Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis - Editor

The New York Times takes note of books highlighting Jackie's role as an editor.

From the piece...

The two books both make the point that Mrs. Onassis’s lifelong passion for reading, and her two decades in publishing, reveal much about her as a person: the intellect behind the fashion plate, the analytical mind behind the famous face. The little girl whom Mr. Kuhn describes sneaking books out of her mother’s library, and, at Miss Porter’s School, not letting her roommate, Nancy Tuckerman, interrupt her reading, grew up to spend more years as an editor than as first lady and the wife of a Greek shipping tycoon combined.

When she had lunch with Ms. Talese, Mrs. Onassis had just arrived at Viking as a consulting editor, at a weekly salary of $200. Each book recounts how in 1977, after a break with Viking’s publisher, Thomas Guinzburg, over his publication of the Jeffrey Archer assassination-plot thriller “Shall We Tell the President,” in which Edward Kennedy occupies the White House, she joined Doubleday, where Ms. Talese settled some years later. Ms. Talese’s office at Doubleday was next to that of Steve Rubin, then the publisher. “Everybody would line up outside my office waiting to see him,” she said, “and Jackie would line up just like everyone.”

In both biographies, colleagues remember Mrs. Onassis’s small office, her big glasses, and her hair smelling of cigarettes. The editorial tastes of the woman who lodged her husband’s legend in Camelot ran to cultural histories of court life, the power and mechanics of myth, biographies of unconventional women and civil rights heroes, coffee-table books celebrating past gilded ages and books on dance. She got her Martha’s Vineyard neighbor Carly Simon to write children’s books. She signed up Michael Jackson’s “Moonwalk,” which proved a headache, and a best seller.