Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born into New York society as the eldest daughter of John Vernou "Black Jack" Bouvier III (1891-1957), a playboy stockbroker of French descent, and his wife, Janet Norton Lee (1906-1989), a bank president's daughter. Her maternal great-grandfather, a potato-famine Irish immigrant, was a superintendent of New York City public schools, though Janet Lee Bouvier preferred to tell people that he was a Maryland-born veteran of the Civil War. She had a younger sister, Caroline Lee Bouvier, who was eventually married three times. First to Michael Canfield, then to Polish prince Stanislas Radziwill and finally to financier Herbert Ross.
After being named "Debutante of the Year" for the 1947-48 season, she was educated at Miss Porter's School, Vassar College and George Washington University, and spent time studying in France.
After a youthful engagement to stockbroker John Husted, Jr. (they were to have been married in June 1952), Jacqueline Lee Bouvier married Senator John F. Kennedy, one of the Democratic Party's rising political stars, on September 12, 1953, at Newport, Rhode Island. The couple had four children: Arabella Kennedy (stillborn, 1956) Caroline Bouvier Kennedy (born 1957), John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr (1960 - 1999), and Patrick Bouvier Kennedy (born and died 1963).
John F. Kennedy, narrowly beat his friend Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election, becoming the 35th President of the United States in 1961. Jacqueline became one of the youngest First Ladies in United States history. On February 14, 1962 she took American television viewers on a tour of the White House. She was riding with Kennedy when he was assassinated on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas.
In 1968 she married shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, from whom she was widowed in 1975.
When a paparazzo had photographed Jackie nude on a Greek island, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt bought the photos and published them in August 1975, much to her embarrassment and to the embarrassment of the Kennedy family.
She spent her latter years working as an editor at Doubleday, living in New York City and Martha's Vineyard with Maurice Tempelsman, a Belgian-born industrialist and diamond merchant. She died of lymphoma and is buried with her first husband at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.
