Producing good kids is tough enough for anyone. In Jackie Kennedy’s case, the odds were stacked high against her. Caroline was 6 and John was 3 when their father was murdered. Their uncles (especially Ted) and family friends were helpful, but could not really raise them. Jackie’s own background didn’t suggest a family tradition of warm child rearing. Her bitterly divorced parents subscribed to old-fashioned aristocratic notions of raising children: let the servants do it.
It’s almost axiomatic that extremely wealthy children do not often turn out well in America. Add celebrity and the mix can be ruinous. Tabloids live off the woes of famous children, whose confusion over their own lives is perfectly understandable. Do people like me for myself – or for my name? If this is all there is to success and fame in America, what’s the point? These questions are disorienting and ultimately unanswerable.
For the Kennedy children, the usual threats were multiplied. Every time they walk out the front door, they are prey. (John, dressed in jogging clothes, last week had to sprint past the mob just to get into his own mother’s apartment.) Any offhand comment might end up in the newspaper. The natural reaction should have been to beat their heads against the cage. And the example of that was at hand. For years, a few of their first cousins seemed especially ungracious and self-destructive.
The conventional analysis is that Jackie Onassis reacted to these threats by protecting her children from the barbarians beyond the walls – and from within the Kennedy family. This is not quite accurate. She did express skepticism toward certain Kennedys, and she did create a cocoon for her children. But it was not a physical one of restrictions and prohibitions. It was a cocoon of values. Caroline and John have always traveled widely and associated with whom they chose. As kids, they sometimes stayed with their cousins, including the ones who landed in deep trouble, and they remained loyal to them, as did their mother. Yet both children developed compasses that have kept them from crossing the line into danger. They are centered and well adjusted not by the standard of Kennedys or celebrities in general, but by any standard.
In this there were no Jackie mysteries, just the basics: love, commitment, hands-on supervision, respect for learning, for accomplishment and for the feelings of others. Even when she traveled abroad during the late 1960s, she bombarded her children with affection. Jackie was sometimes accused of caring too much about money. Yet warped values are usually conveyed to the next generation, and her children are extraordinarily unmaterialistic. They appreciate nice things but do not collect them or otherwise live extravagantly. They don’t judge people on the basis of money.
She also passed along her sense of humor and irreverence. As children, Caroline and John could tease Aristotle Onassis when the dog relieved himself on his shoes. As adults, they could rib Maurice Tempelsman for the way he steered his boat. They joked often and easily with their mother, who showed them how to laugh at the silly (and usually wrong) press accounts and tune out the hurtful ones. If she didn’t approve of something they were doing, she let them know it. But she didn’t hector them. She didn’t have to.
Jackie was not just her children’s mother, but their friend, and she left her gift of friendship to them. Caroline, now 36, and John, now 33, are cautious with outsiders, but open and sensitive toward those they have come to know. As they grow older, they have become less world-weary, not more. This is the reverse of the normal pattern, and it, too, comes from their mother. Her appetite for intellectual stimulation and fresh experience is obvious in them. Both were trained as lawyers but constantly undertake new projects that satisfy their curiosity, to the point where John, at the same age his mother was in the White House, still hasn’t quite figured out what to do when he grows up. Caroline is coauthoring her second book, this one on privacy law. She and Ed are raising their own three young children with the right values.
Caroline and John want to convey their parents’ legacy. But they have also learned to hold on to what is theirs. When Caroline wrote an article for Newsweek in 1992 on the 75th anniversary of JFK’s birth, she originally included some tender memories of bedtime stories her father made up for her. At her mother’s urging, she deleted them from the article. Jackie believed that when you tell something deeply personal to people you don’t know, it ceases to be yours.
By example, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis changed the way we view the First Lady. She changed our sense of style and grace, and set a new standard of strength. Wouldn’t it be nice if she also was remembered, in the end, as an example of how to raise and treat our children?
