackie, as the world called her, might almost have been a movie star. Her picture appeared on countless magazine covers, and the “Jackie look” was widely imitated. But in spite of all this, she remained a very private person.

This first lady.s background could hardly have been more glamorous. Her father was a rich and handsome New York stockbroker named John Vernon Bouvier. Her mother, Janet Lee Bouvier, was a skilled horsewoman who frequently won prizes at society horse shows.

Born in the fashionable Long Island resort of East Hampton on July 28, 1929, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier had a seemingly perfect childhood. By her second birthday she already had her own pony to ride. Her parents accustomed her to elegant living on the family estate at East Hampton, Long Island in the summer and in their Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan during the winter. They saw to it that she was treated like a princess by maids, butlers, nurses, and chauffeurs. “Jackie,” her father once told her, “you never have to worry about keeping up with the Joneses, because we are the Joneses. Everybody has to keep up with us.” 2

Jackie developed a great deal of self-confidence. Once when she was 4, while playing in Central Park she looked around and couldn.t see a familiar face. She walked up to the nearest policeman and said firmly, “My nurse is lost.”3

Jackie.s parents quarreled constantly over money and over her father.s infidelities, and in 1936, to the eight year old girl.s distress, they separated, and she found herself with divided loyalties. Jackie adored her father. He was full of fun, generous with money, and deeply devoted to her. She couldn.t help preferring his company over her mother who was rather sedate and thrifty.4 In time as her parents vied for her affection, she learned to play them against each other when she wanted money for clothes, trips, and pets. Later on, when her mother divorced her father and married Hugh D. Auchincloss, wealthy Washington lawyer and stockbroker, she started playing her father and “Uncle Hugh,” as she called her stepfather, against each other. By doing this she ended up enjoying the best of both worlds.

Jackie.s girl friends thought she was different. She was very independent-minded, at times withdrawn, and a bit rebellious. “Sometimes,” they complained, “you have the feeling she isn.t really there.”5 At New York.s fashionable Chapin School, which she attended for a time, her mischievous manner won her the reputation of being “the very worst girl in the school” and forced the head-mistress, Ethel Stringfellow, to call her on the carpet every day.6 Mrs. Stringfellow eventually won Jackie over by talking to her about horses, which at the time she seemed to prefer over humans, and convincing her that even thoroughbreds have to be schooled before they can perform.

Jackie got her first taste of fame during the summer of 1946. “Queen Deb of the Year is Jacqueline Bouvier,” the writer Cholly Knickerbocker proclaimed in the New York Journal-American. He called her “a regal brunette who has classic features and daintiness of Dresden porcelain,” then added: “She has poise, is soft-spoken and intelligent, everything the leading debutante should be.”7

Jackie enrolled at Vassar College to major in art history. After her freshman year she toured Europe with some of her classmates, and she enjoyed this first exposure to Old World culture so much that she arranged to spend her entire junior year studying at the Sorbonne in France. Upon returning to the United States she attended George Washington University at Washington. At age twenty-one she entered a writing contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Competing with more than a thousand other hopeful graduates, she won first prize, which was the opportunity to work for the magazine.s Paris edition. But she turned it down.

Yet her success in the contest turned her thought.s toward journalism, and with the help of a family friend she got a job at the Washington Times-Herald. She became the newspaper.s “Inquiring Camera Girl,” wandering around the capital interviewing people and taking their pictures, then preparing a daily column giving their answers to questions she asked them.

At a dinner party some newspaper friends introduced her to a young congressman from Massachusetts who was regarded as the capital.s most eligible bachelor. He was tall and good-looking, with a keen mind and a wonderfully dry wit, and also had a very rich father. This man was John F. Kennedy. But it wasn.t until he advanced into the Senate and started aiming for the presidency, that he seriously began courting Jackie. Politics had never appealed to her, and everybody in Washington knew that Senator Kennedy had been involved with many other women. Even so, she told a friend who warned her about him, “What I want more than anything else in the world is to be married to him.”8

Their marriage took place on September 12,