Finding Jackie: A Life Reinvented

Summary

Jackie. One name was all you needed. A paragon of femininity, fashion, ideal American wifeliness and motherhood, she was also fiercely independent, the first of the modern First Ladies. Then her husband was murdered, changing her world and ours.

Traumatized and exposed, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy nonetheless built a new life for herself in an America similarly haunted by upheaval. She dated and traveled ceaselessly before scandalizing the world by marrying a foreigner, living abroad, climbing pyramids, cruising the oceans, and wandering Europe braless and barefoot.

But the story of Jackie’s reinvention has been culturally erased. In Finding Jackie, author Oline Eaton pieces it back together.

Jackie’s story—treated like the national soap opera and transmitted through newspapers, magazines, images, and TV during the 1960s and 1970s—became wired into America’s emotional grid. Here, in Finding Jackie, she’s rediscovered as an adventurer, a wanderer, a woman, and an idea in whom, for over half a century, many Americans and people around the globe have deeply, fiercely wanted to believe.