As the world marks the 50th anniversary of a president’s assassination, I remember the day I met his widow, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. In 1982 she was known around the world as Jackie O — “O” for Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate who had married her and then widowed her a second time.
She could have swatted me away like some bothersome fly, but what I remember most about my brief encounter with a living legend was how gracious she was, and how kind she was to a young person. At the time, I was working as a stringer for the Associated Press in China. Jackie O was coming to Beijing with her friend I.M. Pei, the great architect who had designed the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, who had already designed Beijing’s Fragrant Hills Hotel, and was back to explore more opportunities and play tourist in the country of his ancestors.
My boss, Victoria Graham, who had opened the AP’s Beijing bureau, was ambitious and eager to score an interview with Mrs. Onassis. But she had turned down multiple written pleas for a sit-down, so in a last-ditch effort to win that exclusive, Vickie sent me to track down the elusive Jackie O. and use my youthful earnestness to get her to say yes. It was like sending a child into the lion’s den to beard the lion. But what did I know? I was 22 and unfazed by the challenge.
The thought that strikes me today, more than 30 years later, is the same thought that enters my mind when I watch the film from that fateful day in Dallas: how little security existed and how easy the access. Mrs. Onassis was staying at the Beijing Hotel, practically the only game in town back then and the place where anyone who was anyone stayed.
It may have been that hotel staff and everyone else thought that I was a lowly hotel worker; after all, in my plain Chinese-style clothes and makeup-less face, I probably looked like any other employee. So no one stopped me when I walked into the hotel and scoured the lobby and restaurant, determined to find my prey and score that interview for my boss. And then there she was, sitting and sipping tea and chatting, in the lobby restaurant just like any mere mortal might do. I took a deep breath and then walked right up to her. At that point I did notice two large men in dark suits appearing from the corners to accost me, but Mrs. O. waved them off and let me approach.
I remember being struck by how warm she was and how relatively small in relation to the image I had carried around in my head. There is a tendency to imagine celebrities as literally larger than life. The cameras may magnify them on television and in the magazines, but they are really just like the rest of us.
She listened seriously to me as I pleaded my case, how I was working for the AP, how my boss and I had admired her for years, and how amazingly wonderful it would be if she would grant us just a few minutes of her time to tell the world the story of her visit to China.
Maybe it was because she had two children close to my age; Caroline a couple of years older, John, a couple of months younger. Maybe she was impressed at my courage; perhaps she was amused that I had managed to sneak past security and her entourage. Ultimately she turned down my request for an interview, but it was one of the kindest letdowns I had ever been given. I remember that she did give me her full attention and serious consideration and for that, I was grateful.
A little more than a decade after our Beijing encounter, when she died of cancer at the heartbreakingly young age of 64, I mourned along with the rest of the world at the loss of a great and gracious lady, a woman who had patiently listened to an earnest young reporter with the heart of a mother.
In July, 1999, I was a mother myself, with eight-year-old Katie, five-year-old Molly, and an infant William, when we heard the news of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane crash off the coast of Massachusetts where he, wife Carolyn, and sister-in-law were heading for his cousin’s wedding. JFK Jr. was dashing and fun. As long as he was alive, the idea that Camelot could be reborn was still a possibility.
His premature death was shocking, but even as I and the rest of the world were reminded once again of the Kennedy curse and how one family could endure such pain, one thought stood out to me. And that was how the only saving grace in the early deaths of JFK Jr. and his mother was that she had died before he did and how she, who had lost her husband in such a sudden and heartbreaking way, would not have to bear the pain of losing her only son in a similarly shocking fashion.
Today the world will pay tribute to a great president whose life and promise were cut short by an assassin’s bullet. I will do the same, but I will also remember his widow, the beautiful and gracious Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, who was thrust on the stage of history in a way no wife and mother ever should be. Our paths in life crossed ever so briefly, but in a way I will never forget.
