Jacqueline Bouvier Onassis (Kennedy)

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born on July 28, 1929, in Southampton, New York, the elder daughter of John Vernou Bouvier III and Janet Lee. She grew up in Manhattan and on Long Island, rode horses from childhood, and learned French, Spanish and Italian. She studied at Vassar and in France, at Grenoble and the Sorbonne, and took her degree in French literature at George Washington University in 1951. Her first job was at the Washington Times-Herald, as its Inquiring Camera Girl.

She married Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts on September 12, 1953, in Newport, Rhode Island. They lost a pregnancy in 1955, and in August 1956 their daughter Arabella was stillborn. Caroline was born in 1957, and John seventeen days after his father was elected President in 1960.

As First Lady she restored the White House as a house of the nation's history, founded the White House Historical Association, and in February 1962 took fifty-six million Americans through it on television. Abroad she spoke to people in their own languages. In August 1963 their son Patrick was born five weeks early and lived two days.

On November 22, 1963, she was beside her husband in the car in Dallas when he was shot. She would not take off the suit that carried his blood. She modelled his funeral on Lincoln's, walked behind his coffin, and lit the eternal flame at his grave.

In 1968 she married Aristotle Onassis; he died in 1975. She went home to New York and worked as a book editor, first at Viking and then at Doubleday, and fought to save Grand Central Terminal. She died of lymphoma at her apartment in Manhattan on May 19, 1994, aged sixty-four, with her children beside her. On May 23 she was buried at Arlington beside the President, Patrick and Arabella. President Clinton spoke at her grave.