He had known her for more than 30 years and had been her constant companion for more than a decade, sharing everything: the daily victories, big and small, the adventures and frustrations of her complex life, and then her final months of suffering. He walked with her in the park in her last days, steadying the frail body with his hand, and he was at the bedside Thursday night when she died.
Maurice Tempelsman always seemed to be there for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. To the general public, which had rarely seen them together and had not even known his name until recent days, his central role in yesterday's ceremonies may have seemed astonishing.
But to those who knew them, it seemed unremarkable, perhaps even quite fitting, when he stood with her children at the funeral in New York and at the graveside at Arlington National Cemetery yesterday and bade a loving, poetic farewell to the woman he had never married.
"And now the journey is over, too short, alas, too short," he said in a personal commentary after reading a favorite poem, "Ithaka" by C. P. Cavafy, at the service at St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic Church. "It was filled with adventure and wisdom, laughter and love, gallantry and grace. So farewell, farewell." Third Man in Her Life
Mr. Tempelsman, a 64-year-old financier who amassed a fortune as a diamond dealer and industrialist, was the third man in her life, friends said, but he has never been divorced from his wife of 45 years, Lily, the mother of his three grown children.
Born in Belgium in 1929 to a Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox Jewish family that fled to the United States in 1940 as war spread across Europe, he went to work for his father, a diamond broker, when he was 16. Early in his career, he established a lasting connection with the DeBeers diamond empire in South Africa.
Mr. Tempelsman met Mrs. Kennedy in the 1950's, when he arranged a meeting for then-Senator John F. Kennedy with South African diamond interests. After she was widowed a second time with the death of Aristotle Onassis in 1975, Mr. Tempelsman became her financial adviser. He is reported to have quadrupled her $26 million inheritance.
Beginning in the early 1980's, Mr. Tempelsman and Mrs. Onassis were seen together with increasing frequency at private dinner parties, consular affairs and other discreet occasions. The relationship was kept low-key; he once sought -- and got -- a retraction from a gossip columnist who said they would marry. He told friends that he was not free to marry because his wife, as an Orthodox Jew, would never grant him a divorce.
It was about 1982, acquaintances said, that he moved into Mrs. Onassis' 15-room apartment on Fifth Avenue and began assuming the host's role. It seemed to some an unlikely pairing. Unlike the dashing President Kennedy, Mr. Tempelsman was short, portly, baldish, and he was not a billionaire like Onassis.
But Rose Schreiber, a cousin of Mr. Tempelsman, described him as a charming, worldly but gentle man with other qualities that appealed to Mrs. Onassis: a sharp wit, a sensitive and unassuming manner, and a respect for scholarship and learning.
They spent their summers together at her oceanfront estate on Martha's Vineyard, passed weekends at her horse farm in New Jersey and sailed aboard his 70-foot yacht, the Relemar. Last summer, they entertained President and Mrs. Clinton aboard the yacht off Martha's Vineyard.
At home in New York, they entertained friends at quiet dinner parties and occasionally went to small restaurants on the East Side. They often conversed in French, discussing her work as an editor with Doubleday or fighting to preserve a landmark. Friends said they had often strolled in Central Park, looking for all the world like any older, devoted couple.
Since last winter, when her lymphatic cancer was diagnosed, he had been with her almost constantly. He was at her side when she died Thursday night, and he was there to greet every guest at an informal wake for family and friends Sunday.
He chose to read "Ithaka" at the funeral. A translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard for "C. P. Cavafy/Collected Poems," (Princeton University Press, 1992), reads:
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon -- don't be afraid of them:
you'll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon -- you won't encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind --
as many sensual perfumes as you can,
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
Keep Ithakacq always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her, you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
“Tempelsman’s role in the confluence of public policy and private profit as a middleman for the De Beers diamond cartel may have shaped every major U.S. covert action in Africa since the early 1950s. Declassified memos and cables between former U.S. presidents and State Department officials over the last four decades directly linked Tempelsman to the destabilization of Zaire/Congo, Sierra Leone, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Rwanda and Ghana.”
For over 35 years Maurice and son Leon Tempelsman worked the diamond connection behind the repression of Mobutu Sese Seko and his Israeli-trained shock troops. Now, 47 years later, the Tempelsman empire remains rock solid behind three companies: Leon Tempelsman & Sons, De Beers, and Lazare Kaplan International; LKI supplies Tiffany’s and Cartier’s. A client of Adelai Stevenson’s law firm during the first Congo crises (1960-1970), Tempelsman later hired Lawrence Devlin, a CIA station chief responsible for covert operations in Katanga, to maintain the Mobutu diamond/cobalt connections into the late 1980’s.
Tempelsman’s capacity to sway governments and leverage markets is unrivaled. In 2002, Tempelsman offered Namibia’s President Sam Nujoma an $80 million interest free “loan” to bridge Namibia's budgetary shortfall against future sales of Namibia’s gemstones.
Namibia is the leading producer of offshore deep sea diamonds, through DeBeers and Diamond Fields, and South Africa second. Offshore diamond mining has expanded to Papua New Guinea and New Zealand waters, and global mining investors call it the “new gold rush,” but scientists compare deep-sea dredging to destroying an eco-system as complex as a tropical rain forest. Specialized deep-sea crawler vessels like DeBeers “The Peace in Africa” reflect the expertise of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Maurice Tempelsman is an honorary trustee and an honorary member of the corporation of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Tempelsman is the deep pockets of the Democratic party, a regular supporter of the campaigns of John Kerry (D); Ed Royce (R); Tom Daschle (D); Barack Obama (D); Maxine Waters (D); John Rockefeller (D); Richard Gephardt (D); Howard Wolpe (D); Patrick (D) and Edward Kennedy (D); and the 1988 win of George H.W. Bush. Tempelsman also exploited ties with Anthony Lake, Clinton’s National Security adviser, who intervened at the U.S. Export-Import Bank on Tempelsman’s behalf.
Tempelsman contributed some $500,000 to Clinton for president, and he is backing Hillary (D). He traveled at Clinton’s side on the 1998 Presidential Africa tour—along with National Security Council staffer John Prendergast, now an International Crises Group “expert” and leading “Save Darfur!” cheerleader. The Clinton’s Botswana visit was not about an Okavango Delta wildlife reserve safari. Botswana’s President Mogae attended the 1999 Attracting Capital to Africa Summit in Houston (TX), organized by the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA), the “who’s who” of multinational corporations. CCA chairman Maurice Tempelsman organized the summit, where 10 African heads of state met with half of Clinton's Cabinet and 200 corporate representatives. Tempelsman and the CCA organized the U.S.-Africa Business Summit in Africa in 2001, featuring DRC President Joseph Kabila, coordinated with an Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) meeting involving President G. W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powel.
Maurice Tempelsman was Jackie Onassis Kennedy’s lover and he reportedly courted Madeline Albright. Tempelsman is Chairman of the American Jewish Congress, a Zionist pressure group that claims it “works closely with the Israeli military.” He sits on the boards of nationalist American think tanks that also seat Madeleine Albright. As Vice-Chairman of Lazare Kaplan International, Tempelsman’s annual base pay is $458,833, with a bonus of $80,000; as principal director/shareholder in Leon Tempelsman and Sons he gets a comparable amount again. SEC filings show that LKI directors are high-rolling Zionist lawyers and investment bankers: one director belongs to the law firm that represented President Kennedy—another Tempelsman friend. LKI is also connected to the euphemistically named United States Agency for International Development (USAID).Selling to the U.S. Diamond Stockpile and to his private profits, Tempelsman companies have plundered tens of billions of diamond dollars from Congo/Zaire—alone—in the past five decades.
- [2007] BLOOD DIAMOND DOUBLETHINK & DECEPTION OVER THOSE WORTHLESS LITTLE ROCKS OF DESIRE
by Rick Hines & Keith Harmon Snow
