Jackie Owns the Stage as Her ‘Third Act’ Opens at 60

If all the world’s a stage, then Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis enters the “third act” of her life this year an affluent and “confident” player with $200 million at her bidding, a longtime acquaintance writes in the August issue of Vanity Fair. Edward Klein interviewed 60 friends of the former First Lady, who turns 60 on July 28, and paints her as a “woman who has managed to develop into an ever-more appealing, self-confident personality”--who’s also ever-so rich. Starting with $25 million from the estate of the late Aristotle Onassis, his widow has been able to increase her fortune to almost $200 million, not counting her $45,000 annual salary as an editor at Doubleday books, Klein says. One of her financial advisers has been Maurice Tempelsman, whom Klein describes as “Jackie’s significant other.” “He’s made it possible for her to enter the third act of her life, the act in which life’s conflicts are resolved,” Klein says.

--An aide came to the aid of President Bush in his interview with CBS anchorman Dan Rather last year, using cue cards to feed Bush those seemingly spontaneous ripostes, a new book says. The most famous retort came when then-Vice President Bush told Rather, who had been questioning him on his role in the Iran-Contra affair, “How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?”--referring to a 1987 incident when a tennis match ran into the CBS anchorman’s broadcast. What people at home could not see was that when Bush struggled for a response, media consultant Roger Ailes would write out something on a pad and hold it just beneath the TV camera in Bush’s line of vision, say CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer and co-author Gary Paul Gates in their book “The Acting President.”

--Lucille Ball was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, as President Bush described her and four other recipients as American heroes. Also receiving the nation’s highest civilian award in a ceremony in the White House East Room were former Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, aviator and war hero James H. Doolittle and statesmen Douglas Dillon and George Kennan. Gary Morton, Ball’s husband, accepted the medal for the comedian who died April 26 at age 77.