15 Weird Facts About What Happened Behind Closed Doors with JFK and Jackie HT
They were the most photographed couple in America and one of the least understood. >> >> Behind the smiles and the state dinners and the children playing on the Oval Office floor, something else was happening entirely. Jackie once told her father-in-law that she would stay in the marriage, but if Jack came home with a venereal disease from any of his women, her price for that would be $20 million.
JFK actually cried in front of Jackie exactly once and she described the moment as the only time she had ever seen him cry. He made a joke about her on national television the morning before he was shot. She wrote him a three-page love letter describing exactly what she loved about their marriage and it sold at auction for more than $26,000.
They both read Lord Byron’s poetry together and agreed with each other about Vietnam before he ever gave a speech about it. And after losing their premature son Patrick just months before Dallas, they held hands in public for the first time anyone could remember. Here are 15 weird facts about what happened behind closed doors with JFK and Jackie. Fact one.
Jackie wrote JFK a three-page private love letter describing exactly what she loved about him in either 1957 or 1958. While John Kennedy was serving as a senator from Massachusetts >> >> and their marriage was entering one of its more strained periods, Jacqueline Kennedy sat down and wrote her husband a three-page letter by hand.
The letter was deeply personal. She described in specific and affectionate terms what she loved about him and about their marriage and she did it in the direct unsentimental voice she used when she was being most honest with herself. The letter went to auction through RR Auction in November of 2023 as part of a collection of Kennedy memorabilia.
It sold for $26,568. Marie Claire Australia, which covered the auction, described the letter as offering a rare glimpse into one of history’s most complicated marriages capturing Jackie’s genuine feelings about a man whose private behavior she was simultaneously struggling to accept.
The letter existed alongside everything else that was true about the marriage. The infidelities, the separation during her miscarriage, >> >> the period when she consulted a divorce attorney. What it demonstrated was that the complexity of the relationship was real in both directions. She was not simply enduring a marriage she had never wanted.
She loved him with specificity, with enough precision to fill three pages in her own handwriting. Both things were true at the same time. She loved him and he heard her and she was clear-eyed enough about both facts to write them down. Fact two. They bonded over Lord Byron’s poetry and shared views on Vietnam before he was president. The intellectual connection between John and Jackie Kennedy was established before they were married and ran deeper than most people followed them primarily for their glamour understood.
Biographer Carl Sferrazza Anthony, whose book Camera Girl documented Jackie’s pre-marriage years in exhaustive detail, found that the two of them were both passionate readers of the poetry of Lord Byron. A shared enthusiasm that gave them common ground from early in their relationship. Time magazine’s coverage of the 30th anniversary of Jackie’s death, drawing on Anthony’s research, described how she and JFK shared genuine feelings about Vietnam’s independence and how their conversations on the subject laid the groundwork for his
first major foreign policy speech to the Senate in 1953. Jackie had translated French books on Vietnam and synthesized them into the 88-page research report she produced for him while they were dating. The speech drew on her work directly. Anthony told Time that there was a lot of substance that Jackie had with JFK that excited her intellectually and that this was the thing that distinguished Kennedy from the man she had been previously engaged to, a stockbroker named John Husted, with
whom she had felt no equivalent intellectual connection. She broke off the engagement to Husted. She married Kennedy. The Byron poetry and the shared position on Vietnam were not incidental background details of the relationship. According to the biographer who knew her longest, they were part of the foundation of it. Fact three.
Joe Kennedy offered Jackie $1 million to stay in the marriage and she negotiated. Before JFK became president, Jackie Kennedy consulted a divorce attorney. The marriage had reached a point where she was, by the accounts of multiple biographers, including J.
Randy Taraborrelli and the authors of the biography Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, >> >> a life beyond her wildest dreams, seriously considering ending it. The specific trigger, according to Taraborrelli’s research, was a period of particular humiliation during which Jackie became aware of yet another of her husband’s affairs at a time when she was recovering from a miscarriage.
Joe Kennedy, the family patriarch, intervened. He told Jackie directly that there was danger facing her as a divorced Catholic woman and that she should put divorce out of her mind. He then offered her $1 million to stay. >> >> The Irish Central and multiple other sources documented what Jackie allegedly said in response.
She told him that her price would rise to $20 million if Jack came home with a venereal disease from any of his women. The line, delivered with the ice-cold precision that was characteristic of Jackie at her most controlled, was noted by everyone who later heard it. The arrangement that emerged from this confrontation was essentially a formal understanding.
Jackie would stay in the marriage and she would receive financial security. Jack would continue as he had been with the requirement that his activities remained private enough not to become publicly humiliating to her. Whether the million-dollar payment was actually made has never been definitively confirmed >> >> or denied by the Kennedy family.
What is documented is that Jackie stayed, that the marriage continued through the White House years and that she went to her grave without writing or speaking publicly about the terms on which she had agreed to remain in it. Fact four. JFK cried in front of Jackie only once in their entire marriage. In the oral history interviews Jackie Kennedy recorded with Arthur Schlesinger in the spring of 1964, she described many things about her husband’s private character with a candor that comes from grief and from speaking into a microphone that has been
promised to remain sealed for 50 years. One of the details that lodged itself in the memories of those who later read the transcripts was her account of the one time she saw John Kennedy cry. It was during the Bay of Pigs crisis in April of 1961. The operation, a CIA-backed attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro using a force of Cuban exiles, had collapsed catastrophically within 3 days.
More than a hundred of the invading force were killed and approximately 1,200 were captured. The failure was a profound humiliation for the new administration, one that Kennedy publicly accepted responsibility for and one that privately devastated him. Jackie told Schlesinger that she had gone to find him during that period and found him crying.
The Bonjour Paris review of the published oral history noted this detail specifically, observing that readers would learn about Jackie witnessing the president weep over the Bay of Pigs, >> >> described as one of the very few times she ever saw her husband cry. She did not elaborate extensively on the moment in the interview.
She mentioned it as a fact. It was, for a woman who had lived with a man who was constitutionally disinclined to show emotion in private or in public, an extraordinary thing to have witnessed. And it was the only time it happened. Fact five. JFK made a public joke about Jackie being slow the morning before he was shot.
On the morning of November 22nd, 1963, John Kennedy spoke at an outdoor rally in Fort Worth, Texas in the parking lot of the Texas Hotel. The crowd had gathered early and was waiting for both the president and the first lady. Jackie was not yet downstairs when JFK stepped outside to address them. Shouts from the crowd asked where she was.
JFK pointed up toward the hotel window of their eighth-floor suite and said with the easy self-deprecating humor that had been one of his most reliable political tools throughout his career, “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes her a little longer, but of course she looks better than we do when she comes out.
” The line drew laughter from the crowd and was documented in the account of the Fort Worth morning in multiple books about the final days of the Kennedy presidency, including a sourced excerpt that appeared in a UC Press publication on the Kennedy era. Jackie appeared a few minutes later in the pink wool boucle suit that would become the most recognizable garment in American presidential history.
JFK saw her walk out and, according to those who were present, looked visibly pleased. He said she looked smashing. The joke and the compliment both happened on the same morning within an hour of each other on the last day of his life. The Fort Worth crowd saw a couple exchanging the kind of comfortable, affectionate public teasing that suggested a marriage that had found its equilibrium after years of difficulty.
7 hours later, everything was over. Fact six. >> >> Jackie told the French press one of JFK’s affairs was sleeping with her husband in French while giving a tour. The moment has been documented in multiple sources and has become one of the most frequently cited illustrations of how Jackie Kennedy managed her awareness of her husband’s infidelities.
She handled them with devastating composure and a very precise use of language. During a White House tour she was giving to a journalist from the French magazine Paris Match, the route took her past the desk of a White House press aide named Priscilla Wear. Jackie said in French while continuing to walk, something that translated as, “This is the girl who is supposedly sleeping with my husband.
” The remark was relayed afterward by Kennedy press aide Barbara Gamarekian, who was present and who later gave a detailed oral history interview to the JFK Library. The Irish Central documented the incident in its coverage of what Jackie knew about her husband’s affairs, noting that she had spoken in French specifically.
Presumably because she was talking to a French journalist and because speaking in a language most of the surrounding staff did not fluently understand provided a degree of deniability. The cool precision of the delivery was, according to people who knew Jackie well, entirely characteristic. She did not become visibly upset. She did not stop walking.
She identified the situation with two sentences in French, continued the tour, and moved on. The remark was a demonstration not of naivety or of ignorance, but of the opposite. A woman who knew exactly what was happening around her and had chosen a method of acknowledging it that was simultaneously honest and controlled >> >> in the language most appropriate to her audience without breaking her public stride. Fact seven.
Jackie had her own extramarital relationships. That JFK was reportedly aware of the historical record of the Kennedy marriage, as assembled across multiple biographies and accounts from people close to both of them, documents that Jackie Kennedy was not simply a passive recipient of her husband’s infidelities. She had relationships of her own.
Multiple biographers, including sources compiled by the Irish Central, >> >> have documented affairs attributed to Jackie during the Kennedy years with figures including actor Marlon Brando, actor Paul Newman, and actor Warren Beatty. JFK himself appears to have been aware of at least some of this. The account from biographer Tara Berrell’s research described a conversation during JFK’s relationship with flight attendant Joan Lundberg in which Kennedy asked her directly, “Do you think Jackie is sleeping with other guys?” He then
explained that Jackie was, in his words, “So great that he could not imagine her not having someone else in her life.” The question was not one of outrage or jealousy. It read as the inquiry of a man who understood at some level that the arrangement in his marriage had dimensions that ran in more than one direction.
The symmetry of the situation was consistent with the social world both of them had come from. Biographer Pamela Keogh, author of Jackie Style, noted that Jackie came from a world where that was what men did and it was accepted and that women in those circles were, in the words of Cornelia Guest, “Much more pragmatic about the whole thing.
” The Kennedys had not invented this arrangement. They had inherited it from two family cultures in which it was simply understood and they navigated it, each in their own way, throughout the 10 years they were married. Fact eight. JFK left Jackie alone during her stillbirth and his brother >> >> had to beg him to come back.
In August of 1956, Jacqueline Kennedy was pregnant and close to her due date when John Kennedy left the country to go on a yachting vacation in the Mediterranean with a group of friends including Senator George Smathers. While he was away, Jackie went into labor prematurely. The baby, a girl, was stillborn. Jackie underwent emergency surgery and spent days recovering in the hospital.
JFK was not there. He was in the Mediterranean. >> >> The Tiger Times and multiple other sources documented that Kennedy’s aides attempted to reach him to tell him what had happened, but accounts differ on exactly when he was informed and how quickly he responded. What is clearly documented across multiple sources is that it was eventually his brother Robert Kennedy, not JFK himself, who most urgently communicated to Jack that he needed to come home immediately, that his wife was in the hospital, and that
his absence was unconscionable. Jackie’s response to JFK when he finally returned was described by those who witnessed it as one of the low points of their marriage. She was not visibly dramatic about it. She was, by the accounts of the people around her, deeply hurt in a way that was quiet in total.
The stillbirth and the subsequent estrangement were the period that multiple biographers identified as the closest the marriage came to ending before the official approach to a divorce attorney that followed years later. That JFK’s brother Robert felt compelled to intervene and demand he come home rather than JFK making that decision himself was the kind of detail that no subsequent Camelot mythology could entirely erase.
Fact nine. The death of their son, Patrick, finally made JFK affectionate with Jackie in public. On August 7th, 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy gave birth prematurely to a son they named Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. The baby was born five and a half weeks early and weighed 4 lb 10 and 1/2 oz. He was immediately transferred to Boston Children’s Hospital where he was placed in a hyperbaric chamber to treat hyaline membrane disease, a condition affecting the development of the lungs that was not yet well understood or well
treatable in 1963. Patrick Kennedy died 39 hours after he was born. JFK was present when Patrick died. He held the tiny body for a long time after the death before allowing the nurses to take it. By multiple accounts from those who witnessed those hours in Boston, >> >> the president was shattered in a way he had not allowed himself to be shattered publicly before.
He did not attempt to compose himself quickly or perform the stoic resilience that he normally projected in difficult situations. He simply held his son and grieved. In the weeks and months that followed, people who observed the Kennedys together noticed something that had not been present before. Biographer Carl Anthony told Time magazine that everyone said the loss of Patrick brought JFK and Jackie closer together than they had ever been and that for the first time they would be affectionate in public and be photographed together
holding hands. The photographs from the period between Patrick’s death in August and the Dallas trip in November show a couple touching, holding hands, leaning toward each other in ways that their earlier public appearances had not captured. The loss of their son produced a visible tenderness in their public relationship that three years of the White House >> >> had not.
It lasted until Dallas and then it ended along with everything else. Fact 10. Jackie described their marriage to Schlesinger as Victorian and Asiatic in how she deferred to him. When Arthur Schlesinger asked Jackie Kennedy about her relationship with JFK during their 1964 oral history >> >> sessions, she used a phrase that has puzzled and fascinated historians ever since.
She described the marriage as rather terribly Victorian or Asiatic in the sense that she deferred to her husband on political matters. The phrase was unusual, layered, and entirely characteristic of the self-awareness Jackie brought to conversations about herself when she was speaking honestly. The Irish Times review of the oral history transcripts noted the comment and placed it in context.
>> >> Jackie had been a highly educated woman with strong political opinions of her own. She had translated French political books, written research reports for her senator husband, and spent years engaged in cultural diplomacy that required genuine political understanding. And yet she described her role in the marriage on political matters as one of deference.
She saw it clearly, named it with historical and geographic precision, and apparently accepted it as the framework within which the marriage functioned. The self-awareness in the phrase was the thing that distinguished it from a simple description of a conventional 1960s marriage. She was not saying she had no opinions.
She was saying she had made a choice about how to manage them within the structure of the relationship, a choice she framed in terms that located it historically >> >> as an old and durable arrangement between men and women of a certain kind rather than as a personal failure or a private unhappiness. It was, like most things Jackie said when she was being careful and honest simultaneously, a statement with several layers of meaning, all of them true at once.
Fact 11. Jackie answered JFK’s question about whether she loved him with a poem. Jackie Kennedy had a habit of expressing her most personal feelings in writing >> >> and during the years of her relationship with JFK, she did this through poetry and literary reference as much as through direct statement.
Biographer Carl Anthony described how their shared love of Lord Byron’s poetry was a genuine thread running through the early years of their relationship and how she used literary language to communicate things that direct conversation between them sometimes could not reach. A handwritten note from Jackie to JFK, one of several pieces of personal correspondence that came to light through auctions and estate records in the years after her death, showed her quoting poetry in the context of her feelings about him. The
practice was consistent with what people who knew her privately described. She was a woman who found literary language more precise than ordinary conversation for the most important things and who used it in her most personal writing the way other people use direct declaration. The pattern was documented most fully in her letters to Father Joseph Leonard, the Dublin priest with whom she corresponded for 14 years.
In those letters, she wrote about JFK using both direct description and literary framing often in the same paragraph. She described him as someone like her father in his relationship to conquest and boredom >> >> and then, in the same breath, described the intellectual excitement she felt in his company.
Both observations were in service of understanding the same complicated person >> >> approached from two different angles using the full range of expressive tools available to a woman with a degree in French literature and a lifelong habit of reading everything she could get her hands on. Fact 12. JFK asked Jackie not to be present at his birthday event with Marilyn Monroe and she was not.
On May 19th, 1962, a massive birthday fundraiser for President Kennedy was held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It was a spectacular event attended by 15,000 people featuring performances by some of the biggest entertainment names of the era. Marilyn Monroe appeared at the event and sang her famous version of Happy Birthday to the president in a rhinestone-encrusted, skin-tight dress.
The performance became one of the most famous moments of the Kennedy era. >> >> Jackie Kennedy was not there. She had gone riding at her Virginia property instead, an absence that was noted publicly at the time. The political team and those close to both Jackie and JFK have long understood that her absence was not accidental or coincidental.
She had been informed of the nature of the event and had chosen not to attend. >> >> In the same quiet way she managed most of the situations in her marriage that she preferred not to directly confront. Jackie reportedly answered the phone at some point during this period when Monroe called the Kennedy home asking for JFK. According to biographer J.
Randy Taraborrelli’s account, she did not confront Monroe. She reportedly warned her husband afterward to cease contact with the actress. >> >> Whether he complied or to what degree is part of the larger documented story of that relationship, >> >> which continued to be a source of public speculation for decades after both Monroe’s death in August of 1962 and JFK’s assassination the following year. Fact 13.
JFK’s secret code name was Lancer and Jackie’s was Lace. The United States Secret Service assigns code names to the president and to every member of the first family. During the Kennedy administration, the family’s code names all began with the letter L. President Kennedy’s code name was Lancer.
The name was a deliberate allusion to the Arthurian knight Sir Lancelot from the Camelot mythology that Jackie herself had introduced into the public narrative of the Kennedy presidency through her Theodore White interview one week after the assassination. Jackie Kennedy’s code name was Lace. Their daughter Caroline’s was Lyric.
Their son John Jr.’s was Lark. The choice of Lancer for the president was notable in retrospect because of the dual resonance of the name. Lancelot was the most accomplished knight in Camelot and also the one whose personal conduct, specifically his affair with Queen Guinevere, >> >> was responsible for the destruction of Camelot from the inside.
Whether whoever chose the code name intended that resonance is unknown. The code names were functional designations used in Secret Service communications and had no public dimension during the administration. Lancer appeared in the official record most prominently on November 22nd, 1963 >> >> in the communications transmitted to and from Dallas as the events of that day unfolded.
The agents who used the code name that day were using it in circumstances that no one who had chosen it had imagined. Fact 14. Jackie privately described the Camelot myth as something JFK would have found corny. The Camelot narrative that Jackie introduced through her Theodore White interview one week after the assassination became the dominant framework through which the Kennedy presidency was understood and remembered for decades.
Jackie had constructed it deliberately >> >> with full understanding of what she was doing and why as a way of securing the historical legacy of her husband’s administration before the political analysts and historians could establish a less flattering version. What has emerged through biographers who had access to people in Jackie’s confidence is that she privately acknowledged the mythological quality of what she had done.
She was not naive about the gap between the Camelot image and the reality of the thousand days in the White House. She had lived in that building. She knew exactly what the image was concealing. And she had chosen to establish the myth anyway because she understood that myth was more durable than analysis and because she believed her husband’s genuine achievements deserved a framework that would outlast the inevitable revelations of his private failures.
Those who knew her best said she also understood with her characteristic self-awareness that JFK himself might have found [snorts] the Camelot framing a bit much. He had a dry, ironic sense of humor about himself and about the mythology that surrounded the Kennedy family. He would have laughed at certain elements of the image Jackie constructed. She knew that.
She built it anyway because it was not for him. It was for the country, for the children, and for whatever the historical record would eventually make of a presidency that lasted less than a thousand days and ended in a motorcade in Dallas. Fact 15. Jackie said the years with Jack were the best of her life and she meant both things at once.
In the final months of her life, as she was undergoing treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and conducting the private burning of letters she did not want to outlive her, Jacqueline Kennedy made several statements to people close to her that were later reported by biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli in his 2023 biography.
Among the most striking was something she said about the years of her marriage to JFK. She called them the best years of her life. The statement existed in the same biographical record as the divorce attorney. The $1 million negotiation with Joe Kennedy. The panties in the bedroom. The miscarriage she went through alone. The midnight phone calls to her sister expressing suicidal thoughts in the years after the assassination.
>> >> The oral history tapes describing the marriage as Victorian in its dynamic. All of that was also true. >> >> And yet she called those years the best of her life. And by the accounts of those who heard her say it, she meant it. The complexity of that position was not something she ever tried to resolve or simplify.
She had loved him. He had hurt her. The marriage had been a genuinely complicated thing built on intellectual connection and political partnership and real affection and also on infidelity and grief and the kind of private negotiations that neither of them ever made public while they were alive. She went to her grave having preserved the myth and having burned the letters that told the rest of the story.
She died in May of 1994 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery next to John Kennedy and next to Patrick, the son they had lost together in the summer before Dallas. The loss that had finally made him hold her hand in public. >> >> She was buried where she had always been, beside him. The marriage of John and Jackie Kennedy was not the Camelot image she built for it and it was not the tabloid version that emerged in the years after the assassination, either.
It was something more complicated and more human than either of those stories. They shared Lord Byron and Vietnam policy and a dry private sense of humor. He made her laugh on the morning he was killed. She sat with him while he cried over the Bay of Pigs. They held hands after Patrick died in a way they had never managed before.
She wrote him a three-page letter about what she loved. She burned it before she died. If this video gave you something to think about, leave a like and subscribe. There’s always more to the story.