The bios I have read of Jackie say she married Onassis because she believed he could protect her and her children from the public and the violence in America. I won't begrudge a young woman with two young children, seeking a safer life out of politics after her husband and brother-in-law were assassinated, even if it meant a marriage to an older man from another country who could afford to protect her.
She began keeping company with Templesman five years after Onassis died in 1980. Maurice left his wife in 1984. They never divorced. Templesman's daughter Rena was married to Robert Speisman, an executive vice president of Lazare Kaplan International Inc. He died on Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. Tempelsman died of complications from a fall at Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan on August 23, 2025, three days before his 96th birthday.
I also won't begrudge her the comfort and companionship of Templesman in her later years, and especially during the last years of her life. I'm a 78 year old divorced woman who raised two sons alone. My life was the complete opposite of Jackie Kennedy's. I wouldn't have wanted to have had her life. It wasn't a very happy one. She was 11 when her parents divorced. Her mother married Hugh Auchincloss two years later, and when he died, she married Bingham W. Morris, three years later. I grew up in a normal home. My parents were married for not quite 50 years when my father died.
Everyone is different. Their needs are different. I wouldn't judge Jackie or any other woman in a similar situation about the choices in their lives. They are after all, the ones who will have to live with those decisions, not me.
Unless you've walked in someone else's shoes, you have no idea of their mindset or their personal sufferings. She lost two children as infants. It's a miracle the two that did survive, didn't die while she was still alive. As a mother, my only goal in life now, is not to outlive my children.
Yes; but I think Mrs. Lincoln may have always been a little ‘off’.