Jackie Kennedy Onassis Dies: America's Icon of Grace

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died on May 19, 1994, at her apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. She was 64. She had been diagnosed in January and declined rapidly. Her children, Caroline and John Jr., were with her. Born Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in Southampton, New York on July 28, 1929, she grew up in a family of wealth and social prominence. Her father, John "Black Jack" Bouvier, was a stockbroker who drank and gambled away much of his fortune. She attended Miss Porter's School, Vassar, George Washington University, and the Sorbonne in Paris. She worked briefly as a photojournalist before marrying John F. Kennedy in 1953. She was 34 when her husband was shot beside her in a motorcade in Dallas on November 22, 1963. She wore the blood-stained pink Chanel suit for the rest of the day. "Let them see what they have done," she reportedly said. She married Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate, in 1968, a union that shocked the American public and provoked fierce criticism. The tabloids called her "Jackie O." Onassis provided financial security and an escape from the relentless public attention that had surrounded her since Dallas. He died in 1975. She returned to New York and built a second career as a book editor, first at Viking Press and then at Doubleday, where she worked for nearly two decades. She edited works by Bill Moyers, Naveen Patnaik, Michael Jackson, and others. She was a serious, professional editor whom authors described as deeply engaged with their manuscripts. She raised Caroline and John Jr. largely out of the spotlight, protecting them from the public obsession that had consumed her own life. John Jr., a lawyer and magazine publisher, died in a plane crash off Martha's Vineyard in 1999. She spent her final years walking in Central Park, attending the ballet, and reading. When the diagnosis came, she chose not to pursue aggressive treatment. She died at home, surrounded by family, and was buried beside President Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery.