What Jackie Taught Us (Revised and Expanded): Lessons from the Remarkable Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Introduction by L iz Smith - Hardcover

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A longtime admirer of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—and for many years a neighbor in the same New York apartment building—Clementina (Tina) Santi Flaherty, author, philanthropist, and businesswoman, is a former radio and TV broadcaster who went on to become the first female corporate vice president of three of America’s largest corporations: Colgate-Palmolive, Grey Advertising, and GTE (now Verizon).

Tina is the recipient of many awards and honors including an honorary doctorate from St. John’s University and an Equal People Award sponsored by the U.N. Decade for Women. She was also selected by the National Conference of Christians and Jews as “An Extraordinary Woman of Achievement.”

She is an active board member for the Irish Repertory Theatre, the Animal Medical Center, the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation Inc., and the Churchill Centre.

Tina is also the author of The Savvy Woman’s Success Bible (with Kay Gilman) and Talk Your Way to the Top. She lives in New York City with her two dogs, Jackie and Scarlett.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.***

Copyright © 2014 by Tina Santi Flaherty

Prologue

Some may believe that there is such a thing as “the Kennedy Curse.” Violent deaths, personal destruction, and broken dreams have haunted the fabled family over the decades and have contributed to this belief. Whether this scourge actually exists is open to interpretation. There is no doubt, however, that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis could rightfully be called “the Kennedy Blessing.” indeed, America was blessed in a way it had never been before her tenure as First Lady. in sharing with us her love and protection of all things beautiful, she changed the way America was perceived at home and abroad. For more than four decades, Jackie—as we still fondly call her—captured our imaginations as no other woman has or probably ever will again in our time. Her death in 1994 seemed premature, and it still doesn’t seem fair that she’s gone. Twenty years later, her radiant smile and elegant spirit continue to live on and will forever be a part of American history.

Jackie had everything people admired and wanted for themselves—beauty, intelligence, adorable children, a life full of excitement and glamour, and, yes, a handsome husband, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. We cannot think of Jackie without remembering Jack. Together they symbolized a poignant time in our nation’s history, when its innocence and optimism promised that anything was possible. They gave us hope and made us feel that each of us would be the best we could be.

The extraordinary life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was full of magic, both black and white. The most terrible tragedy that could ever be imagined happened to her. Her husband, the most powerful man in the free world, was murdered before her very eyes. She handled his death with a majesty that we will never forget. Our hearts ached as we tearfully reached out to her, young Caroline, and the little boy we called John-John. We loved Jackie when Jack was alive and continued to love her after he was gone. Admittedly, many of her admirers were temporarily thrown off base by her subsequent marriage to Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. After Onassis died, we resumed our unflagging adoration when she emerged as America’s most famous working woman. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was by no means a perfect person, but in our minds and memories, she was as close to perfection as few people ever will be.

Although I didn’t know Jackie personally, I happened to live in the same building in New York City. in 1989, my former husband and I purchased an apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, the building to which Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis moved with her two children in 1964, after she left Washington, DC. With its magnificent views of Central Park and its large gracious apartments, 1040 Fifth was designed by the architectural genius Rosario Candela, who created some of New York City’s most prestigious buildings, including the grand art deco duplex at 740 Park Avenue where Jackie lived as a child. Located on the Upper east Side of Manhattan, near the world-famous Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1040 Fifth Avenue is still special because to most people it’s where Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis lived for the final thirty years of her life and it was there that she died in 1994 at the age of sixty-four.

As a neighbor, I observed Jackie from a faraway closeness— never wanting to encroach on her privacy. Once, her son, John, who was thirty-two years old at the time, approached me in the lobby as I was returning home from a chilly winter walk in Central Park with Liam, my yellow Labrador. “What’s it like to have a dog in a New York City apartment?” he asked, with an earnest, friendly smile on his handsome face. “It’s just fine,” I answered. “Dogs just want to be wherever you are.” It was an endearing encounter. I assumed he asked the question because he was thinking of getting a dog, which he subsequently did— an enormous German Shepherd named Sam, which he rescued from the pound.

Jackie’s Legacy

As a woman who filled many roles in her life, Jackie’s enduring legacy lies in the choices she made. She handled happiness and heartache, incredible fame and wealth, and public demands and private needs with a remarkable discipline derived from a tremendous well of self-knowledge and acceptance. Indeed, Jackie taught the world, both women and men alike, many valuable lessons for which we may be forever grateful.

This book explores the unique path that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis took, which led to her overwhelming success, and examines those personal characteristics and traits that made it possible. Her life shows us that success is determined less by an inborn capacity than by focus, strategy, and passion. More important for us, Jackie laid out a road map for achievement.

While we need not aspire to the same heights she reached to learn from her extraordinary accomplishments, we can all enlarge and enrich our own personal universe by following her example in our own way.

Veiling Truth in Mystery

An Introduction

Liz Smith is a columnist and the author

of Natural Blonde.

In my sixty-odd-year career of writing about celebrities and the prominent, I’ve realized I’ve had the chance to observe the lives of five of the most famous and vital women of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries:

Marilyn Monroe, more famous now than when she died dramatically in 1962. Elizabeth Taylor, movie star of stars, and my friend, who left us in 2011. The still provocative pop queen deluxe Madonna, constantly pronounced “finished,” who made more money last year than her younger competitors. Princess Diana, declared the VIP most people would like to bring back to life after her tragic early death in 1997. And Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis—the most mysterious and inexplicable of them all—gone of illness in 1994.

Virgil wrote about “veiling truth in mystery,” and Jackie’s legacy has been just that.

This commemorative edition of What Jackie Taught Us, published on the twentieth anniversary of Jackie’s death, includes not only the insights from her life about how to live with poise, grace, and zest as Tina Flaherty articulated them but also the memories of her by a number of astute observers. But this book won’t pretend to solve the variousness, the depth of unusual ideas, theories, and contradictions about Jackie.

For she alone of the five maintained an almost impenetrable air of reticence and spiritual-psychic secrets. One way or another, the other four were flamboyant exhibitionists. But Jackie gave away only what she wanted people to know and think, and she left us always wanting more.

The world press almost went crazy because—though millions read the rumors that she was indifferent to infidelities, or promiscuous herself, and all the rest of her contradictions during her thousand days as First Lady—she gave up almost nothing. Her voice, downy and pillow soft, her televised tour of the White House with Charles Collingwood, her heroic behavior at the Dallas assassination, a final move to New York City to escape the public, the downhill phase of her marriage to Aristotle Onassis, and her private life as a book editor raising two first-rate children—Jackie never gave anything away.

If she did say something in a rare unintended interview—as with Teddy White and to William Manchester after JFK’s death—she soon relented and denied it. Or sued to...