10 Years Later, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Still Fascinates
May 19, 2004 -- When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was alive, the world sat mesmerized at her feet.
Ten years after her May 19, 1994, death, the fascination with the former first lady, wife of President John F. Kennedy, remains.
As first lady, every one of her gestures was observed, every utterance noted, and every dress photographed. But since the death of the woman known as "Jackie O.," Americans have learned a great deal more about the private life and motivations of the first modern first lady.
America's fascination with the queen of Camelot has become a virtual cottage industry, with some 60 books and 15,000 articles written about her.
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In attempts to peek behind Onassis' sunglasses, beyond the cool and private facade she projected for 64 years, writers and researchers have found an increasingly complex portrait of America's 35th first lady.
"Jackie Kennedy was not sweet," said Kati Marton, author of Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our Recent History. "Jackie Kennedy had a will of steel, which she couched in this porcelain beauty, and that breathless, childish, girlish voice which nobody could resist — not men, not women."
Her iconic style of classic grace and high fashion was simply one tool in her well-stocked arsenal, and it often hid a whip-smart, deeply serious and surprisingly calculating woman, Marton says. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis controlled her image and the Kennedy image, from the beginning to the end.
The Kennedy Library will release the interview that historian William Manchester conducted with the first lady shortly after President Kennedy's assassination. But that will not happen until 2067. Other documents related to her life are gone.
"Shortly before she died, Jackie gathered all her correspondence that she had saved in neatly tied bundles, and then tossed them into the fireplace because she did not want people in the future knowing about some of her most private moments," said Ed Klein, author of Farewell, Jackie: A Portrait of Her Final Days.
She was also a woman who understood her power.
"I think every woman wants to feel needed and in politics you are … more than other professions," Onassis once told an interviewer.
The President's Secret Weapon?
Onassis aged gracefully.
"With the passage of the years, she looks stronger, she looks more impressive, and she looks really quite heroic," Marton said. "I think I would place her on the short list of great first ladies."
Her assets were not lost on her first husband.
"I am the man who accompanied Jackie Kennedy to Paris," President Kennedy once said.
When Mrs. Kennedy charmed all during a presidential visit to Paris, it was actually a strategic plan to gain the trust of French President Charles De Gaulle, Marton said. And he wasn't the only world leader on her list.
"Charles de Gaulle, Nikita Khrushchev … none of them were terribly impressed by [President] Kennedy," Marton said. "They were all beguiled and charmed by Jackie, and therefore much more open to Kennedy's diplomacy."
Burnishing the Kennedy Image
Onassis understood, well before the television era, the critical value of image to a presidency, and she controlled and burnished the Kennedy image until her final days.
"I was to take this opportunity to thank all of you for the 800,000 messages for me and my husband," she said in an inview just after JFK's death. "The warmth of these tributes I will never forget."
Her instincts for controlling the Kennedy legacy were so strong that even on the plane back from Dallas, the stunned and bloodstained Jackie was planning the memorial service in intricate detail, down to the heartbreaking salute that her son — then nicknamed John-John — gave to honor his father.
"Jackie orchestrated her own death with the same meticulous care that she orchestrated the funeral of her husband," Klein said. As Onassis lay dying of cancer, the detailed plans that she made in her own death were stunning, Klein said.
"The color of the bed sheets that she'd lie on while she was dying, the music that was playing in her room, the guest list at her own funeral," he said. "Every single detail was under her meticulous control."
Dealing With Tell-Alls
However, she was unable to quell the onslaught of tell-alls that have sought to profit from intimate details and dispel the Kennedy myth.
"I think she would be horrified by some of the books that now dissect her, her medical history, her sexual history, the most personal details of her life," Marton said.
Ever private, Onassis mused in interviews later in her life that it was strange to find herself still the focus of so much attention.
"Jackie wanted to preserve her image as she wanted it, and I don't think even her best friends should necessarily honor that view, given the fact that she was such an important historic figure and that we need to know more about her," Klein said.
Yet, in the glare of the spotlight, Onassis' reputation has stayed intact. She is still America's queen, always a graceful style-setter, and, as it turns out, a much more influential and shrewder first lady then ever imagined.