May 19, 2024, was the 30th anniversary of Jackie Kennedy’s death from non-Hodgkins lymphoma at age 64.
As a tribute to the undeniable strength, grace, elegance and resilience she showed the world, even during times of private and unimaginable sorrow, Morning Honey has revealed that behind the glamorous facade of the Camelot myth, lay a heart shattered by the loss of three precious lives. Jackie’s miscarriage and two stillborn children haunted her for decades, casting a shadow over her seemingly charmed existence.
Born on July 28, 1929, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was a little rich girl living in a swanky apartment in Manhattan and a country estate in East Hampton on Long Island. Her father, Wall Street stockbrokerJohn “Black Jack” Bouvier III, and socialite mother, Janet Norton Lee, baptized her at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan. She had a younger sister, Caroline Lee (known as Lee), four years later, but her dad always favored his first-born, calling her "the most beautiful daughter a man ever had."
From an early age, Jackie was an enthusiastic equestrienne and horse riding remained a lifelong passion. She was a ballet dancer and excelled at school as an outgoing child. After her parents divorced, her mother remarried Standard Oil heir Hugh Auchincloss Jr., who was worth hundreds of millions, and Jackie and her sister moved to a luxurious estate in Virginia. She made her debut to high society in 1947 and spent her junior year of Vassar College in Paris.
She met John Fitzgerald Kennedy, fell in love, then wed on September 12, 1953. But the fairytale didn’t last. In 1955, she suffered a miscarriage after three months, and doctors told her “carrying and delivering a child would always be difficult for her,” recalled JFK’s friend and adviser Ken O’Donnell. Soon she became pregnant again, but on the morning of August 23, 1956, a month before her second baby was due, Jackie awoke and cried out for her mother — she was hemorrhaging.
The joy of motherhood was cruelly snatched away when, a few agonizing hours later, she gave birth to a stillborn baby girl, Arabella, while husband JFK was on a yacht with friends cruising the Mediterranean. When he received the devastating news, the Massachusetts senator didn’t race back to his wife until his pals told him the shame of not rushing to Jackie’s side would tarnish his reputation in the eyes of women voters.
"You better haul your a-- back to your wife if you ever want to run for president,” a friend told him. He boarded the next plane. Jackie got pregnant a third time and went on to give birth to a healthy baby girl, Caroline, in 1957. In 1960, she delivered John Jr., but he suffered respiratory problems at birth, and had trouble taking his first breaths. It was touch and go until a pediatric resident named Ira Seller took quick action — he inserted a tube into the baby’s trachea and as he blew air into the lungs, John Jr. finally responded and began to breathe on his own.
The couple were ecstatic with their two young children, and many insiders say they became closer as a couple after they became parents. But Jackie’s pregnancy tragedies weren’t over. On August 7, 1963, she suffered another soul-crushing blow when she went into labor five-and-a half weeks early and delivered a four-pound, ten-ounce boy, Patrick, who, like John Jr., was born with severe respiratory problems.
The couple prayed while the world watched. Patrick struggled to survive, but after a heartrending, stressful 39 hours in which Jackie and John went through h--- praying for their baby to live, little Patrick lost his battle for life. "The death of the infant was one of the hardest moments in the lives of both President and Mrs. Kennedy,” JFK’s press secretary Pierre Salinger said later, but the tragedy brought them even closer as a couple, and they were more devoted and in love than the day they wed. When the president left the hospital with Jackie days later, they emerged holding hands.
"I first observed it in the hospital suite at Otis Air Force Base but it became publicly visible when Mrs. Kennedy was released from the hospital,” said Secret Service agent Clint Hill, now 92. "Prior to this, they were much more restrained and less willing to express their close, loving relationship while out in public. The loss of Patrick seemed to be the catalyst to change all that.”
But three months later, the couple climbed into a limousine in Dallas, Texas, where Hill was called into action and even leapt onto the back of the car to help Jackie after her husband was fatally shot. After that nightmare day, Jackie never became pregnant again.
And she didn’t live to see the death of cherished son John Jr., 38, whose plane went down in the Atlantic with wife Carolyn and her sister Lauren on July 16, 1999 — five years after his mother’s death. "Thank God Jackie was spared that final tragedy,” said an insider. “The pain would have finally broken her.”
Caroline, 66, is the only survivor of Jackie’s children. Arabella and Patrick are buried with their parents at Arlington National Cemetery.