Jackie Kennedy made private White House visit eight years after JFK's death

Fifty years ago, Jacqueline Onassis entered the White House for her first visit since her husband, John F Kennedy, was assassinated.

By 1971, it had been almost eight years since Onassis had been in her former home, but she had written to the then first lady, Pat Nixon, to request a private visit ahead of the unveiling of Kennedy’s official portrait.

Related: The big picture: a tender family moment with JFK

That letter, and others, which are on display at the presidential libraries of Richard Nixon and Kennedy, show the importance of the visit by Onassis and her children, and the tenderness of the treatment by Pat Nixon as the family visited the White House.

Onassis had been invited by Nixon to attend the official unveiling of hers and Kennedy’s portraits. For Onassis, who had only returned to the Washington area to visit Kennedy’s grave at Arlington national cemetery, the idea of an official event was too much.

“As you know, the thought of returning to the White House is difficult for me,” Onassis, who remarried in 1968, said in a handwritten letter to Pat Nixon on 27 January 1971.

“I really do not have the courage to go through an official ceremony, and bring the children back to the only home they both knew with their father under such traumatic conditions. With all the press and everything, things I try to avoid in their little lives, I know the experience would be hard on them.”

Onassis instead suggested to Nixon a private visit: “Perhaps any day before or after, at your convenience, could the children and I slip in unobtrusively to Washington, and come to pay our respects to you and to see the pictures privately?”

Nixon accepted, and Onassis and her children Caroline Kennedy, then 13, and John F Kennedy Jr, 10, visited the White House in late January. Nixon made sure no photos were taken of the family as she and her daughters, Julie and Patricia, gave the family an intimate tour of the place that held such joyous and sad memories for them.

The Kennedy children met the Nixons’ dogs, and the president, Richard Nixon, as the Washington Post remembered Julie writing in her autobiography, told the children of the legend that sitting on the Lincoln bed and making a wish would see that wish come true.

After the visit, Onassis wrote to the president and first lady to express her gratitude.

“Never have I seen such magnanimity and such tenderness,” she wrote.

“Can you imagine the gift you gave me?” she said. “To return to the White House privately with my little ones while they are still young enough to rediscover their childhood – with you both as guides – and with your daughters, such extraordinary young women.”

The Kennedy children also sent thank-you notes to the Nixons.

“I loved all the pictures of the Indians and the ones of all the presidents. I also really like the old pistols,” John F Kennedy Jr wrote. “I really really loved the dogs they were so funny as soon as I came home my dogs kept on sniffing me. Maybe they remember the White House.”

Caroline Kennedy, like her brother, enjoyed meeting the dogs and seeing the portraits of her father and mother.

The portraits were hung “so nicely”, Caroline said, and she wrote that “everything was just perfect and everyone was so nice”.