Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis

"Every moment one lives is different from the other. The good, the bad, the hardship, the joy, the tragedy, love, and happiness are all interwoven into one single indescribable whole that is called life. You cannot separate the good from the bad. And perhaps there is no need to do so, either." Does any one know what intelligent, strong, and classy women who said that quote? Well, the wife of John F. Kennedy said it. Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis did go through "the good, the bad, the hardship, the joy, the tragedy, love, and happiness" during the sixty-four years of her life. She was one of the most famous women in the 20th century, but she never called a press conference, never was on a talk show, never wrote about her life story, and never presented herself as a victim of anything. Yet, wherever she went there was always admirers, and photographers following her every move. Some people even call her America's Queen.

Jackie showed her strength even as a young girl when her parents got divorced when she was nine years old. She was very close with her father but did not see him much because she lived with her mother. Both of her parents hated each other to the extent that they could not even look at each other with out getting in a fight. Even at Jackie's wedding her father did not give her away like he was suppose to do because her mother told her father that he would ruin the wedding. Because of that comment from her mother, her father did not show up on her wedding day. Jackie was truly crushed but managed to forgive her father. She even got stronger as she got older. She witnessed her first and second husband die in her arms. When she saw that her husband was dead she started kissing him. After the shooting of President JFK many people tried to persuade Jackie to change her clothes, but she insisted on wearing the blood stained pink suit. "I want them to see what they have done," she said. She also refused to take tranquilizers, fearing they would interfere with her plans of the President's, her husband's, funeral. At the funeral she did not shed a tear. She stood their looking strong. When John F. Kennedy's coffin went past her and their two children, she asked John Jr. to salute his father. It was then that the nation saw her as a mother.

A great and amazing mother she was to her children. She wanted nothing but the best for Caroline Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr. One way that a person can find this out is by seeing which First Lady she admired the most out of all the First Ladies before her. She admired Bess Truman because of "her sensible way of bringing up her daughter, Margaret, in the White House glare." Jacqueline always tried to keep her children's