Four years after leaving the White House, Jacqueline Kennedy made a decision that changed the way millions of people saw her. She married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek shipping magnate 23 years older than her, whose world was built around tankers, private islands, famous guests, enormous wealth, and a yacht named Christina.
The reaction was extraordinary. One reader wrote to Time, "We've lost a national shrine." Another newspaper announced that America had lost a saint. Even Cardinal Richard Cushing, the man who had married Jackie and John Kennedy in 1953 and prayed at Kennedy's funeral 10 years later, felt compelled to defend her publicly as criticism poured in.
People were not reacting as though a 39-year-old widow had simply remarried. They were reacting as though something that belonged to them had been taken away. Underneath all the outrage was one question: Why him? Why Aristotle Onassis?
In the spring of 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy sat down with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to record her memories of the Kennedy White House. She was 34 years old. Her husband had been dead only a few months. Looking back at their years in the White House, Jackie called them "the happiest time of my life." The interviews were sealed for 47 years.
The public remembered the young president, the children playing in the White House, the state dinners, Paris, Camelot, Jackie's clothes, her restoration of the White House, her televised tour of the mansion. Then November 1963 transformed that image forever. Jacqueline Kennedy was no longer simply a former first lady. She became the widow of a murdered president.
Soon after leaving the White House, Jackie moved her children away from the center of Washington politics and eventually settled in New York. But moving to another city did not mean becoming anonymous. She was trying to build a new life while simultaneously protecting the old one. She helped establish the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. She selected I.M. Pei to design it. She guarded her husband's image closely.
In 1966, that instinct to protect became painfully public. William Manchester was preparing *The Death of a President*, an enormous account of Kennedy's assassination. The Kennedy family had originally cooperated with the project, but Jackie objected to parts of the manuscript and tried to stop publication. She told friends, "I have to try. I can't lose all that I've tried to protect for these years."
Protection was not an abstract idea to her. She protected memories. She protected her children. She protected private conversations. She protected the boundary between the public Jacqueline Kennedy and the person behind that name. But the harder she protected the boundary, the clearer another fact became. The public did not want to let her disappear.
Then, from a completely different world, came Aristotle Onassis. If Jackie Kennedy represented American political aristocracy, Aristotle Onassis represented something almost opposite. He had built himself. And he had done it aggressively.
Onassis was born in Smyrna in 1906 to a prosperous tobacco trading family. When he was 16, catastrophe destroyed the world he knew. In 1922, as Smyrna burned, his family lost its position and property. The young Onassis fled with Greek refugees. A year later, he left for Argentina using a Nansen passport issued to stateless refugees.
Buenos Aires was where the reinvention began. He worked, he traded tobacco, he learned markets. Then, during the Great Depression, when ships could be bought cheaply because other businessmen were frightened, Onassis moved into shipping. He bought old cargo ships, then tankers. He realized that oil would increasingly move across the world by sea, and he built larger vessels to carry more of it.
In 1945, his fleet consisted of only a handful of ships. A decade later, the Onassis Foundation records 77 vessels with a combined tonnage roughly 15 times larger. This was not a quiet businessman. Onassis liked scale. He liked risk. He liked competition. He liked being noticed.
He was complicated. Friends from Argentina remembered a quick, energetic operator with enormous charm, but also a temper and a long memory. People who disliked him saw a ruthless social climber. People who liked him could describe an entirely different man. When critics attacked Jackie for marrying him, Elizabeth Taylor responded by calling Onassis the most charming, the most appealing, the kindest man around.
Onassis was not experienced by everyone as the same person. He could be hard in business and enormously attentive socially. He could spend months aboard Christina entertaining political leaders, industrialists, actors, and royalty. Winston Churchill had been his guest, so had Greta Garbo, Prince Rainier, Giovanni Agnelli.
Then there was Maria Callas. For years Onassis had a turbulent and very public relationship with one of the most famous opera singers in the world. His first marriage had ended. His affair with Callas became part of international celebrity culture. And then in 1968, that relationship ended, too.
In 1963, Onassis bought a private island, Scorpios. It was dry and relatively barren. He planted trees, built guest houses, created beaches, added harbors. He transformed it into a private retreat. The man who had once fled his home as a refugee had become wealthy enough to build himself an island, where unwanted people could simply be kept away.
That was the man Jacqueline Kennedy already knew because their worlds had crossed years before the wedding. In August 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy lost her newborn son, Patrick. He had been born prematurely and died 2 days later. A few weeks afterward, Jackie left Washington for a private trip to Greece.
Reporters followed her movements across the Mediterranean. During the trip, Aristotle Onassis brought Christina to the villa where Jackie was staying and placed the yacht at her disposal. Jackie used it for dinners, travel, and a cruise through the Aegean. This was not yet a romance story. Jackie was still first lady. John Kennedy was still alive. But she had now seen Onassis' world from the inside.
Two months later, John Kennedy was dead. Time later reported that Onassis was among the people outside the Kennedy family circle whom Jackie received after the assassination. But then the story becomes less dramatic for a while. Jackie did not immediately run away with Aristotle Onassis.
For years, their lives moved mostly along separate tracks. She raised her children in New York. She worked on Kennedy's legacy. She traveled. She fought over the Manchester book. Onassis continued building businesses, traveling aboard Christina, living publicly, and maintaining his relationship with Maria Callas. There was no obvious straight line from 1963 to a wedding.
Then came 1968, one of the most chaotic years in modern American history. Vietnam, protests, political unrest, the presidential campaign, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And then in June, Robert F. Kennedy died after being attacked during his presidential campaign. For the Kennedy family, another central figure was gone. For Jackie, another layer of the world surrounding her children had disappeared.
By the summer of 1968, Jackie and Onassis were spending more time together. The atmosphere was almost absurdly different from Washington. The Mediterranean, moonlight, bouzouki music, the deck of Christina. Time's cover story from that year described an August evening aboard the yacht with Jackie among the guests while music played and people danced late into the night.
At some point, Onassis proposed. And according to contemporary Time reporting, Jackie gave him her answer by long-distance telephone. Yes, she would marry him.
Jacqueline Kennedy had carried the Kennedy name for 15 years. It connected her to a dead president, to a political dynasty, to American history, to Catholic tradition, to an image of herself constructed by newspapers, magazines, and television. Marriage to Onassis would not merely give her a husband. It would publicly announce that her life after John Kennedy belonged to her.
The Kennedy family's public reaction was restrained. Edward Kennedy issued a short statement wishing them well. But outside the family, restraint disappeared very quickly. People wanted an explanation. And if Jackie would not provide one, they would invent their own.
She wanted money. She wanted protection. She was escaping the Kennedys. She wanted glamour. She was lonely. She wanted a father figure for her children. She was abandoning America. She was abandoning John Kennedy. Almost every interpretation said as much about the person making it as it did about Jacqueline Kennedy.
The wedding itself was October 20th, 1968. Rain fell over Scorpios. Onassis's private island was suddenly surrounded by the attention it had been designed to keep away. Inside the small chapel, Jacqueline Kennedy stood beside Aristotle Onassis. She wore a beige dress. He wore a dark business suit. There were around 25 guests. Caroline and John stood beside their mother holding tall white candles.
The ceremony was Greek Orthodox. Jackie and Onassis exchanged rings. Wreaths were placed on their heads. They shared wine. The priest led them three times around a table in the traditional wedding rite. It was surprisingly modest for two people surrounded by so much fame and wealth.
At dinner afterward, Jackie appeared wearing ruby and diamond jewelry Onassis had given her. Caroline looked at her mother and exclaimed, "They're so pretty. You're so pretty." Jackie laughed and let her daughter play with the ring. Inside all the symbolism was a mother at dinner with her child after getting married.
Outside that world, the reaction was vicious. A German newspaper announced that America had lost a saint. Letters poured into magazines. Commentators mocked the age difference. Others attacked Onassis. Religious objections became a major part of the story.
Richard Cardinal Cushing finally spoke publicly. He had known Jackie for years. He had officiated at her wedding to John Kennedy. When critics suggested Jackie was a sinner for marrying the divorced Onassis, Cushing responded, "Why can't she marry whomever she wants?"
Anthropologist Margaret Mead offered a brutally simple explanation. They wanted her to be a widow forever. Jacqueline Kennedy had been more useful to the public as a symbol than as a complicated human being. A beautiful widow could preserve Camelot forever. A woman remarrying a Greek billionaire could not.
Onassis broke the image. He was too rich, too foreign, too old, too flashy, too unrelated to American politics. He made it impossible to pretend that Jackie's life had stopped in November 1963. And perhaps that was exactly why the marriage disturbed people so much.
The easiest answer is money. And we should not pretend money did not matter. Onassis possessed extraordinary resources. Ships, aircraft, homes, staff, a yacht capable of moving across the Mediterranean, an island where access could be restricted. Money changed what was physically possible.
But saying she married him for money creates another problem. It pretends we know more than the evidence allows. Even in 1968, people disagreed about her motives. Some observers emphasized wealth, others emphasized security, others believed she was escaping the Kennedy world. Some thought the relationship was genuine affection. Others thought it was practical.
Look at what Onassis actually offered. First, security. Jackie had spent years living with an unusual kind of vulnerability. She could not disappear into an ordinary neighborhood. Onassis could surround a family with a level of physical separation available to almost nobody. Scorpios was not metaphorical privacy. It was literal water between you and everybody else.
Second, mobility. Washington had rules. The Kennedy family had rules. American politics had rules. Onassis lived across borders, Paris, Athens, Monte Carlo, New York, the Mediterranean. His identity was international rather than tied to one political institution.
Third, he understood public attention. Onassis was not a quiet businessman shocked by fame. He actively cultivated publicity. He entertained famous people. He understood photographers. He understood headlines. He could not make Jackie unfamous. But unlike most people, he was not intimidated by fame.
Fourth, companionship. Here the evidence becomes more private. We know they spent time together. We know he proposed. We know she accepted. We know they married. But history cannot measure affection with a ruler. Anyone who tells you exactly how deeply Jacqueline Kennedy loved Aristotle Onassis is crossing the line from history into speculation.
And finally, there was freedom. For years, Jackie had been treated as though she represented something larger than herself. Kennedy, Camelot, Catholic America, national mourning, elegance, tragedy, continuity. People had assigned her a role. And then she chose a man who did not fit it.
One letter published by Time after the wedding suggested Jackie may have married Onassis simply to escape what the writer called America's parental eye. She was 39 years old, and millions of people were still arguing over what she was allowed to become.
So why Onassis? Probably not for one reason. Money may have mattered. Security may have mattered. Privacy may have mattered. Companionship may have mattered. The desire for a future outside the Kennedy mythology may have mattered. Human beings almost never make their largest decisions for one perfectly clean reason.
Marriage to Onassis did not make Jackie disappear. It gave her a different public identity. Jackie Kennedy became Jackie Onassis and eventually simply Jackie O. She moved between New York and Europe, between the world of her children and the world of Onassis, between Manhattan and the Mediterranean.
Wealth did not protect the Onassis family from tragedy. In January 1973, Aristotle's 25-year-old son Alexander died after an aviation accident. His father was devastated. The Onassis Foundation describes Alexander's death as a blow from which Aristotle never recovered. After that, Onassis's health deteriorated.
Two years later, on March 15th, 1975, Aristotle Onassis died in Paris. He was buried on Scorpios beside his son. Jacqueline Onassis was a widow again. She was 45. Her children were older.
What she did next is essential to understanding why this story should not end with either John Kennedy or Aristotle Onassis. She went to work. After Onassis died, Jackie accepted a job as an editor at Viking Press in New York. Later, she moved to Doubleday and became a senior editor. She continued working in publishing until near the end of her life.
There is something almost perfect about that career choice. This was a woman whose own life had been narrated endlessly by other people. Newspapers wrote about her, biographers wrote about her, political families built mythology around her, photographers chased her, magazine editors put her face on covers. Now Jacqueline Onassis was sitting on the other side of the page, editing, choosing, shaping books, helping decide how stories would be told.
Her life also returned to another interest that had existed long before Onassis: preservation. As First Lady, Jackie had fought to protect historic architecture around the White House. In New York, she later became involved in efforts to preserve Grand Central Terminal.
By the end of her life, the world had known her under several identities. Jacqueline Bouvier, Jacqueline Kennedy, the First Lady, the President's widow, Jackie O, Jacqueline Onassis, editor, preservationist, mother, icon. No single one of those identities completely explains her.
For decades, people have asked the same question. Why did Jacqueline Kennedy marry Aristotle Onassis? Maybe the most revealing part of the story is not that historians still cannot give one simple answer. Maybe it is how badly people wanted one. They wanted money to explain it, or fear, or love, or betrayal. Something simple enough to turn a complicated human decision into a headline.
But Jackie Kennedy's life had already been turned into a story once. Camelot. The beautiful first lady, the murdered president, the dignified widow. When she married Onassis, she stepped outside that script. The public could admire the symbol. But the person underneath it still had to wake up the next morning and decide how to live.
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis died on May 19th, 1994, at the age of 64. She was buried beside John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery. Decades after the wedding that shocked so many people, perhaps Margaret Mead's observation remains the simplest way to understand the reaction. People wanted Jackie to remain a widow forever. She did not. She chose another life. And whatever combination of love, security, money, companionship, privacy, or freedom went into that choice, the choice was hers.