Maurice Tempelsman

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution announces with great sorrow the death of WHOI Life Trustee, Maurice Tempelsman. Maurice Tempelsman, the enigmatic and politically connected Belgian-American diamond magnate who drew news media scrutiny for his business dealings in Africa and was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s companion for more than a decade before her death in 1994, died on August 23, 2025, in Manhattan. He was 95.

His death, at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, was from complications of a fall, his son, Leon, said.

Maurice Tempelsman was a Member of the WHOI Corporation from 1990-2000, a Trustee from 1999-2000, an Honorary Trustee from 2000-2009, and a Life Trustee from 2009-2025.

In a trade known for its discretion and secrecy, Mr. Tempelsman, one of the world’s premier diamond merchants, spent his career quietly meeting African leaders across the political spectrum, from tyrants to liberation activists, and was an early business operator in newly decolonized nations such as Ghana and Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

For a half-century, he had also been a prominent fund-raiser for the Democratic Party and forged particularly close relationships with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.

The intersection of mining and political interests in volatile countries, sometimes overlapping with coups and other foreign intrigue, made Mr. Tempelsman an object of ample curiosity and conspiracy theorizing. One of his employees in Africa was Lawrence Devlin, a former C.I.A. station chief in pre-Zaire Congo, who continued passing information to the intelligence agency while working for Mr. Tempelsman, The New York Times reported in 2008.

Courtly, charming and intensely private, Mr. Tempelsman rarely conceded any ground to critics of his business ventures or his methods. “I hate to deflate the romance,” he told Insight magazine in 1991, in a rare interview. “But the reality is a lot more pedestrian.”

To the general public, Mr. Tempelsman was best known as the final companion of Mrs. Onassis. As she was dying of cancer, he was identified as the concerned-looking man in news photographs accompanying her on walks in Central Park, steadying her frail body.

Mr. Tempelsman with Mrs. Onassis on a walk in Central Park in April 1994. She died the following month.Credit…Steve Allen/Liaison, via Getty Images

He was at her bedside when she died at 64 in May 1994 and stood with her children at her funeral in New York and at her burial at Arlington National Cemetery. The public was soon made aware that he and Mrs. Onassis had known each other for three decades, and that they had been living together in her Fifth Avenue apartment for some years; Mr. Tempelsman was married but long separated from his wife.

His friendship with Mrs. Onassis began in the late 1950s, when her husband then, Kennedy, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts with presidential ambitions, wanted to meet representatives of the South African diamond industry. Mr. Tempelsman, who had developed a formidable reputation for his African mining interests and who was close to leading Democrats, like the two-time presidential nominee Adlai E. Stevenson II, arranged the gathering with Kennedy.

Later, Mr. Tempelsman set up a meeting at the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan with President-elect Kennedy and Harry Oppenheimer, the chairman of the Anglo American Corporation and of De Beers, the world’s largest miners and distributors of diamonds and gold. Mr. Tempelsman and Mrs. Kennedy’s paths crossed over the years, but the close relationship between them began after she was widowed a second time with the death of the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis in 1975.

Mr. Tempelsman became Mrs. Onassis’s financial adviser and, in time, was reported to have quadrupled her $26 million inheritance from Mr. Onassis. Within a few years, they were being seen together at private dinners, consular affairs, the ballet and the opera.

To some, it may have looked like another unlikely pairing for the slim and beautiful Mrs. Onassis: Mr. Onassis, 23 years her senior, had been short and blunt-featured; Mr. Tempelsman was portly and balding. But those who knew Mrs. Onassis and Mr. Tempelsman said he had many qualities that appealed to her.

His style was much the same as hers. Urbane and reserved, Mr. Tempelsman believed that discretion was among the higher virtues. He had a sharp wit, a gentle and unassuming manner, a respect for scholarship and learning, an abiding interest in the arts and a deep knowledge of Africa. They were also the same age.

Mr. Tempelsman spent a fair share of time trying to discourage photographers eager to snap his picture together with Mrs. Onassis, but there was seldom any mention of their relationship or words of disapproval directed at him or her by New York’s legion of gossip columnists. Mrs. Onassis was widely admired for the dignity she showed after President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, and there seemed to be an unspoken consensus that she was entitled to privacy and personal happiness.

In New York, they entertained friends for dinner and liked to go to small restaurants on the Upper East Side. They enjoyed speaking French together during their walks in Central Park. As their romance flowered, they spent weekends at Mrs. Onassis’s horse farm in New Jersey and summers together at her oceanfront estate on Martha’s Vineyard, sometimes sailing aboard his yacht, the Relemar. In 1993, they entertained President Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton, on board.

After Mrs. Onassis was told she had lymphatic cancer in the winter of 1993, Mr. Tempelsman moved his office into her apartment and escorted her to and from the hospital.

He spoke at her funeral, at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue, reading from a poem he had selected, “Ithaka,” by C.P. Cavafy, which speaks of discovery and life’s journey.

“For those of us who cared about Mrs. Onassis, it was comforting — it was terrific — to know she was with somebody who was a good, generous and gentle man,” Roger Wilkins, the journalist, historian and civil rights champion who was an administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Kennedy administration and who had known Mr. Tempelsman for years, told The Washington Post after the funeral.

Mr. Tempelsman and Mrs. Onassis at a Democratic Party fund-raising dinner in 1988. He was a prominent fund-raiser for the party.Credit…Mariette Pathy Allen/Getty Images

Maurice Tempelsman was born on Aug. 26, 1929, to Leon and Helen (Ertag) Tempelsman in Antwerp, Belgium. His father was in the commodities business.

The family, Orthodox Jews, fled Belgium in 1940 as Nazi Germany invaded Belgium. They settled with other refugees on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, among them Lilly Burkos, whose family had also fled Antwerp. She and Mr. Tempelsman married in 1949 and had three children, Rena, Leon and Marcy.

His wife died in 2022. In addition to his son, Leon, his survivors include two daughters, Rena and Marcy; six grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

Mr. Tempelsman attended New York University for two years before dropping out to join his father in a new business venture, as diamond merchants; his father named the company Leon Tempelsman & Son.

In 1950, while barely in his 20s, Mr. Tempelsman scored a huge win for the firm by persuading the United States government to buy African industrial diamonds for its stockpile of strategic materials maintained for national emergencies.

He made millions of dollars for the firm by acting as a middleman and buying the diamonds from African suppliers. He also acted as a go-between in deals in which he delivered industrial diamonds, cobalt and uranium to the United States in return for agricultural commodities, which he then sold. As Insight magazine reported, Mr. Tempelsman wrote a memo to the State Department stressing — amid the Cold War — that the deal would help prevent “Eastern bloc commercial activities.”

Mr. Tempelsman understood that the decolonialization of Africa would loosen the control that the old colonial companies had over the continent’s resources, and that opportunities would open for energetic, intelligent outsiders like him.

At 27, he and his lawyer, Stevenson, the former Democratic presidential nominee, traveled to the Gold Coast in West Africa, where local diamond diggers had set up their own market. He got one of the first buying licenses and, for a time, was part of a flourishing diamond trade in Ghana.

According to Insight, citing declassified Kennedy administration documents, when Ghana’s nationalist leader Kwame Nkrumah began to implement socialist economic policies that threatened the diamond market, Mr. Tempelsman’s representatives in the country took a leading role in pressing for the removal of Nkrumah from office and installing a Western- and business-friendly rival. Nkrumah, whose rule became increasingly erratic, was deposed in a 1966 military coup.

Mr. Tempelsman, who also had his eye on Congo’s extensive diamond and copper wealth, became an ardent early supporter of Col. Joseph Mobutu in what became Zaire.

He was credited with helping smooth the way for Western backing of the autocratic Mobutu, who later took the name Mobutu Sese Seko. Their relationship paid off when Mr. Mobutu gave the copper and cobalt concession at the vast Tenke Fungurume mine to Mr. Tempelsman instead of a Belgian group to which it had been promised.

Over the years, as Mr. Mobutu’s leadership became more corrupt and repressive, what had once seemed like a politically astute business decision came in for withering rebuke. “Somebody had to win, and I guess we won that one,” Mr. Tempelsman told Insight. “I wish now we hadn’t!”

In his roles chairing the Africa America Institute and the Corporate Council on Africa, groups created to foster African development, Mr. Tempelsman remained at the forefront of Westerners with entrenched personal and business relationships at the pinnacle of African power, whether right-wing or Marxist governments.

Mr. Tempelsman presented an award to President Hage Geingob of Namibia during a gala event in New York in 2015 sponsored by the Africa America Institute. Mr. Tempelsman was the organization’s chairman. Credit…Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for The Africa-America Institute

He was, at times, a strong supporter of African liberation and helped underwrite Nelson Mandela’s first visit to the United States, in 1990, months after his release from his 27-year imprisonment by the racist apartheid government.

In 1984, Mr. Tempelsman became the chief executive of Lazare Kaplan International in New York, one of the largest companies specializing in the import, cutting and sale of diamonds; its customers included Tiffany’s and Cartier. He was also a general partner in Leon Tempelsman & Son, which became a diversified company active in mining, industry and agriculture, as well as in putting together consortiums to mine diamonds and minerals.

Mr. Tempelsman was one of 160 diamond sightholders in the world, making him part of an exclusive club in which participants several times a year buy diamonds directly from the De Beers cartel, which holds a near-monopoly on the world’s diamond supply.

Mr. Tempelsman in 2010. In recent years he was active in efforts to end the AIDS epidemic in Africa.Credit…Evan Agostini/Associated Press

In addition to his giving to the Democratic Party — more than $500,000 alone in the 1990s, The Nation reported — Mr. Tempelsman was active in Jewish philanthropies.

In recent years, he was chairman of the international advisory council of the Harvard AIDS Institute, a public health program at the university. Marshaling the extensive networks by which he had flourished in business, Mr. Tempelsman connected politicians and scientists to strengthen research efforts to end the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

“The important thing is to mobilize the different parties that can make contributions,” he told The Times. “Each of them lives in a different universe.”

Information for this obituary is from the New York Times