Jackie O walking down Fifth Avenue, circa 1970.

The Secret History

Jackie O spent the years after her husband’s assassination trying to keep out of the public eye. Years later, her job as a book editor encouraged her to see the value in revealing private people’s secrets

By J. Randy Taraborrelli

“Oh, you know me, Jack. I have three lives. Public, private, and secret.”

Those were Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s words to the acclaimed architect John Warnecke in 1989, about a week before her 60th birthday. Warnecke recalled them to me almost 10 years later when I interviewed him for Jackie, Ethel, Joan—Women of Camelot, the first of my five Kennedy books.