Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy played a historic role during the Kennedy administration: most notably her restoration of the White House, her contribution to its collection of art and historical furnishings, her support of the arts, her leadership in historic preservation, and her work as a traveling ambassador.
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born on July 28, 1929 in Southampton, New York. Her father, John Vernou Bouvier III, was an affluent Wall Street stockbroker whose ancestors had arrived from France in the early 1800s. Her mother, Janet Lee Bouvier, an accomplished equestrian, was of Irish and English parentage. Jackie spent her childhood in New York City and Long Island and later, following her mother's divorce in 1940 and remarriage to Hugh D. Auchincloss II in 1942, in McLean, Virginia and Newport, Rhode Island. Her favorite pastimes were reading, sketching, writing poems and riding horses.
Jackie attended Miss Porter's School for Girls in Connecticut and Vassar College, where she excelled in history, literature, art and French. After studying at the Sorbonne in Paris for her junior year in 1949, she returned to the United States to earn a degree in French literature from George Washington University.
While she was finishing the work for her degree in 1950, she entered a writing contest sponsored by Vogue called the "Prix de Paris," which she won with her essay on "People I Wish I Had Known," beating out 1,279 other contestants. Her subjects were Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire and Sergei Diaghilev. Her victory entitled her to receive a year-long position as a trainee at Vogue, spending six months in their New York office and six months in the Paris office. Jackie's parents, especially her stepfather, felt that she had spent a long time in Europe already, and they were concerned that if she took the job she would not return to the United States. At their request, Jackie turned down the offer and went to work instead.
Her first job was in 1952 as the "Inquiring Camera Girl" for the Washington Times-Herald, roving the city with her camera to capture citizens' reactions to issues of the day. During this time, Jackie met the young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. They were married on September 12, 1953 at St. Mary's Church in Newport. A crowd of 3,000 on-lookers waited outside the church for a glimpse of the newlyweds. Afterwards, 1,200 guests attended the wedding reception at Hammersmith Farm, the nearby Auchincloss estate, a place filled with happy memories for the bride of the summers she had spent there with her mother and stepfather, brothers and sisters.
Following their wedding, the Kennedys lived in the Georgetown section of Washington. During her husband's convalescence from major back surgery in 1955, she encouraged his interest in writing Profiles in Courage, a study of highly-principled political decisions in U.S. history, which he eventually dedicated to her. The book won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography, a momentous year for the Kennedy's as their first child, Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, was born that November.
In January 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Presidency of the United States, launching 11 months of cross-country campaigning. A few weeks into the campaign, Jacqueline became pregnant and her doctors instructed her to remain at home. There she answered campaign mail, taped TV commercials, gave interviews and wrote "Campaign Wife," a syndicated column carried across the nation. Celebration of a Kennedy election victory was followed just weeks later by celebration of the birth of the Kennedys' second child, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr.
At age 31, Jacqueline Kennedy became the third youngest first lady in U.S. history and the first to be the mother of an infant since the turn of the century. She defined her major role as "to take care of the President," but added that "if you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much."