Why ‘Our Jackie’ Should Not Be Frozen in Time

New biography chronicles Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s life through the lens of the media.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis leaves her chartered Olympic Airlines plane in Greece after accompanying the body of her late husband, Aristotle Onassis, on a flight from Paris on March 18, 1975. (Credit: Bettman)

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…