While Jackie had her own special effortlessness, Nancy could be painfully wary about contact with other people. She never smiled for the camera and in pictures frequently looked distressed or sad, though in person she could be droll, and loved to laugh. Nancy liked a soft-collared golf shirt and trousers. One was always chic and smiling for the camera. Jackie’s files, which she’d kept for decades, disappeared overnight. Jackie’s family abruptly terminated Nancy’s position, though she still had useful work to do in helping wind up Jackie’s affairs. When Jackie died in 1994, hospital officials accused Nancy of underrating the gravity of Jackie’s condition in her statements to the press. From left, Helen Thomas, Nancy Tuckerman, Anne Blair, president of the club, and Hazel Markel, of NBC radio. Nancy Tuckerman, the new White House social secretary, is honored at a reception. The last time I saw her, after she’d been diagnosed with an incurable lung condition, she gave me a goodbye as tender and unafraid as I’d like one day to be myself. Nancy telephoned Nan Talese, my editor, in New York to upbraid her for one of my draft chapters she disliked. There’s a famous photograph of Nancy losing her cool with a photographer who got too close at Caroline Kennedy’s high school graduation. She was legendary for keeping outsiders at bay. Our relationship began with hesitation on both sides. We continued to see each other for lunch and dinner after the book was done. I met Nancy in 2008, when she helped me with a book on Jackie’s publishing career, Reading Jackie. She worked at Olympic Airways during Jackie’s marriage to Onassis, and later in an office next to Jackie’s at Doubleday in the ’80s and ’90s. Kennedy, and was serving as White House social secretary at the time of JFK's assassination 10 years later. Nancy was among Jackie’s bridesmaids in 1953 when she married John F. They met as schoolgirls in New York in the 1930s and roomed together in high school at Miss Porter’s in Connecticut in the ’40s. Nancy was Jackie’s personal assistant and her friend for more than five decades. Few people were more discreet or more loyal than Nancy, but discretion and loyalty also had their costs. When Nancy died last summer, at the age of 89, much that she knew about her friend died with her. Few people knew Jackie Kennedy Onassis as well as Nancy Tuckerman did.
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