The New York Times: Letters From Jacqueline Kennedy to the Man She Didn’t Marry
LONDON — 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.”
The letter was part of a set of papers found in locked red-leather cases discovered only last month in Wales at the family home of Mr. Ormsby Gore, who died in 1985. They are being auctioned in London next month by his grandson to help restore the house.