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Show How Tragedy Brought Jackie For years they sharedthe exhilaration of power, wealth, and position, but only mutual (» In 1938 young Jack Kennedy came to London from Harvard to visit his father, Joseph, Sr., who was then ambassador to the Court of St. James, and also to take a course at the London School of Economics. Jack's older brother, Joe, Jr., introduced David Ormsby-Gore to him. Ormsby-Gore was at Oxford, at that time, and Joe told his brother that David had becomehis best friend in England. Joe was later killed in the war, but Jack and David remained on intimate terms. It was David who introduced his first cousin, the Marquess of Hartington to Jack’s sister, Kathleen, They later married. The Marquess of Hartington waskilied in the war, too, and Kathleen died in a plane crash in 1948. In the meantime David had joined the British army, and in 1940 married Sylvia Lloyd Thomas —"Sissie” to her friends—a Welsh girl, daughter of a senior Foreign Office official. David served with the Berkshire Yeomanry as an air-observa- tion pilot and finished the war on the general staff with the rank of major. In 1950 he was elected to Parliament and held a series of offices without making much of a mark. “Ormsby-Gore was just too smooth for words,” a former colleague said. “A life untrou- bled by self-doubt or worries about sordid stuff like money does not make the best preparation for the House of Commons, where so many of the members on both sides are self-made men with a low boiling point in social resentment.” But in 1960 John F. Kennedy was elected President of the U.S., and there was much commotion in diplomatic circles in Britain. Everyone knew of Ormsby-Gore’s long friendship with . f Jackie and Lord Harlech’s visit to Cambodia was the first open evidence of their deepening friendship. F JACQUELINE Kennedy marries Lord Harlech, as rumored, it will prove that neither money nor beauty creates happiness because the fundamental union between them is mutual tragedy and heartbreak. The deep friendship of Harlech and the Ken- nedys dates back to before World War II, and since has been sealed by a series of family catastrophes, the latest occurring last May when Harlech’s wife Sylvia was killed in an auto accident. At 49, Lord Harlech, formerly Sir David Ormsby-Gore, can claim to have a wider personal horizon than almost any other man alive. It reaches up to the highest echelons of the British aristoc- racy. His motheris a Cecil, sister of Lord Salisbury. It reaches downward into the heart of hip- ‘ Family Weekly, January 7, 1968 the new President, especially Prime Minister Harold MacMillan. Ormsby-Gore’s social tenta- cles were everywhere—the Prime Minister’s son, Maurice MacMillan, a memberof Parliament, was Ormsby-Gore’s brother-in-law! Although British ambassadorial appointments are professional rather than political, the British have always attached high importance to family pie-land. His daughter Jane is one of the most connections in international affairs, and so Sir celebrated kooks of the swinging Chelsea set and David Ormsby-Gore became British amJarsadur in Washington. He now had two sons and three occasionally tangles with the police. In the business world he is a partner of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a Welsh tv enterprise. In the political world he sat in the daughters, the older boy studying at McGill University in Montreal, and one of the daughters, House of Commons for 10 years and was British says,” Ormsby-Gore said, somewhat wryly. Jane was already the family terror, and he obviously ambassador to the U.S. from 1961 to 1965—the Kennedy years, during which time he was one of the most privileged envoys in diplomatic history. President Kennedy said of him, “I would trust David as I would my own cabinetofficers.” Harlech is a supremely self-controlled, hawknosed Welshman, “so sure of himself,” according to one friend, “he doesn’t find it necessary to throw his Welshness around, the way Richard Burton does.” He does, however, boast that he is one of the few Britishers who understands and appreciates American football. Jane, studying in Madrid—“or at least so she had a premonition of the antics to come. The Ormsby-Gores were soon the envy of the diplomatic corps in Washington. Sylvia was @ beautiful, slim brunette, the perfect ambassa- dorial hostess. It was estimated that OrmsbyGore saw the President more often than all the other ambassadors put together. The Kennedys and the Ormsby-Gores dined together at least once a week. The British couple were called, not always charitably, “the darlings of the New Frontier.” It is difficult to find in the history of |