The other love of Jackie O
In November 1967, four years after her husband’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy travelled to the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia on a muchpublicized trip with David Ormsby Gore, a friend of her husband and himself a recent widower.
There was much speculation of a romantic attachment. A few months later, Ormsby Gore, a former British ambassador to Washington, proposed marriage. She turned him down.
In a handwritten letter, filled with anguish and a touch of cruelty, she explained her decision to marry Aristotle Onassis instead.
“If ever I can find some healing and some comfort — it has to be with somebody who is not part of all my world of past and pain,” she wrote. “I can find that now — if the world will let us.”
The letter was part of a set of papers found in locked red-leather cases discovered only last month in Wales at the family home of Ormsby Gore, who died in 1985. They are being auctioned in London next month by his grandson to help restore the house.
The letters point to the depth of feeling behind the public mask of one of the most celebrated women of her time.
Among them is the letter to Ormsby Gore, also known as Lord Harlech, dated Nov. 13, 1968, a month after her marriage to Onassis and five months after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
In it, she spoke of the love she felt for Ormsby Gore, whose wife had died in a car crash in May 1967. “We have known so much & shared & lost so much together — Even if it isn’t the way you wish now — I hope that bond of love and pain will never be cut.”
Writing from Onassis’ yacht in Greece, on stationery with the ship’s crest, a clear if cold message, Kennedy told Ormsby Gore: “You are like my beloved beloved brother — and mentor — and the only original spirit I know — as you were to Jack.”
Ormsby Gore had expressed incredulity at her choice of Onassis, and she tried to respond.
“Please know — you of all people must know it — that we can never really see into the heart of another,” she wrote. “You know me. And you must know that the man you write of in your letter is not a man that I could marry.”
Onassis, she wrote, is “lonely and wants to protect me from being lonely. And he is wise and kind. Only I can decide if he can, and I decided.
“I know it comes as a surprise to so many people,” she continued. “But they see things for me that I never wanted for myself.”
Ormsby Gore was an old friend of John F. Kennedy, whose younger sister Kathleen, or Kick, married Ormsby Gore’s first cousin. After John Kennedy’s election in 1960, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sent Ormsby Gore to Washington as Britain’s ambassador.
The two men were extremely close, and the president consulted him on every key issue of foreign policy, especially during the Cuban missile crisis, and in discussions of Vietnam and nuclear disarmament.