Photo by William Karel & Richard Melloul
 
Negative Year: June 1978 (printed year: 1970s)
Print size: 29.8x19.8 cm
Style: Vintage print / gelatin silver print
Photographers stamp on the verso
 
The Backstory:
Many stories have been written about Jackie Kennedy and the following lines are just a fraction of her life.
 
Not many people know that Jacqueline was a reporter-photographer at the Washington Times-Herald after she graduated in 1951. Besides horseback riding and painting, writing was one of her passions. On September 12, 1953, she married John F. Kennedy and seven years later she became the youngest first lady in nearly 80 years leaving a distinct mark on the job. 
During her travels with JFK, she won wide praise for her beauty, fashion sense, and facility with languages. Alluding to his wife’s immense popularity during their tour of France in 1961, President Kennedy jokingly reintroduced himself to reporters as the “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”
 
99 minutes after her husband was assassinated (1963), she stood beside Lyndon Johnson in her blood-stained suit as he took the oath of office, an unprecedented appearance by a widowed first lady.
 
1968 Jacqueline wed the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. According to the press, the marriage soon became troubled, and she continued to spend considerable time in New York. After the death of her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, Jackie Kennedy was romantically tied in press accounts to Khashoggi, though in all likelihood they were just friends. In June 1978 there were even rumors in the press that the two got secretly married. The latter is also stated on the backside of the present photograph.
 
Returning to an old interest, Jacqueline begun working as a consulting editor again.
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis died on May 19, 1994, and is buried beside President John F. Kennedy's gravesite. Throughout her life, she was a ubiquitous presence on lists of the most admired and respected women in the world - beyond her death.
 
Neither her husband's affairs and his early death nor the loss of two children and the unhappy marriage to the billionaire Onassis rob her of the strength to be herself.