(2 of 9)
To most Americans as well, Jackie's marriage symbolized her goodbye to an era and a hero. "It's the end of Camelot," was a common reaction. Many were disturbed that she was marrying out of her church and culture. A certain residual puritanism (and at moments like this its lingering strength becomes most apparent) made many Americans feel that she was entering a frivolous, if not slightly wicked jet-set world. No one could reasonably expect her to remain unmarried, the guardian of the Kennedy legend. But people tend to be fastidious, even ruthless, about their heroes and heroines. The imagination of most Americans would not necessarily have preferred an American but, if a foreigner, something closer to an English aristocrat (many had been rather hopeful about Lord Harlech) or a swinging Prime Minister, like Canada's Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
Is it anyone's business? Of course not. The speculation, the gossip, the judgment of new motives may well be seen as rude and a little absurd. They are either too solemn or too shallow. But Jackie Kennedy simply is not a private person who may escape such scrutiny.
To few men or women have Americans accorded the concern, sympathy and affection that they extended to her. Few living Americans, for that matter, have been so fervently admired by foreigners. Even before the assassination of the 35th President in 1963, her beauty and style captivated the world—including Charles de Gaulle and Nikita Khrushchev. In the days after Jack Kennedy's death, millions grieved for the widow whose poise and lonely courage helped carry the U.S. through one of the century's worst ordeals.
Jackie took on a mythic quality in the American mind. She seemed to detest the world's devouring and often cruel interest in her—but she might well have avoided the public gaze, had she wished, by adopting a different style of life. In choosing "Ari" Onassis, a man of 62 or 68,* a divorcee, a centimillionaire little known for generosity or wisdom and very well known for his flamboyant mode of life, Jacqueline Kennedy seemed brusquely to abdicate the throne that Americans had made for her.
Death and Liberation Thus, to some degree, the American shock at Jackie's decision undoubtedly grew from a feeling of rejection. Friends note that she may well feel rejected herself: after Jack's death, she took strength from Bob Kennedy, only to see him murdered too. "Perhaps she feels she has not been very well treated by America," says a Kennedyite with poignant understatement.
Many of her countrymen developed what was perhaps an unduly adulatory impression of Jackie as a serious intellectual and political helpmeet to her husband. Actually, before she married J.F.K. in 1953 she had lived a pretty jetty life — the most expensive finishing schools, a year at the Sorbonne, the rounds of parties and balls at Newport, the Hamptons, Manhattan and Washington, a year of "roughing it" as inquiring photographer for the Washing ton Post.