Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 21, 1994 TAG: 9405230162
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TANYA BARRIENTOS KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
``It's been the three of us for so long - Mommy, me and Caroline.''
While Onassis may have been characterized by detractors as a gold digger or an aimless socialite, nobody has ever said she has been less than an excellent, devoted mother.
She was fiercely loyal to her children, raising them with a steely determination and a steadfast insistence that they grow up respectful of their Kennedy legacy but not prisoners of it.
And, unlike many of the other Kennedy children who have stumbled through drug addiction, troubles with the law and struggles with celebrity, her children avoided such pitfalls.
Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, 36, and John F. Kennedy Jr., 33, have grown to be devoted, successful adults.
Recently, John Jr., in particular, was by his mother's side often, accompanying her during her daily walk through Central Park as she struggled to regain her health.
In recent years, the cameras that have never stopped following Jackie O focused in on her as a doting grandmother. She was filmed and photographed playing with her three Schlossberg grandchildren: Rose, born in 1988; Tatiana, born in 1990; and John, born in 1993. We saw her chasing them on the beach or buying them ice-cream cones.
Onassis' fierce devotion to her children's privacy won the nation's attention while they were still toddlers, and the world watched them bury their slain father.
On what historians have called one of America's darkest days - President John F. Kennedy's funeral - the first lady (who had lost a son shortly after birth only three months earlier) gently coaxed her 5-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son through the motions of public mourning with grace. Images of the young Jacqueline Kennedy smiling tenderly as she whispered in John Jr.'s ear, and the toddler's poignant salute to his father's coffin, are frozen in the minds of Americans of a certain generation.
But that day also was John Jr.'s birthday, and the first lady insisted that the youngster's party not be canceled. He got cake, ice cream and presents. But from that day on, both children usually commemorated their birthdays (John Jr. - Nov. 25, 1960, and Caroline - Nov. 27, 1957) by visiting their father's gravesite.
An assassin's bullet had left them alone, a beautiful 34-year-old woman and two children too young to understand the burden that came along with being a Kennedy.
Their mother, however, knew the burden all too well and decided to protect them from the glare of public exposure. She left Washington and moved to New York, where she moved into a 15-room apartment on Fifth Avenue.
In 1968, the nation was shocked by her marriage to Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.
``Jackie: How Could You?'' demanded one newspaper headline.
But biographers have since written that the marriage was largely born out of pragmatism, a knowledge that the Onassis millions would buy Caroline and John Jr. their privacy and a clear separation from the long cast of the Kennedy family's shadow.
``Marrying him liberated me from the Kennedys - especially the Kennedy administration,'' she is supposed to have said. ``None of them could understand why I'd want that funny, little squiggly name when I used to have the greatest name of all.''
Still, she pushed her children to live up to the Kennedy name. John Jr. became a lawyer despite dyslexia, a less-than-stellar academic record in prep school and two failed attempts to pass the New York Bar examination. Caroline, also a lawyer, graduated from Harvard University and Columbia University Law School and is by all accounts happily married to design firm owner Edwin Schlossberg.
Like all families, they had their differences. Jackie is said to have frowned on John Jr.'s on-again, off-again love affair with actress Daryl Hannah. And John Jr. is reported to have balked at his mother's plans for his future in the law, choosing instead to pursue a fledging career as a television reporter.
But her children remained devoted.
by CNB