What Jackie Taught Us

When she was First Lady early in the 1960s, Jackie Kennedy told her press secretary that she wanted the media to get “minimum information with maximum politeness.” Jackie applied that command to her own life for the thirty-one years after she left the White House and in doing that, became the enigmatic icon that fascinates us even now. Today would have been Jackie’s 82nd birthday, and the lessons she taught by example still hold true in 2011. Here are a few:

Don't Talk Too Much

Jackie spoke out on what mattered to her , like the arts or preserving historic buildings, but she never made small talk with the media, and she didn’t blurt the first thing that came to her mind. Hillary “I’m not some little woman staying home and baking cookies” Clinton could have learned a lot from that when she started out at First Lady. Michelle Obama tends to be more in the Jackie mode.

Dress Well She always did, at every stage of her life. When she first came into public view in the Mad Men era, women wore suits (with skirts) or dresses to travel on an airplane. That’s unthinkable now, but Jackie’s Aristotle-Onassis-era outfit of slim, light-colored pants and a dark top still looks great. And her evening gowns were always both glamorous and appropriate.

Put Family First I’ll be a wife and mother first, and then First Lady,” she once said. And in later years, she added, “If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much.” No one could say that Jackie bungled motherhood. Her daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, has a long-term marriage and is an attorney. And John F. Kennedy Jr., before his tragic death, married the woman he loved and founded the innovative magazine George.

Don't Be Afraid To Like What You Like Jackie did a lot for the arts, including advocating for an agency that eventually became the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts. But her taste wasn’t exactly avant-garde. She had pianist Arthur Rubinstein, not composer John Cage, perform at the White House; she convinced the French to lend the Mona Lisa to the U.S. and didn’t spend too much time thinking about the contemporary wild-man painter Jackson Pollock. She wasn’t ashamed of liking art that was pretty, delicate and somewhat old-fashioned. And she loved anything French.

Forget About Trying To Please Other People Jackie recalled that when in the White House, she was angered by news stories, her husband had told her to ignore them, “like a horse flicking off flies in the summer.” Later, as the subject of endless tabloid stories, she showed that she’d taken that advice to heart. “The river of sludge will go on and on,” she said. “It isn’t about me.”

Don't Marry For Money She did and her marriage to Aristotle Onassis was probably the biggest mistake Jackie ever made. It’s pretty obvious that she wouldn’t have married him if he hadn’t been one of the world’s richest men. As for his part, the Greek shipping magnate regarded the former First Lady as a kind of trophy. And the premarital contract was negotiated by Jackie’s brother-in-law, Ted Kennedy, and reviewed by Jackie’s legendary financial consultant, Andre Meyer. Perhaps inevitably, the marriage didn’t work out. Onassis’s daughter Christina hated Jackie, and Onassis never got over the love of his life, Maria Callas. Jackie and Onassis separated, and when he died in 1975, seven years after marrying Jackie, Onassis had begun filing for divorce. Only Jackie could say whether the settlement she got – variously reported as $10 million to $26 million – was worth years of being married to a man she didn’t love.

Grieve And Go On “One must not let oneself be overwhelmed by sadness,” she said. And she said, with characteristic understatement, “After going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane.”