Do we like them?

Do we like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis?

Our score: 8 out of 10. A decent public record and a famous win for a shared public space, with a few sharp private opinions from 1964 as the one mark.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is a hard one to pin down because so much of what we know is the image she chose to show. Months after her husband was assassinated in 1963, she sat down with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and recorded hours of candid interviews. She sealed them for decades, and they only came out in 2011.

Those tapes are where the harm check gets interesting. On them she called Martin Luther King Jr. a “phony”, and described Indira Gandhi, years before Gandhi became India's prime minister, as a “bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman”. They were private remarks, made while she was grieving, and not a campaign.

The King comments have context. Historians quoted in coverage of the tapes say her view of him was shaped by information passed on from J. Edgar Hoover, who was working to damage King's reputation, and there is no proof King said the things she heard. That explains the remarks but does not undo them, which is why this is an asterisk and not a clean pass. Nothing turned up on her campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women or migrants, or pushing climate or health misinformation.

The good stuff is real and public. Living in New York after the assassination, she teamed up with the Municipal Art Society to form the Committee to Save Grand Central Station. She spoke at meetings and press conferences, and she wrote to then-Mayor Abe Beame urging him to help save it. Her fame made the campaign visible, and the terminal survived after Penn Central lost at the Supreme Court.

Nothing new turned up on her lately that we could verify. The honest gap is that most of what we could open was about Grand Central and the tapes. We could not fully read the pieces on her book-editing career or her private life, so we have left them out rather than guess.