I have to admit that I was super excited to read this book. But once I got through the Kennedy assasination, my interest lagged considerably. It is very rare that I start to read a book and not finish it, but I had to with this one. I just had so much left to read that I didn't even pick it up for 4 days. So I ended up just scanning the rest to read about the really important events, Bobby's assasination, her marraige to Onnasis, and her own death. Maybe I shouldn't have tried the full biography, but it was just filled with too many pointless details for me to really enjoy.

This biography of Jackie Kennedy is one that gives me mixed feelings.

On the one hand, it allows me to better understand the woman as a complex being, having had to deal with divorce, a husband murdered in front of her, another husband who was abusive to some degree, and her favourite Kennedy relative also gunned down in cold blood. Honestly, I probably feel more sympathetic than others to her tale - if my hypothetical husband was killed in front of me and people started slandering him, I too would act like Jackie would.

At the same time, it feels trashy at points - its coverage of the Bobby/Jackie affair is where it's most notable, if mainly for the juxtaposition of how the book tries to explain how Bobby wouldn't be with Jackie because it would go against his religion and his wife... only to casually mention without much detail about how he himself cheated frequently. Even some exploration of that would have been interesting.

Also, the post-Onassis years, whilst interesting, felt somewhat undercovered?

Still, a decent enough book.

II'll start with a couple of negatives: this book would have benefitted from some family trees! There were so many Kennedys and Bouviers and cousins all over the place that I lost track of everyone. There were many names throughout this book and sometimes it felt like a list rather than a description of a party or whatever. There's a little bit of jumping about too, obviously the author sticks to a linear story but several times she drops in events that happened years later or years before and became a little confused about timelines.
I think Jackie O comes across as a very complex woman in this book. Jackie seems strong but also quite sad at times. She married two men who she was in love with and yet both men saw her as a trophy wife. I think her creation of the JFK myth after his death was an intruiging part of the book - how she talked about Camelot and did everything she could to get his good attributes promoted. Which is probably the reason the world forgot he was a cheating playboy who only became president thanks to mafia money. I felt like JFK comes across very badly in this book, and I don't think Jackie would have approved!
Sometimes Jackie became lost in her own biography. So many Kennedys! However, it shows the strength of her character that her and her children came out of that family in tact and regained independence.
Overall this is a solid biography. If you want to immerse yourself in her life then this is a good book to start with, and I liked all the photos from throughout her life.

Enjoyed this book. Gave me a different view of Jackie Kennedy Onnasis.

Well, that was kind of disappointing.

Sarah Bradford is one of those authors that I have fairly high expectations for. Her Borgia biographies are quite good; but then, this Jackie bio makes me want to go back and fact-check all of her claims in previous books. Maybe she became overwhelmed with the Kennedy legend? I don't know. This just... wasn't up to par.

For much of the book, Bradford comes off less as a biographer and more as a gossipmonger. She has a shoot first and ask questions later kind of attitude, reporting every little scandalous detail without actual wondering if it's true. There is so much rumor surrounding the Kennedys, and so much of it well-recorded, that in my opinion you really have to take everything with a grain of salt.

In his superb biography "Robert Kennedy: His Life" Evan Thomas painstakingly picks apart every major rumor surrounding his subject. He reports what some have said, but admits that it may or may not be true based on x, x, and y reasons. Bradford, on the other hand, chooses to regurgitate everything anyone has ever said, citing several "sources" (a la Us Weekly) without naming names.

She also manages to, for lack of a better term, screw up some fairly big details. She says at one point that Marilyn Monroe had two husbands, while it has been common knowledge for quite some time that she had three. (Bradford specifically forgets Monroe's non-famous husband that she married before becoming an actress; Joe Dimaggio and Arthur Miller, she of course remembers.) She also recounts a tale of JFK talking about assassination the day of his death, making finger guns and lurching into a crouch. But... wait a second. Hasn't Bradford spent numerous pages talking about how bad Jack's back was? If he couldn't pick up his own son, how could he spontaneously crouch down in a dramatic moment of play-acting?

It's just--fishy.

I'm not saying that the Kennedys were pure as driven snow. It's just that Bradford spins so much rumor that I can't really tell fact from fiction. She treats the rumored affair between Bobby Kennedy and Jackie as if it's pure fact, relying on "sources" and rumors spread by RFK's enemies. (Of which he had plenty.) However, numerous biographers have cited RFK as being too sanctimonious to approach infidelity. More still have admitted that, while it's quite possible that he did have an affair with Jackie, we just CAN'T know. (See: Evan Thomas.) This is a huge event for Bradford to just arbitrarily declare truthful. She seems incapable of admitting, "Well, there's no solid evidence but it's possible..." rather jumping to conclusion after conclusion.

Much of what she writes flies straight in the faces of other accounts I've read. So I must conclude that she picked and chose what she wanted to present as fact.

Look--there's a lot of fact here. But there's also a lot of murkiness, and sometimes, I suspect, fiction, even if it wasn't intentional on Bradford's part. The writing is really engaging, which is why I'm giving this three stars. (That, and the aforementioned fact. This isn't all made up, by a long shot! It's just not very well researched.)

So: read this, with that grain of salt I was talking about. And then check out some other Kennedy bios for greater detail and more objective writing.

liked it a lot

‘… the greatest changes in the White House was brought about by the presence of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy herself. She was thirty years younger than any of the First Ladies I had served, and, I was to discover, had the most complex personality of them all. In public she was elegant, aloof, dignified and regal. In private she was casual, impish, and irreverent. She had a will of iron, with more determination than anyone I have ever met. Yet she was so soft-spoken, so deft and subtle, that she could impose her will upon people without their ever knowing it …’

I heartily enjoy reading biographies – or autobiographies if I can get my hands on a decently edited copy – of strong, influential (most-especially American) women. Surprisingly perhaps, I had previously never been interested in reading or knowing anything at all about Ms. Jackie O – as for me she was nothing more than a woman in large sunglasses. However, after reading a Monroe bio, I realized I absolutely needed to read more about Jackie – who apparently preferred to be called Jacqueline – immediately. READ MORE