Letters From Jacqueline Kennedy to the Man She Didn’t Marry

In November 1967, four years after her husband’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy traveled to the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia on a much-publicized 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, Mr. 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.”