Research by Steven L. Brawley

Essay by Jackie featured in:

Books I Read When I was Young: Favorite Books of Famous People (June 1980, Avon Books)

“Read for escape, read for adventure, read for romance, but read the great writers. You will find to your delight that they are easier and more joy to read than the second-rate ones. They touch your imagination and your deepest yearnings, and when your imagination is stirred it can lead you down paths you never dreamed you would travel. If you read great language you will develop, without your realizing it, an appreciation of excellence that can shape your life.

Read Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, Jules Verne, Ernest Hemingway. And read poetry—in whatever anthology your school gives you. Rhythm is what should first seize you when you read poetry. Do you know ‘Tarantella’ by Hilaire Belloc? Read Countee Cullen, e.e. cumming, Emily Dickinson, Siegfried Sassoon. Do you know ‘The Fog’ by Carl Sandburg? It is modeled on the Japanese haiku which is only allowed to be seventeen syllables long and doesn’t have to rhyme. You could try to write a poem like that.

If you read, you may want to write. Great painters learned to paint by copying Old Masters in museums. You can learn to write by trying to copy the writers you like. Writing helps you to express your deepest feelings. Once you can express yourself you can tell the world what you want from it or how you would like to change it. All the changes in the world, for good or evil, were first brought about by words.”

Research by Steven L. Brawley

Vogue's 1951 “Prix de Paris” Competition

Self-portrait submitted by Jackie as part of her winning essay "People I Wish I had Known" (copyright Conde Nast Publications)

"A self portrait written from the author’s viewpoint is liable to be a little biased. Written from the viewpoint of others it would probably be so derogatory that I would not care to send it in. I have no idea how to go about describing myself but perhaps with much sifting of wheat from chaff I can produce something fairly accurate.

As to physical appearance, I am tall, 5’7”, with brown hair, a square face and eyes so unfortunately far apart that it takes three weeks to have a pair of glasses made with a bridge wide enough to fit over my nose. I do not have a sensational figure but can look slim if I pick the right clothes. I flatter myself on being able at times to walk out of the house looking like the poor man’s Paris copy, but often my mother will run up to inform me that my left stocking seam is crooked or the right-hand topcoat button about to fall off. This, I realize, is the Unforgiveable Sin.

I lived in New York City until I was thirteen and spent summers in the country. I hated dolls, loved horses and dogs and had skinned knees and braces on my teeth for what must have seemed an interminable length of time to my family.

I read a lot when I was little, much of which was too old for me. There were Chekov and Shaw in the room where I had to take naps and I never slept but sat on the window sill reading, then scrubbed the soles of my feet so the nurse would not see I had been out of bed. My heroes were Byron, Mowgli, Robin Hood, Little Lord Fauntleroy’s grandfather, and Scarlett O’Hara.

Growing up was not too painful a process. It happened gradually over the three years I spent at boarding school trying to imitate the girls who had callers every Saturday. I passed the finish line when I learned to smoke, in the balcony of the Normandie theatre in New York from a girl who pressed a Longfellow upon me then led me from the theatre when the usher told her that other people could not hear the film with so much coughing going on.

I spent two years at Vassar and still cannot quite decide whether I liked it or not. I wish I had worked harder and gone away less on weekends. Last winter I took my Junior Year in Paris and spent the vacations in Austria and Spain. I loved it more than any other year of my life. Being away from home gave me a chance to look at myself with a jaundiced eye. I learned not to be ashamed of a real hunger for knowledge, something I had always tried to hide, and I came home glad to start in here again but with a love for Europe that I am afraid will never leave me.

I suppose one should mention one’s hobbies in a profile. I really don’t have any that I work at constantly. I have studied art, here and in Paris, and I love to go to Art Exhibits and paint things that my mother doesn’t put in the closet until a month after I have given them to her at Christmas. I have written a children’s book for my younger brother and sister, as it amuses me to make up fairy tales and illustrate them. I love to ride and fox hunt. I will drop everything any time to read a book on ballet. This winter I am trying to catch up on things I should have learned before. I am taking typing and Interior Decorating outside of college and learning to play bridge and trying to cook things from recipes I found in France. I am afraid I will never be very successful over a hot stove.

One of my most annoying faults is getting very enthusiastic over something at the beginning and then tiring of it half way through. I am trying to counteract this by not getting too enthusiastic over too many things at once."

Notes: In 1951 Miss Bouvier beat out more than twelve hundred of the college women in America to win Vogue's Prix de Paris competition, with her essay on "People I Wish I Had Known."  Carol Phillips, managing editor of Vogue said at the time: "Each paper is excellent – there is no exception. She is a writer… my only worry is that she might marry some day – and go off on one of those horses she speaks about." 

Who did she say she would like to have known? In her essay, she listed playwright Oscar Wilde, poet Charles Baudelaire and ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev. Despite winning the competition, she ultimately declined the award and became the "inquiring camera girl" for the Washington-Times Herald.

Research by Steven L. Brawley

Quotes Attributed to Jackie

• When Harvard men say they have graduated from Radcliffe, then we've made it.
• The only routine with me is no routine at all.
• I'll be a wife and mother first, then First Lady.
• A newspaper reported I spend $30,000 a year buying Paris clothes and that women hate me for it. I couldn’t spend that much unless I wore sable underwear.
• It (the White House) looks like it’s been furnished by discount stores.
• A camel makes an elephant feel like a jet plane. (India 1962)
• I always wanted to be some kind of writer or newspaper reporter. But after college... I did other things.
• There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all.
• If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much.
• Whenever I was upset by something in the papers, Jack always told me to be more tolerant, like a horse flicking away flies in the summer.
• I want minimum information given with maximum politeness.
• The one thing I do not want to be called is First Lady. It sounds like a saddle horse.
• I want to live my life, not record it.
• Even though people may be well known, they hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth: birth, marriage and death.
• One must not let oneself be overwhelmed by sadness.
• Now, I think that I should have known that he was magic all along. I did know it - but I should have guessed that it would be too much to ask to grow old with and see our children grow up together. So now, he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.
• Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the President's widow?
• There are two kinds of women, those who want power in the world and those who want power in bed.
• An editor becomes kind of your mother. You expect love and encouragement from an editor.
• What is sad for women of my generation is that they weren't supposed to work if they had families. What were they going to do when the children are grown - watch the raindrops coming down the window pane.
• We know you understand that even though people may be well known they still hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth — birth, marriage, death. We wish our wedding to be a private moment in the little chapel among the cypresses of Skorpios.
• Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed with shadows. He brought me into a world where one could find both happiness and love. We lived through many beautiful experiences together which cannot be forgotten, and for which I will be eternally grateful.
• Every time we got off the plane that day, three times they gave me the yellow roses of Texas. But in Dallas they gave me red roses. I thought how funny, red roses — so all the seat was full of blood and red roses.
• Dear God, please take care of your servant John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
• The children have been a wonderful gift to me, and I’m thankful to have once again seen our world through their eyes. They restore my faith in the family’s future.
• I think my biggest achievement is that, after going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane.
• One man can make a difference and every man should try.
• The river of sludge will go on and on. It isn’t about me.
• It has helped me to be taken seriously as an editor, for my own abilities.
• If you produce one book, you will have done something wonderful in your life.
• I remember a taxi driver who said, “Lady, you work and you don’t have to?” I said, “Yes.” He turned around and said, “I think that’s great!"

Research by Steven L. Brawley

Poems Penned by Jackie

Me (1939)

Easter (1941)

Sailing (1943)

Sea Joy (1939)

When I go down by the sandy shore

I can think of nothing I want more

Then to live by the booming blue sea

As the seagulls flutter round about me 

I can run about - when the tide is out

With the wind and the sand and the sea all about

And the sea gulls are swirling and diving for fish

O - to live by the sea is my only wish.

Thoughts (1943)

I love the Autumn,

And yet I cannot say

All the thoughts and things

That make one feel this way.

I love walking on the angry shore,

To watch the angry sea;

Where summer people were before,

But now there’s only me.

I love wood fires at night

That have a ruddy glow.

I stare at the flames

And think of long ago. 

I love the feeling down inside me

That says to run away

To come and be a gypsy

And laugh the gypsy way.

The tangy taste of apples,

The snowy mist at morn,

The wonderlust inside you

When you hear the huntsman’s horn. 

Naustagia - that’s the Autumn,

Dreaming through September

Just a million lovely things

I always will remember.

Meanwhile in Massachusetts (1953)

Meanwhile in Massachusetts Jack Kennedy dreamed

Walking the shore by the Cape Cod Sea

Of all the things he was going to be.

He breathed in the tang of the New England fall

And back in his mind he pictured it all,

The burnished New England countryside

Names that a patriot says with pride

Concord and Lexington, Bunker Hill

Plymouth and Falmouth and Marstons Mill

Winthrop and Salem, Lowell, Revere

Quincy and Cambridge, Louisburg Square.

This was his heritage—this his share

Of dreams that a young man harks in the air.

The past reached out and tracked him now 

He would heed that touch; he didn’t know how.

Part he must serve, a part he must lead

Both were his calling, both were his need. 

Part he was of New England stock

As stubborn, close guarded as Plymouth Rock

He thought with his feet most firm on the ground

But his heart and his dreams were not earthbound

He would call new England his place and his creed

But part he was of an alien breed

Of a breed that had laughed on Irish hills

And heard the voice in Irish rills

The life of that green land danced in his blood

Tara, Killarney, a magical flood

That surged in the depth of his too proud heart

And spiked the punch of New England so tart

Men would call him thoughtful, sincere

They would not see through to the Last Cavalier 

He turned on the beach and looked toward his house. 

On a green lawn his white house stands

And the wind blows the sea grass low on the sands

There his brothers and sisters have laughed and played 

And thrown themselves to rest in the shade.

The lights glowed inside, soon supper would ring

And he would go home where his father was King.

But no he was here with the wind and the sea

And all the things he was going to be.

He would build empires 

And he would have sons

Others would fall

Where the current runs 

He would find love

He would never find peace

For he must go seeking

The Golden Fleece

All of the things he was going to be

All of the things in the wind and the sea.

Notes: Some of Jackie's favorite poems included: "Ithaka" by Constantine P. Cavafy and "Memory of Cape Cod" by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Read Caroline Kennedy's "The Best Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis" for further information.