Do we like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades of saving buildings and backing writers and artists, marked down for harsh private remarks about a civil rights leader.
Nothing new on her lately, and she died in 1994, so this is a look at the whole life. She was born in Southampton, New York, in 1929, and went on to be the First Lady who redecorated the White House with period furnishings. That was only chapter one.
After the White House she did something many famous widows don't: she went to work. She spent about 19 years as an editor, first at Viking and then at Doubleday, and published more than 100 books. Her list ran from Michael Jackson's Moonwalk to Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy and Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth.
The cause she's best loved for is saving Grand Central Terminal. In the 1970s she joined the Municipal Art Society's committee, spoke at meetings and press conferences, and wrote to the mayor, which brought huge attention to the fight. Her campaign helped lead to the 1978 US Supreme Court ruling that upheld the city's landmark law and blocked a tower being built on top of the station. The terminal's main entrance was later named the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Foyer in her honour.
Now the harm check, and there's a blot. In 1964 she recorded interviews with historian Arthur Schlesinger, released in 2011, in which she was harshly critical of Martin Luther King Jr. She said she couldn't see his picture without thinking he was terrible. Coverage says her view was shaped by what JFK told her about FBI surveillance, and that no evidence confirms the claims she repeated.
That's the whole list on harm. Those remarks were made privately in 1964, and nothing in the sources we read shows her campaigning against any group, backing hate or pushing conspiracy theories. We found nothing either way on LGBTQ+ causes, so we can't call her an active ally. It's a stain, not a pattern, which is why it's an asterisk rather than a fail.
On the good-person side, she stands up well. She spent her later decades lending her name to public causes such as Grand Central. She kept her Martha's Vineyard property, Red Gate Farm, as open land: after her death it was sold well below market to two nonprofits to become a public conservation reserve, with the family keeping 95 acres. In her own words on preservation, she wrote that Americans care about their past but tear down what matters for short-term gain.