Book Review - Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

emilyelizabethfran
May 26, 2015
2 min read

My brother and his wife-to-be gifted me with this beautiful biography last Christmas, and it didn't take me long to read it from cover-to-cover. I had known of Jacqueline Kennedy for as long as I could remember, and I had learned to appreciate her as style icon, Jackie O, during my high school years, but it wasn't until I read Barbara Leaming's detailed biography of this First Lady’s personal life, that I began to view her as a brave survivor of mental illness.

As its title hints, this book narrates the story of Jackie's life from her late teens, when she was simply a young Miss Bouvier, to her death many years later, after becoming both a Kennedy, and then an Onassis.

Leaming tells this story honestly and insightfully, revealing an important plotline, which has never seemed more relevant than now. After describing Jacqueline's time as the wife of America's handsomest president, the book centers on the days, months and years that followed John F. Kennedy's assassination and Jacqueline's very real struggle with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after that fateful day in Dallas in 1963. Although, the diagnosis of PTSD did not emerge until many years later, Jacqueline suffered intensely from the symptoms of this mental illness for the remainder of her life.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is commonly diagnosed among war veterans, and victims of violence and sexual assault. PTSD is diagnosed when one experiences recurring flashbacks of one or several traumatic events, long-term, or when extreme stress is triggered in response to relatively neutral stimuli, because the memory of trauma is called forth.

According to Leaming's research, Jacqueline frequently experienced vivid flashbacks to her husband's assassination, recalling details from the sound of the first gun shot, to the blood spattered on her infamous pink suit. Nevertheless, this mid-century celebrity's courage and resilience enabled her to cope with the symptoms of PTSD, and eventually became a successful New York book editor.

I was so inspired by this book, and so appreciative of the angle from which Leaming told Jacqueline's story, an angle that I feel has been neglected by too many biographers, too many times before.

Mental illness is not new, but our acceptance of it is. Accepting mental illness as a regular part of life, and endeavoring to care for our mental health, just as we care for our physical health, enables us to progress as a cohesive society. This book is certainly a step in the right direction.