Why ‘Our Jackie’ Should Not Be Frozen in Time
New biography chronicles Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s life through the lens of the media.
It was an eighth grade history teacher, fondly remembered as a John F. Kennedy “devotee,” whose own impassioned interest in the former president forever sparked the curiosity of a student in the Kennedy name.
But it wasn’t the former president, who was tragically assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, while riding in a presidential motorcade in Dallas, Texas, to whom Karen Dunak, in her formative years in that classroom, was drawn. It was 1993 and as the 30-year anniversary of the assassination of John Kennedy approached, so would the unit teaching about the former president. Dunak, who hails from New Jersey, describes the lessons as emotional and recalls how she was even forewarned about the class that would make “people cry.”
No, it wasn’t the young Democrat that left an imprint on Dunak. It was the woman turned widow veiled in black who captivated her from the classroom and that ultimately kindled an unanswered question about Jacqueline Kennedy, the former first lady: What was this woman’s story?
Another 30 years later, that question, despite the vast literature about Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, persists. Dunak, a history professor at Muskingum University and author of the new book Our Jackie: Public Claims on a Private Life released this week, set out to answer that question. The answer, as Dunak lays out in a close examination of her portrayal through the decades-long lens of a relentless media, remains to this day incomplete.
What it uncovers, as Dunak explains in the Introduction, is the sustained fascination of the former first lady whose private life led to musings, speculation, conjecture and imaginings about who she was and how she must have felt for the entirety of her public life. Through the coverage of Jacqueline Kennedy and later as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Dunak reveals how John Kennedy’s wife emerged as a figure in her own right as made apparent early on when Time chose for its January 20, 1961 issue of the president-elect’s inauguration the incoming first lady for its cover. And by assessing the media coverage of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s public life, Dunak shows the progression of women in society, noting that the former first lady “often served as a barometer for articulated and idealized views about American women—how they should behave, what they should value and to whom they should defer.”
Many of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s personal papers remain unavailable to researchers, Dunak writes, and because she did not write a memoir or share her innermost thoughts, her explicit motives often remained known only to her. As a result, Dunak continues, the former first lady was assessed by the media and the public without the full understanding of her intentions.
What Dunak hopes with her book is that readers don’t stop at the Kennedy years—an era in which Dunak believes Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis has been frozen in time. It is in the searing images like those of the former first lady in her blood-stained pink Chanel suit and days later wearing a black veil with a Givenchy black suit at her husband’s funeral—the image that struck Dunak in her eighth-grade history class—that Dunak believes truncates the historical significance of the former first lady who spent less than three years in the White House.
“There was an opening to really trace that media coverage of [Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis] and to see what it was that kept her in the public eye,” Dunak tells East Wing Magazine in a recent Zoom interview.
In looking back at her time spent researching, what stands out to Dunak about the former first lady, who is widely understood as a private person, is her sense that she doesn’t need to explain anything to anyone.
“I think that is truly a radical thing for somebody born in 1929 and raised at this time when women are meant to please and to explain,” Dunak says, adding that it becomes clear the way in which the media stays with her. “There’s an intersection where this book is very much about her, but then the co-star is really an evolving American media landscape.”
But it is Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in her post-White House years whom Dunak is focused on establishing a stronger historical record.
“Within the far-reaching historical scholarship on American women at midcentury and beyond,” Dunak writes, “[Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis] has not been a central character. This book aims to fill that gap.”
The book’s chapters focus on the public aspects of the former first lady’s life that begins with “Campaign Wife” and continues with “First Lady,” “Widow,” “Single Woman,” “Fallen Queen,” “Jet Setter,” “Professional,” to “Icon.” Making up Dunak’s media assessment includes television footage, political magazines, legacy newspaper outlets and fan magazines of the day. And, throughout the book, Dunak makes a point to refer to the former first lady by her names that represent the time periods of her life.
The shorthand of “Jackie,” Dunak says, gets used all the time, but it was not the former first lady’s preference. After the assassination and until she died, Dunak says, she insisted on being called Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
“That is her signature, and ‘JKO’ is the shorthand she uses,” Dunak says. “It was so interesting to me when people are writing obituaries or tributes to her that they refer back to ‘Jacqueline Kennedy’ when that is not the name or the identity that she chose for herself. Her time as Jacqueline Kennedy was short comparatively.”
There are moments in the book when Dunak presents media coverage of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that demonstrates how the culture at the time (and to some degree persisting in the present day) assessed women public figures along too fine of a line.
“This person is smart, but is she too smart? She’s beautiful. Is she too beautiful? She’s fashionable. Is she too fashionable?” Dunak says in a tenor that smacks of the 2023 Barbie movie monologue. As times have changed from 1960 until 2024, she adds, there is still an expectation for women scrutinized by the public eye to be perfect or … good luck. “And if you’re perfect, you’re too perfect.”
What is evident in Dunak’s assessment of the media after the assassination of President Kennedy is how the language in the early 1960s embraced the idea of mourning and grieving, but not of trauma.
The former first lady gives the appearance, or performance, Dunak says, of being able to handle it or move forward in leading the nation in grieving. Although, she says, there were accounts as the one-year anniversary of the president’s death approached that people were uncomfortable with her “still” talking about the violent event behind closed doors.
There was no public conversation and perhaps a lack of understanding that “it probably would take a long time to bounce back from having been in a car next to a person who’s been shot, who’s been assassinated in this way,” Dunak says. “There’s no engagement with that sort of language or that reality.”
In the aftermath of her husband’s assassination and his brother Robert Kennedy’s assassination on June 5, 1968, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Dunak shows a media that is swept up in projecting what the former first lady must have been feeling in the absence of a true historical record of her inner thoughts.
“I think there is a sense of familiarity [from the media] that is created from the fact that [the Kennedys] are on TV, from the fact that they’re in Life Magazine all the time,” Dunak says. “There is the sense of ownership and expertise in being able to guess how she is feeling. And when she doesn’t say anything, I think the media is there to fill that void.”
Four months after Robert Kennedy was gunned down, the former first lady married Aristotle Onassis in “a desire to escape the United States, to take refuge from the relentless publicity and potential danger,” writes Dunak as a plausible explanation. Time in covering the union, Dunak continues, quoted one Kennedyite: “Perhaps she feels she has not been very well treated by America.”
The American media coverage of the former first lady’s marriage to Onassis, a wealthy Greek and Argentine shipping tycoon, was viewed as strange, unnatural and disappointing. But, it did not cease the media’s intrigue. Instead, it intensified it, Dunak writes.
“That choice of him—nobody likes it and it defies explanation,” Dunak says, adding that the decision exemplifies that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis “really does do what she wants.”
And while there is no clear record, Dunak believes the former first lady’s choice in a second marriage was directly linked to the Robert Kennedy assassination. The book details the media coverage during that time that gives accounts of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s ‘jet-setting’ lifestyle during her seven-year marriage to Onassis, who died in 1975. And even as the former first lady settled into a professional life in New York City working as a consulting editor for Viking Press and later campaigning on behalf of Ted Kennedy, who unsuccessfully challenged incumbent President Jimmy Carter in the primary, the media’s curiosity of the former first lady continued.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died at age 64 on May 19, 1994, in New York City from non-Hodgkin lymphoma cancer. By then, she had established an independent career in publishing. In her death, media accounts depicted the former first lady as classy, a partner in a new frontier, a partner in ‘Camelot’ and honored her heroic behavior after John Kennedy’s assassination. Based on the number of tributes and obituaries, Dunak questions whether the former first lady—figuratively—also died in 1963.
“That’s sort of the defining moment. That imagery that is used is very often young Jacqueline Kennedy in the White House. Jacqueline Kennedy in that pink Chanel suit. Jacqueline Kennedy with the veil at the funeral. And you know, there are various tributes that don’t say the word Onassis at all.”
And in an ironic turnaround after years of the media constantly pressing the former first lady to “tell us,” Dunak describes a media narrative that took hold in tributes saluting her for maintaining her privacy.
“She kept things for herself and that becomes, potentially, her most heroic quality,” Dunak says.