Newly discovered letters reveal that Jackie Kennedy came close to marrying Britain’s former ambassador to the US David Ormsby-Gore before spurning him for the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
Ormsby-Gore, who later inherited the title Lord Harlech and who died in 1985, was a friend and key adviser to President John F Kennedy, particularly during the Cuban missile crisis.
The letters were discovered in January in locked cases at the Ormsby-Gore family estate in Talsarnau, Gwynedd, west Wales. They reveal that Ormsby-Gore and Jackie Kennedy developed an attachment based on “love and pain” after the death of their spouses.
They show that Ormsby-Gore proposed to Kennedy shortly after the death of his wife in a car crash in May 1967.
The mostly handwritten correspondence, which is being auctioned next month at Bonhams with a guide price of up to £180,000, includes a note Kennedy sent to Ormsby-Gore explaining that she intended to marry Onassis instead because she wanted a clean break with her past. She wanted to “be with somebody who is not part of all my world of past and pain,” she wrote.
But she also wrote of her continuing affection for Ormsby-Gore. “You are like my beloved brother – and mentor – and the only original spirit I know – as you were to Jack,” she wrote.
A draft letter Ormsby-Gore wrote after his proposal was rejected revealed the lengths to which he was prepared to go to marry Kennedy.
It reads: “All the pathetic plans I had brought with me for visits to Cyrenaica, holidays near one another and a whole variety of solutions to our marriage problem, including one for a secret marriage this summer – plans which I saw us eagerly discussing, calmly and with complete frankness as we did at the Cape and in Cambodia for the next wonderful ten days – all had become irrelevant trash to be thrown away within a few hours of my landing in New York.”
It goes on to reveal his heartache at her decision: “Why do such agonizing things have to happen? Where was the need for it? I have tried for hours and hours to understand your explanation and I suppose I do in a way, without agreeing with it; but what I find unbearable and in a way, dearest Jackie, untrue is that you could come to such a categorical conclusion.”
Ormsby-Gore was appointed ambassador to Washington in 1960. The New York Times said he was close confidant to JFK and advised him on the missile crisis, Vietnam and nuclear disarmament.
When Ormsby-Gore died in 1985, Jackie Onassis attended his funeral.
