Why Jackie Kennedy SECRETLY Hated Her Sister Lee Radziwill

“For Whom I Have Great Affection”: Inside the Complicated Bond Between Jackie Kennedy and Her Sister

On March 22, 1994, roughly two months before her death, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis signed her last will and testament.

Deep in a document running dozens of pages, in a section addressing her only sibling, she wrote a single sentence: “I have made no provision in this my Will for my sister, Lee B.

Radziwill, for whom I have great affection because I have already done so during my lifetime.”

She then directed that $500,000 be set aside in trust for each of Lee’s surviving children — structured as a charitable lead annuity trust that would pay 10% of its value to charity every year for a decade before any remainder passed to Lee’s children.

The trusts, tied to a contingency involving Jackie’s own children’s inheritance decisions, were ultimately never funded.

Lee’s children received nothing from them. That sentence, and the story behind it, offers a far more precise picture of the sisters’ relationship than the countless glamorous photographs of them together ever did.

Caroline Lee Bouvier was born in March 1933, four years after Jacqueline, to John Vernou Bouvier III — a charming, chronically unfaithful stockbroker known as “Black Jack” — and Janet Lee, who divorced him in 1940 and later married Standard Oil heir Hugh Auchincloss.

Both sisters grew up adjacent to real wealth that was never technically theirs, and both understood early that marriage was the path to security available to women of their class.

Lee married first, wedding publishing heir Michael Canfield in April 1953; Jacqueline married Senator John F. Kennedy five months later.

At the time, by the social standards of the day, Lee’s match looked like the stronger one.

Within eight years, that calculation had completely inverted. Lee left Canfield in 1959 and married Prince Stanisław Radziwiłł, becoming Princess Lee Radziwill.

Because her first marriage had been a Catholic ceremony, she needed a Church annulment to be considered properly married in the Church’s eyes — and that annulment wasn’t granted by the Vatican’s tribunal until November 1962, more than three years after her wedding to Radziwill had already taken place.

The timing sat uncomfortably close to her brother-in-law’s presidency: John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic president in American history, and the tribunal reviewing his sister-in-law’s marital status was doing so during his term.

No document has ever surfaced showing any Kennedy directly intervened, and it would be unfair to claim one did — but the sequence itself was widely noted at the time.

A more complicated entanglement involved Aristotle Onassis. Before he was Jacqueline’s husband, he was, by 1963, involved with Lee — a relationship that surfaced publicly that summer and became a real headache for a White House heading into a re-election campaign.

Because Jacqueline was pregnant and unable to travel, Lee accompanied President Kennedy on a European tour that summer instead.

Then, in August 1963, the Kennedys’ infant son Patrick died two days after birth, and Onassis offered his yacht for Jacqueline’s recovery — an invitation Lee herself helped arrange.

Five years later, in October 1968, Jacqueline married Onassis. Lee never publicly described herself as wronged by this; she said more than once, across various interviews over the following decades, that she’d let him go, believing her widowed sister and her two young children needed him more than she did.

Her own second marriage, to Radziwill, ended in divorce in 1974. Lee made two attempts at an acting career in the late 1960s — a stage production of The Philadelphia Story in Chicago in 1967, and a 1968 television adaptation of Laura, with a screenplay reworked by her close friend Truman Capote.

Both were reviewed brutally; the Chicago Tribune and New York Times panned her performances, and TV Guide’s Cleveland Amory named her the year’s worst actress.

The reviews rarely assessed her as a performer in her own right — they were, more often, reacting to the novelty of Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister attempting a public role she hadn’t earned.

Her friendship with Capote, one of the more genuinely equal relationships of her adult life, ended in a courtroom document.

In 1975, Capote told Playgirl magazine that writer Gore Vidal had been thrown out of a 1961 White House party for drunken behavior; Vidal sued for libel, and Capote’s defense rested partly on his claim that Lee had told him the story firsthand.

When Vidal’s lawyers approached Lee in late 1977, she gave a sworn affidavit stating she did not recall ever discussing the incident with Capote.

Without her corroboration, Capote’s defense collapsed; the case dragged on until 1983, when he issued a written apology to Vidal.

The friendship, which had lasted roughly fifteen years, was over. Capote died in 1984. The final, quieter chapter unfolded in the summer of 1999.

On July 16, John F. Kennedy Jr. — Jacqueline’s son, five years dead by then herself — died when the plane he was piloting crashed into the Atlantic off Martha’s Vineyard, along with his wife, Carolyn, and her sister Lauren.

Lee’s son, Anthony Radziwill, John’s first cousin and closest friend, had been quietly battling cancer since 1989; by that July, it was terminal.

He attended the burial at sea on July 22 and a memorial service the next day.

He died on August 10, 1999, twenty-five days after the crash, at 40. Lee Radziwill lived another twenty years, dying on February 15, 2019, at 85, in her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — a few miles from where her sister’s will had been signed a quarter-century earlier.

Biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli, who has written extensively on the family, has described the sisters’ bond as genuinely warm at times but never fully resolved — noting that Jacqueline “could have set Lee up in a great way financially, and she never did.”

Nothing in the record suggests outright cruelty or a deliberate plan to punish her sister.

What it does show, across four decades, is a consistent pattern: a title that required Rome’s cooperation, a career that couldn’t survive an unbiased review, a friendship that required Lee to choose between her name and her loyalty, and a final inheritance that depended on a contingency belonging to someone else’s children.

None of it, on its own, reads as betrayal. Together, it looks like something else — two sisters who did, in fact, have each other, and for whom that was never quite the simple thing it appeared to be in a photograph.