15 Weird Facts About Jackie Kennedy After JFK’s Death HT

 

She stood composed on Air Force One while her husband’s blood was still on her dress.  She planned a state funeral in 24 hours that the whole world watched.  She moved herself and her children out of the White House in 2 weeks while simultaneously shaping what history would say about John F.

 Kennedy for the next hundred years. But what the cameras did not capture was what happened in the months and years after. She painted alone at 4:00 in the morning  because she could not sleep. She called her sister in the middle of the night, contemplating ending her life. She asked a priest whether she would see Jack on the other side if she did.

 She secretly slipped back into the White House 8 years later and made them promise no photographs. Here are 15 weird facts you did not know about Jackie Kennedy after JFK’s death. Fact one, she started packing the White House the day after the assassination. The morning after President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Jacqueline Kennedy was back in the White House.

 She had spent the night at Bethesda Naval Hospital while doctors performed the official autopsy. When she returned to the White House in the early hours of November 23rd, 1963, she did not rest. By that afternoon, she had told her staff to begin packing. President Johnson and Ladybird had repeatedly told her she was in no hurry.

There was no pressure to leave quickly. The offer of time and grace was genuine. Jackie did not take it. She had boxes brought in within 2 days of the funeral and began overseeing the removal of her family’s belongings herself. She was also quietly organizing one final act, having the bodies of the two infant children she and JFK had lost, one to a miscarriage and one prematurely, disinterred from their original graves and rearied alongside their father at Arlington National Cemetery.

 On December 6th, 1963, exactly 2 weeks after the assassination, the Kennedy family left the White House. by any measure. The speed and organization of it was extraordinary. She had just watched her husband die in front of her. She had planned a state funeral. She had delivered her children through it and then she packed back to.

 She refused to change out of the bloodstained suit for 20 hours. When Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States aboard Air Force 1 at Lovefield in Dallas on the afternoon of November 22nd,  1963, Jacqueline Kennedy stood beside him. She was still wearing the pink wool boulay suit she had put on that morning.

 It was covered in her husband’s blood she had been offered the chance to change before the ceremony. She declined. According to those present, she said she wanted them to see what they had done. The word they referred most likely to whoever she believed responsible for the killing. The suit was her witness statement worn on her body in front of the cameras at the exact moment the transfer of presidential power was being formalized.

It was a deliberate act. She understood precisely what the image would communicate. She wore the suit for the rest of that day and into the following morning, a period of roughly 20 hours. When she finally changed, the suit was packed away. It was sent to the National Archives before July of 1964. It has never been cleaned.

 It remains in a sealed acid-free container in a windowless room in College Park, Maryland, where it will stay until at least 2,13.  Fact three, she personally designed JFK’s funeral based on Abraham Lincoln’s within hours of the assassination. While she was still at Bethesda Naval Hospital waiting for the autopsy to conclude, Jaclyn Kennedy began planning her husband’s state funeral. She did not delegate the task.

She directed it herself from the hospital. On the night of November 22nd, she had decided that the funeral would mirror the state funeral of Abraham Lincoln in  1865. as closely as possible. She requested the same black draped catapelk that had held Lincoln’s coffin in the capital rotunda, which was located in storage and brought out for the occasion.

 She specified that JFK’s coffin would be carried on a horsedrawn quesan as Lincoln’s had been. She ordered that the procession walk on foot from the White House to the cathedral,  a distance of eight blocks rather than ride in cars. She chose the riderless black horse with reversed boots in the stirrups, the traditional symbol of a fallen warrior.

 Secret Service agents were alarmed by the walking procession. In the immediate aftermath of an assassination with the shooter not yet fully understood, having the heads of state of dozens of nations walk in an open street through  Washington was a security nightmare. Jackie was unmoved. She walked at the front of the procession herself.

 The funeral broadcast to a television audience of hundreds of millions around the world became one of the most watched events in the history of the medium. Fact four. She invented the Camelot myth. One week after the assassination, one week after the assassination, on the stormy night of November 29th, 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy summoned journalist Theodore  White to the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.

 White had written a celebrated account of JFK’s 1960 presidential campaign. He was trusted, and just as importantly, he was friendly. Jackie talked with White for 4 hours. She was by his account entirely composed. She guided the conversation with a clear purpose. She wanted history to remember John Kennedy’s presidency as a magical unre repeatable moment.

 And she wanted that image fixed in the public mind before the political analysts and historians could establish a less flattering one. The image she chose came from a Broadway musical JFK had loved. She told White that her husband’s favorite lines were from the closing song of Camelot. Don’t let it be forgot that once there was a spot for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.

 White wrote the essay in 45 minutes in a servants room at the compound. His editors at Life magazine who were holding the presses at $30,000 an hour in overtime costs. Pushed back on the Camelot references as too heavy. Jackie was in the room when White called to dictate the story. She shook her head at the suggestion that the references be reduced. They stayed.

 The December 6th, 1963 issue of Life magazine introduced the Camelot metaphor to the world, and it has never left. Fact five, she couldn’t sleep and painted watercolors alone until 4:00 in the morning. In the months following the assassination,  Jacqueline Kennedy suffered from severe insomnia. She could not sleep at her mother’s home in Newport, Rhode Island, where she  stayed during that first dark winter.

 She developed a nighttime ritual that those close to her observed and later described in detail. Unable to lie still, she would go downstairs to the family room in the middle of the night, set up her easel in a corner, and open the French windows to let in the cold air from the bay. She would wrap herself in a robe  and paint using watercolors, working alone and in near silence until around 4 in the morning.

  Then she would go back upstairs and try to sleep, sometimes with the help of tranquilizers. Most nights sleep still did not come properly. When biographer Jay Randy Terberelli described Jackie’s PTSD, which is the term that would now be applied to what she was experiencing in 1963 and 64, the midnight painting sessions were part of the picture he painted of a woman managing profound trauma through any means available to her.

 She had functioned publicly with extraordinary composure through the assassination, the hospital, the swearing in ceremony, the funeral, and the departure from the White House. The nights were where everything she had held together during the day came apart. Fact  six. She drank heavily, took pills, and confessed suicidal thoughts to a  priest.

 In the months after the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy’s private condition was significantly worse than the composed public figure the world was watching. According to biographer J. Randy Terraelli, drawing on accounts from those close to her at the time. She was constantly crying, could not sleep without tranquilizers, was drinking heavily, and had begun talking about not wanting to go on living.

 She consulted a Catholic priest named Father Msurley about a specific theological question, whether she would see Jack on the other side if she ended her life. She was not speaking abstractly. Her  sister Lee Radzill was so alarmed by these conversations that she rushed to Jackie’s apartment on at least one occasion after a phone call in which Jackie had said she wanted to take pills and vodka and not  wake up.

 Lee removed whatever she could find that might be used for that purpose. Jackie eventually went into therapy and stopped the heavy drinking and pill use entirely by the late 1960s. Tara Belli later described her stopping as entirely characteristic of the woman. She made up her mind and that was the end of it.

 But the period between November of 1963 and the late 1960s was a far more fragile and desperate time than almost anyone outside her immediate family knew. Fact seven. She blamed herself for not reacting fast enough to save him. Among the most painful elements of Jaclyn Kennedy’s grief in the years after the assassination was a private conviction that she bore some responsibility for what had happened.

 Not in any logical or factual sense, but in the desperate arithmetic of trauma, she returned again and again to the question of whether she could have done something differently. She told the journalist Theodore  White during the Highest Port interview just one week after Dallas that she had been looking away at the moment of the first shot.

 She had turned toward the crowd. She told White she kept holding the top of his head down trying to keep the brains in. The graphic detail she shared in perfect composure just seven days after the event was striking to White and to the historians and biographers who later read his notes. She also told people close to her that she believed if she had just been a little more to one side, it could have been her instead of him.

 That thought, the idea that she had survived something she should not have survived became part of the weight she carried. Biographers who interviewed people from her circle described her as someone who never fully accepted that she had not failed in some way on that day in Dallas. Even though every rational understanding of the event made clear there was nothing she could have done. Fact eight.

 She turned down three ambassadorships offered by LBJ. In the weeks after the assassination, President Lyndon Johnson was looking for ways to help Jacqueline Kennedy and to honor the memory of her husband. He had enormous political resources at his disposal and he wanted to use them. One of the things he offered Jackie was an ambassadorship.

His first offer was France. He knew she spoke the language fluently, that she had studied in Paris and had deep ties to French culture, and that a diplomatic post there would give her a meaningful role and a degree of protection from the press in a country where she was genuinely admired. She turned it down.

Johnson then offered an ambassadorship to Mexico. She turned that down, too. He offered one to the United Kingdom. She declined  again. She also successfully made one specific request of Johnson in those early days after the assassination. She asked him to rename the Florida Space Center after her husband.

 The Cape Canaveral Launch Facility was renamed  the John F. Kennedy Space Center within a week of the assassination.  A change that reflected Jackie’s determination to attach her husband’s name to lasting American institutions wherever she could. She later publicly praised Johnson  for his kindness to her during that period, even though her private views of him, as revealed years later in her sealed oral history tapes were considerably less generous.

 Fact nine, she sent the painting she loved most back to the museum because it hurt too much. During the Kennedy years in the White House, Jaclyn Kennedy had arranged for a loan of six watercolor paintings by the American artist John Singer Sergeant from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She had placed them in the family’s private sitting room on the second floor, the room where she and JFK spent  their evenings where the children played on the floor where they sat with close friends away from the formal machinery of the White House.

After the assassination, she moved out of the White House and went to Georgetown and she asked the museum if she could extend the loan of four of the six sergeant paintings. He wrote them a personal note in December  of 1963, describing the room as the only room in the White House, which was our private happy sitting room, and saying she thought of those paintings when she thought of her happiest memories of her husband sitting  in his favorite chair with the sergeants over his head.

3 months later, she wrote to the museum again. She said she could not continue to live with them. The paintings that had represented happiness were now inseparable from loss. She returned them. The museum kept them. And years later, the story of the loan and the return became part of a broader exhibit about art and the Kennedy presidency.

The detail  was small, but it captured something important. The grief was not abstract. It attached itself to specific objects, specific rooms, specific paintings on a wall, and sometimes the only way to survive was to send them back. Fact 10. Bobby Kennedy became the closest person in her life after the assassination.

 After the assassination of President Kennedy, the person Jaclyn Kennedy relied on most heavily was not a family member from her own side, not a longtime friend, not a therapist or adviser. It was Robert Kennedy, the president’s younger brother and the attorney general of the United States.

 Bobby and Jackie had always been close, but the assassination transformed the relationship into something that many people who observed it closely described as the central emotional bond of both their lives in the years that followed. He had been the person who stayed with Jackie in the hospital during her miscarriage years earlier, not JFK.

 He became a surrogate father to Caroline and John Jr. after the assassination, showing up at the apartment, taking the children out, maintaining a presence in their lives that went beyond obligation. When Robert Kennedy was shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in June of 1968, after winning the California Democratic presidential primary, Jackie’s reaction was not simply grief.

It was terror. She had now watched two Kennedy men be assassinated. She told people close to her that she was afraid of what America might do to her children next. The fear for her children’s safety, the conviction that the country was not safe for her family, became one of the primary stated reasons she agreed to marry Aristotle Onases just a few months later. Fact 11.

 She moved out of Washington because the city was unbearable. After leaving the White House on December 6th,  1963, Jackie and the children moved first to a borrowed house in Georgetown, just a few blocks from the home she and JFK had shared before the presidency.  The plan was to stay in Washington. She had friends there.

 The children had school there. It made sense. It did not work. Washington was too full of reminders. The city was inseparable from everything she had experienced there. and everywhere she went, she was recognized, stared  at, and treated as a monument to national grief rather than as a person trying to live her life.

 The house in Georgetown also attracted crowds outside with people standing on the sidewalk just to see if she would come out. She could not move through the city without it becoming an event. By the summer of 1964, she had decided to leave. She moved to New York City to a 15- room apartment at 1,045th Avenue on the upper east side of  Manhattan.

 New York, paradoxically, offered more anonymity than Washington. She could walk in Central Park, shop on Madison Avenue, and move through the city with a degree of ordinariness that the capital simply would not allow. She spent the rest of her life in that apartment. She never lived in Washington again. Fact 12. She received over 800,000 condolence letters.

 In the weeks and months after the assassination, the mail that arrived for Jackal and Kennedy was unlike anything the postal system had ever processed for a private individual.  Letters came from across the United States and from countries around the world. By the time the counting was complete, she had received more than 800,000 pieces of condolence correspondence.

 She took the letters seriously. She did not simply acknowledge them through a form response and move on. She worked with her staff to reply personally to as many as was humanly possible. She also made a televised appearance on January 14th, 1964, speaking from the office of the attorney general in which she thanked the American public directly for the messages she had received and  said she had been sustained by the country’s affection for her late husband.

 It was one of the very few public appearances she made during her year of mourning. The volume of the letters said something about the scale of the grief the country was experiencing in those months. It also placed an enormous practical burden on Jackie and her small staff. She was managing the single largest unsolicited correspondence in American history while simultaneously dealing with her own PTSD, her children’s grief, the process of moving, the Manchester book arrangement, the oral history recordings with Schlesinger and a hundred other

tasks that the role of presidential widow had generated. The letters  were just one more thing that needed to be handled and she handled them. Fact 13. She secretly returned to the White House only once in her lifetime. After leaving the White House on December 6th, 1963,  Jaclyn Kennedy did not return for eight years.

 She turned down an invitation to attend the dedication of the White House Rose Garden, named in her honor in April of 1965. She declined every subsequent invitation, she said privately, that she did not think she could bear it. In 1970, artist Aaron Schikler completed the official White House portraits of both Jackie and President Kennedy, commissioned by the White House Historical Association.

 When President Nixon and his wife Pat scheduled a public unveiling for February 5th, 1971, Pat Nixon wrote to Jackie personally. Jackie wrote back asking whether she and the children could slip in quietly beforehand to see the portraits in private without any press, without any ceremony, without any photographs at all. Pat Nixon arranged everything.

 A small military jet was sent to New York. On February 3rd, 1971, Jackie, Caroline, and John Jr. arrived at the South Lawn at 5:30 in the afternoon. Only the president and first lady, their daughters, Trisha, and Julie, the chief usher, and the curator knew the visit was happening. No photographs were taken.

 The press was not informed until after they had already left. Jackie later wrote to Pat Nixon. The day I always dreaded turned out to be one of the most precious ones I spent with my children. She never went back again. Fact 14. She edited the journalist’s story live over the phone. While he dictated it when Theodore White was dictating his Camelot essay to his editors at Life magazine in the early hours of November 30th, 1963, he was doing so over the telephone from the servants quarters of the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport.

 Jackie was nearby. She could hear the conversation when the editors told White they thought the Camelot references were too heavy and suggested reducing them. White reported that Jackie, who was following along, shook her head clearly. The Camelot imagery stayed in. She had also physically edited the typed manuscript of the essay before White called in penciling in an additional line after the Camelot quote that read, “And it will never be that way again.

” She wrote those words twice in the manuscript. once at the end of the Camelot passage and once at the very end of the essay.  White later described himself as having been Jackie’s instrument in labeling the myth. He acknowledged that the essay was not purely his journalism.  It was a collaboration with Jackie as the directing partner.

 He donated his handwritten notes from the interview to the Kennedy Library in 1969,  stipulating that they remained sealed until one year after Jackie’s death. She died in May of 1994. The notes were released in May of 1995, and they showed in her own handwriting exactly how much of the Camelot story she had written herself. Fact 15.

 She told someone she expected to spend the rest of her life, waiting for it to really be over. Among the most haunting things Jaclyn Kennedy ever said in the aftermath of the assassination was something she told people in her closest circle in those first terrible months. She said she considered that her life was over. She said she would spend the rest of it waiting for it to really be over.

 The statement reflected the depth of what she was carrying. She was 34 years old when JFK was killed. She would live for another 30 years, building a career as a book editor, raising two children who became remarkable adults, traveling, reading, eventually finding something close to contentment with her longtime companion, Maurice Templesman, in the final years of her life.

 She did not actually spend 30 years waiting to die. She lived with far more fullness than the  statement implied, but the grief never fully left. Biographer J. Randy Terra Borelli wrote that near the end of her life, even after more than 30 years of managing what had happened in Dallas, Jackie told someone close to her what a shame  it was to have spent so much time tormented by a thing she could never change.

 She also said that maybe that was what JFK deserved for her to never really get over it. She died in May of 1994 at the age of 64, surrounded by her children and the people she loved most. She had in the end done far more than simply wait. Jackie Kennedy spent the 30 years after Dallas being one of the most watched women in the world while managing something that almost none of the people watching her could see.

 The grief, the insomnia, the midnight painting sessions, the crisis calls to her sister, trip back to the White House that had to  be conducted in total secrecy because she could not trust herself to hold together in public. She had been composed on the day she fell apart in private. And then slowly she put herself back together again.

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