Jackie Kennedy Born: Future First Lady and Style Icon

She sat beside her husband in the open car when the first shot hit. She never spoke publicly about what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Jacqueline Kennedy carried the weight of that afternoon for the rest of her life, and she did it privately. Born Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in Southampton, New York on July 28, 1929, she grew up in a wealthy, socially prominent family. Her father, "Black Jack" Bouvier, was a stockbroker and a notorious womanizer. She was educated at Miss Porter's School, Vassar, and the Sorbonne in Paris. She worked briefly as a photojournalist at the Washington Times-Herald before meeting John F. Kennedy at a dinner party in 1952. As First Lady, she transformed the White House from a government residence into a cultural institution. She hired a curator, restored the interior with historical furniture and artwork, and gave a televised tour in 1962 that 80 million Americans watched. She invited artists, musicians, writers, and intellectuals to state dinners, turning them into cultural events. Pablo Casals performed. Andre Malraux visited. The White House had never been a center of the arts before; she made it one. After Dallas, she wore the blood-stained pink Chanel suit for the rest of the day. "Let them see what they have done," she reportedly said on Air Force One. She stood beside Lyndon Johnson during his swearing-in, still wearing the suit. She married Aristotle Onassis in 1968, a union that shocked the American public and the Kennedy family. Onassis died in 1975. She returned to New York and built a second career as a book editor at Viking Press and then Doubleday, where she worked for nearly two decades. She edited books by Bill Moyers, Naveen Patnaik, and Michael Jackson, among others. Colleagues described her as professional, rigorous, and genuinely engaged with the manuscripts. She raised her two children, Caroline and John Jr., largely out of the public eye. She was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in January 1994 and died at her apartment on Fifth Avenue on May 19, 1994, at 64.