Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [5]
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born on July 28, 1929, in Southampton, New York, the summer family seat of both her paternal and maternal lines. Her suntanned, Yale-educated, French-American father, John V. Bouvier III, had followed his forefathers to Wall Street; his career never recovered from the stock market crash of 1929. Her mother, Janet Norton Lee, was the daughter of a self-made Irish-American tycoon in New York banking and real estate. From her Park Avenue and Long Island childhood, Jackie (she preferred Jacqueline, but friends and family rarely used her full given name) liked to ride horses, create whimsical drawings, and read books—especially art history, poetry, French history, and literature. When she was twelve, her parents were bitterly divorced, and her mother wed Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr., a Standard Oil heir, who made Jackie and her younger sister, Lee, at home on his picturesque estates in McLean, Virginia, and Newport, Rhode Island. As a student at Miss Porter's School (Farmington) in Connecticut, where she boarded her horse Danseuse, teachers found Jackie strong-willed, irreverent, and highly intelligent.
After two years at Vassar, which did not inspire her, the young woman sprang to life during a junior year at the Sorbonne and the University of Grenoble. Returning to live at Merrywood, her stepfather's house on the Potomac, she was graduated in 1951 from George Washington University and surpassed twelve hundred other college women to win Vogue's Prix de Paris, for which she designed a sample issue of the magazine and wrote an essay on "People I Wish I Had Known" (Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, and Sergei Diaghilev). The prize offered a year as a Vogue junior editor in New York and Paris. She declined it—to the relief of her mother, who was inclined to take her daughter's strong interest in France as an unwelcome sign of allegiance to Jack Bouvier. Instead Jackie took a job as "Inquiring Photographer" for the Washington Times-Herald. In that role, she began seeing the man who would become her husband.
The first time she had met Jack Kennedy was in 1948, on a train from Washington, D.C., to New York when, as she recorded at the time, she briefly chatted with an attentive "tall thin young congressman with very long reddish hair." But the encounter came to naught. That same year, her family friend Charles Bartlett took her "across this great crowd" at his brother's Long Island wedding to meet Jack Kennedy, but "by the time I got her across, why, he'd left." Finally in the spring of 1951, in Bartlett and his wife Martha's Georgetown dining room, Jack and Jackie had their official introduction. After what she called "a spasmodic courtship," the Francophile aesthete and the fast-ascending senator from Massachusetts married in Newport on September 12, 1953, launching the decade of their life that you will read about in this book.
During the months after John Kennedy's murder, his thirty-four-year-old widow found memories of their White House life, which she calls in this volume "our happiest years," so traumatic that she asked her Secret Service drivers to please arrange her trips so that she would never accidentally glimpse the old mansion. She intended to stay away from the White House for the rest of her life—and she did, with only one exception. (In 1971, when Aaron Shikler finished his official portraits of the thirty-fifth president and his wife, she agreed to make a very private visit with her children to the White House, where they viewed the portraits and dined with President Richard Nixon and his family.) At the end of 1963, Mrs. Kennedy feared that reminiscing at length about life with her