Why Jackie Onassis Secretly Visited The White House Eight Years After JFK’s Death

The reaction to John F. Kennedy’s assassination was swift: a state funeral, a change in presidential administration and the slain leader’s family leaving the White House. And as far as the public knew, the President’s widow Jackie Onassis made a point to stay away from the Washington, D.C. estate. But she did, in fact, make a secret visit there for a surprising reason, years after her exit from the storied residence.

It was Jackie herself who instigated the return to the White House, and she did so through a series of letters. The first one arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 1971, landing on the desk of then-First Lady Pat Nixon. An impending event had gotten JFK’s widow thinking about returning to the White House.

But Jackie made one thing clear in her letters – she didn’t want it to be a media circus when she came to visit. She made this explicitly clear in her messages, which had been sent in secrecy. Instead, she wanted to slip into the White House without anyone knowing she was there.

It wasn’t just her own privacy that Jackie had to worry about, after all. The widow shared two children with her fallen husband: Caroline, who was 13 at that time, and ten-year-old John Jr. She hoped to bring them back to their old house with her, but she didn’t want the press to overwhelm “their little lives,” as she admitted in her letter.

But why did Jackie want to make the trip back to Washington, D.C.? After all, by 1971 her life had changed greatly. For one thing, the former First Lady had remarried in a surprise ceremony to ostentatious shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. And she’d moved from the nation’s capital to a luxurious New York City apartment on Fifth Avenue, where she went on to live until her death in 1994.