America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Synopsis
A gossipy biography of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

My thoughts
I didn't know much about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's life beyond the Kennedy years. She was John F. Kennedy's reluctant political asset in The Making of the President and the brave, stoic widow in Death of a President. She lived through remarkable events and I wondered if she was just as remarkable as a woman. I flew through this book and came to the conclusion that she sort of was and sort of wasn't. She wasn't a driving force in any of the political decisions of her day, but up until that point only Eleanor Roosevelt had shown any sort of political drive. She did mastermind the enduring Camelot myth, and the public face she showed after JFK's assassination was truly remarkable.

But by the end of the book I'd formed an opinion I didn't see coming at the outset. I went in expecting to like Jackie and ended up feeling like I couldn't. She was the product of a different time and a different culture - a time when women were subservient and dependent and a culture of debutante balls and grand European tours. She did become her own woman with a successful career, but she was unquestionably a high-maintenance diva.

This is an unauthorized biography written years after Jackie O died, and Sarah Bradford did a breathtaking amount of research and used her own interviews with many, many people to illuminate her subject. Even so, Jackie remains an enigma. She was an intensely private person, so it's difficult to get a sense of what she really thought or felt, which leads to quite a bit of speculation (that Jackie "must have felt" this way or "could't possibly have thought" that way). In addition, I couldn't help feeling that a lot of the people who were interviewed had their own agendas. And sometimes the book was unnecessarily voyeuristic. There are entire passages devoted to JFK's extramarital sex life - exploits that Jackie probably never knew about that just seem thrown in here to increase the scandal factor.

Bottom line
A thorough warts-and-all biography with a lot of dirty laundry.

Fine print
America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, by Sarah Bradford
Genre: Biography
Photo from Goodreads.
I borrowed this book from the library.