Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Quotes

“I mention Jackie mostly because I want to be assured that I inhabit the same universe as other people; that I am not alone on a distant shore. Jackie glues me to this world—most effectively when I can find a way to mention her name or her attributes, when I can find a pretext, however frail, to introduce her into a conversation, even at the risk of non sequitur, bathos, or incoherence.”
― Wayne Koestenbaum, Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon

“She was a little removed,” Jack said as an adult. In private, he complained that Rose never told him that she loved him. Jack’s friend Charles Spalding, who saw the family up close, described Rose as “so cold, so distant from the whole thing . . . I doubt if she ever rumpled the kid’s hair in his whole life. . . . It just didn’t exist: the business of letting your son know you’re close, that she’s there. She wasn’t.” Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy told the journalist Theodore White that “history made him [Jack] what he was . . . this lonely sick boy. His mother really didn’t love him. . . . She likes to go around talking about being the daughter of the Mayor of Boston, or how she was an ambassador’s wife. . . . She didn’t love him. . . . History made him what he was.”
― Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963