15 Weird Facts About the Life JFK and Jackie Lived Away from the Cameras HT
The camera showed a composed, elegant couple running the most powerful country in the world. What they never showed was JFK asking his press secretary to collect 1,200 Cuban cigars the night before he made them illegal. They never showed Jackie telling her husband she wanted to die beside him on the White House lawn rather than be sent to a bomb shelter without him.
They never showed JFK weeping into his hands in their Virginia bedroom after the Bay of Pigs. or Jackie staying awake through 13 nights of the Cuban Missile Crisis, sleeping beside him every time he came upstairs because there was, as she put it, no day or night anymore. They never showed him hiring a comedian to write his jokes or her telling an interviewer she had always been a liability to JFK until the moment she became his greatest asset.
and they never showed the dinner party where he and Jackie argued about politics on tape with their closest friends so freely and so honestly that the recording reads like nothing else in the presidential archive. Here are 15 weird facts about the life JFK and Jackie lived away from the cameras.
Fact one, Jackie told JFK she wanted to die beside him rather than be sent to a bomb shelter. When the Cuban missile crisis began in October of 1962, Jackie Kennedy was at the family’s weekend property in Virginia with the children. JFK called her. She recalled later that there was something in his voice she could not name.
He told her to bring the children and come back to Washington immediately. Even though both were in the middle of naps. She came back that same day, and when she understood the scale of what was unfolding, she went to her husband with a specific request. She told him not to send her away. She said she did not want to go to Camp David.
She did not want the children taken somewhere separate and she did not want any version of the arrangement that placed them somewhere safe while he stayed behind. She told him directly if anything happens we are all going to stay right here with you. She said she knew there might not be room in the White House bomb shelter.
She said it did not matter. She said I just want to be on the lawn when it happens. I just want to be with you. I want to die with you and the children do too rather than live without you. JFK agreed to keep them there. What followed were 13 days during which there was, in Jackie’s words, no day or night.
National security adviser MC George Bundy came to the foot of their bed to wake JFK during the night for crisis updates. Jackie stayed close. She slept beside JFK every time he came upstairs for a nap or a few hours of rest. She walked with him on the south lawn in the brief intervals between meetings, what she described as just sort of walking quietly and then going back in.
The Cuban missile crisis is remembered as one of the great diplomatic confrontations of the Cold War. Jackie Kennedy experienced it from beside her husband’s bed in a building she had refused to leave. Fact two, JFK wept in their Virginia bedroom after the Bay of Pigs. In April of 1961, just 3 months into his presidency, John F.
Kennedy authorized the CIA backed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The operation was a catastrophic failure. The 1400 Cuban exiles who landed on the coast were quickly overwhelmed by Castro’s forces. More than a hundred were killed and over a thousand were captured. Kennedy had publicly taken full responsibility, but in private, the weight of it was a different matter entirely.
Jackie described what she witnessed in her 1964 oral history interviews with Arthur Schlesinger. The PBS NewsHour account of those interviews quoted her directly. He wept with her in a bedroom in the weekend house they had in Virginia. He sat with his head in his hands and cried.
Jackie had described him crying only a handful of times across the entire marriage and each instance was recorded in the oral history with a quiet precision of someone describing something she had not expected to see and had not forgotten. The Virginia weekend house where this happened was Glenn Ora. The property near Middberg that Jackie had decorated and that JFK famously visited only twice.
The Bay of Pigs was one of the occasions when he was there. The image of the president, who had taken public accountability for the disaster without visible emotion, sitting in a private bedroom with his head in his hands and his wife beside him, was one of the more human details to emerge from the sealed oral history when it was finally released in 2011.
It was the version of the presidency that the cameras never saw. A young man who had made a serious mistake and who was not composed about it in private, whatever he managed to project in public. Fact three, JFK had a comedian write his jokes and kept a personal joke bank. John Kennedy’s public wit was widely celebrated.
His press conferences were remarkable, not just for their substance, but for their humor, the kind of dry, self-aware comedy that left rooms full of somber journalists laughing despite themselves. His aid, Kenneth O’Donnell, remembered that the president was always asking all of them for a joke he could use in his next speech, but added that his most widely quoted witicisms were his own originals.
What O’Donnell did not fully capture was the professional infrastructure behind at least some of that wit. In 1960, Joseph Kennedy senior called stand-up comedian Mort Saul, whose name he had apparently been given as the leading figure in American political humor, and asked him to write material for his son.
Saul agreed and began providing JFK with a joke bank to draw from across various speaking engagements. The Vice magazine account of their collaboration included one specific example. When a Protestant leader said that if Kennedy were elected, he would dig a tunnel to Rome.
Saul prepared the line that JFK delivered in response. I am against public works projects of any kind. The line worked exactly as intended. Saul warned Kennedy from the beginning that he would not stop making jokes about him if he became president. and he kept that promise. Joe Kennedy Senior was not happy about the continued satirical treatment of his son.
He apparently made Saul’s career in standup considerably harder in the years that followed. Saul and JFK remained personally friendly regardless. Jackie describing JFK’s humor in her oral history told Schlesinger that JFK’s wit always had a serious nature, that he never liked anything off color, and that his humor was most fully expressed in the self-deprecating style he deployed most visibly at press conferences.
Behind that style was a comedian’s infrastructure and a personal joke bank he actually used. Fact four, they were recorded arguing about politics over dinner with their closest friends. The Smithsonian magazine published an account of a remarkable document in the Kennedy Historical Record, a dinner party recording made at the home of Washington Post journalist Ben Bradley sometime during the Kennedy White House years.
The recording captured JFK and Jackie in private conversation with Bradley, his then wife Tony, and two other guests in an informal setting with a tape recorder running that everyone present apparently forgot about or stopped managing with care. The transcript of the recording reproduced in the Smithsonian account showed a version of both Kennedys that their public appearances had rarely captured.
JFK was relaxed and completely unguarded, ranging across topics from his early political career to his father’s political connections to the mechanics of running for office. Jackie interrupted him, pushed back on his framing, and made her own observations about the events being discussed. At one point, Ben Bradley told Jackie she should show her views and grasp of issues, and she responded with evident spirit.
At another point, JFK asked whether anyone wanted a cigar, and the conversation moved in a completely different direction. What the recording demonstrated beyond its specific content was the texture of the private life, the ease, the humor, the direct engagement between two highly intelligent people who were comfortable enough with each other and with their closest friends to drop the public performance entirely.
JFK in the recording was not presidential. He was funny and self-aware and occasionally profane and genuinely curious about what the other people at the table thought. Jackie was not composed. She was present, opinionated, and at one point openly skeptical of something her husband was claiming. The cameras showed the performance.
The dinner party recording showed who was actually there. Fact five. Jackie said she had always been a liability to JFK until the White House. In her oral history interviews with Arthur Schlesinger, released publicly in 2011 as part of the book Jacqueline Kennedy, Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy.
Jackie made a statement about her role in her husband’s political career that stood out for its directness. She said, “I was always a liability to him until we got to the White House, and he never asked me to change or said anything about it.” The PBS NewsHour account of the oral history interviews noted this remark specifically as one of two things that stood out again and again across the recordings.
how much she admired Kennedy’s personality and intellect and how unsure of her own value to him she really was. She had spent years as someone the political team considered a problem. Too cosmopolitan, too French, too intellectual, not warmly accessible enough to ordinary voters. She had been a liability. She had known it.
He had never said a word about it. The irony of what followed was complete. And she was aware of it. She became first lady and she was in the PBS accounts language the most enormous celebrity in the country. Everyone wanted to wear their hair like Jackie. The woman the political team had handled as a liability had become his most powerful asset.
He had according to the same oral history pleaded with her to join him on the Texas trip specifically because she was by that point such a political asset that her presence was worth more than anything else he could bring to a difficult southern state. The liability had become the most important political tool of the 1963 re-election campaign.
She knew that too and she went. Fact six. JFK collected famous quotes since childhood and read poetry. While getting dressed, Jackie’s description of JFK reading in the strangest way, propping books on his bureau while he did his tie, reading in the bathtub, reading while walking down hallways, reading at the dinner table was one of the most vivid portraits she offered in the oral history.
What she was describing was not casual reading. It was the behavior of a man who had been collecting language since childhood and who treated every available moment as an opportunity to add to the collection. JFK had kept notebooks of quotations since his school years, a habit encouraged by his mother, Rose, who kept detailed index cards on each of her children.
He carried quotations in his head from history, from poetry, from political speeches across centuries, and deployed them in his own speeches and private conversation with a fluency that suggested he had absorbed them rather than memorized them. His press conferences demonstrated this regularly. He answered questions with historical parallels and literary references that were obviously genuine rather than prepared because they came too quickly and too precisely to have been scripted.
His childhood friend LM Billings told the New England Historical Society that he had never known anyone in his life with such a wonderful humor and the ability to make one laugh and have a good time. The humor and the reading were connected in a way that the public performance separated. The wit in his press conferences came from a mind that had been reading everything it could find since childhood.
Retaining all of it and finding the precise quotation or the perfectly timed self-deprecating observation at the moment it was most useful. Away from the cameras, the reading was simply continuous. There was no moment when he was not reading something and the bureau with the book propped open was the private version of the press conference with fact seven.
JFK joked about his own assassination after the Cuban missile crisis. When the Cuban missile crisis ended in late October of 1962 with a negotiated resolution that prevented nuclear war, John Kennedy allowed himself a private moment of dark humor that Jackie later described in the oral history sessions with evident fondness and with equal discomfort.
She told Schlesinger that after it all turned out so fantastically, JFK said to her, “Well, if anyone is ever going to shoot me, this would be the day they should do it.” She paused in the recording after saying this and then said, “I mean, it is so strange these things that come back.” The ABC News account of the oral histories release noted that JFK also said to his brother, Robert Kennedy at the conclusion of the crisis that it might be the night to go to the theater, a reference to Abraham Lincoln and Ford’s theater. That was his
way of acknowledging through the specific form of black humor he deployed for the most serious situations that the triumph over the Soviet Union had placed him at the peak of his historical significance. He saw then Jackie said that he would be remembered. He said it would never top this.
The remark about being shot on that particular day made in private to his wife just weeks after the most dangerous fortnight of the Cold War came back to Jackie after Dallas with a force that she described as so strange she had heard him say it. She had been beside him when he said it. And then 13 months later in a motorcade in Texas on a day when the polls showed his approval rating in Texas rising and the political team was pleased with how the trip was going, someone had made the same calculation JFK had articulated as a
joke and had acted on it. The private remark became in retrospect something she could not think about without the weight of everything that had followed. Fact eight. The children were allowed to interrupt JFK’s Oval Office meetings. One of the most widely recognized images of the Kennedy White House is the photograph of John Kennedy Jr.
playing under the desk in the Oval Office while his father works above him. The image taken by White House photographer Stanley Trek became one of the most beloved photographs in the Kennedy archive. What it captured was not a staged moment, but an actual daily reality of the Kennedy household. The children had access to their father’s office that no previous president’s children had been given.
Jackie had established a family culture in the White House in which the proximity of JFK’s office to the private residence was treated as one of the genuine gifts of the situation. She told Schlesinger in the oral history that one of the things she loved most about the White House was being able to see JFK so many times during the day.
The children were part of that proximity. Caroline and John Jr. came to the Oval Office regularly, often spontaneously, and meetings were not always interrupted to accommodate their arrival. The contrast with the way the children’s public exposure was managed was striking. Jackie was meticulous about keeping Caroline and John Jr.
‘s personal lives away from the press, prohibiting their names from appearing in connection with Christmas wish lists, birthday parties, or any personal detail she considered private. But inside the building, they had complete access to their father at work. The same woman who refused to let reporters know what Caroline wanted for Christmas allowed her daughter to visit the Oval Office in the middle of a meeting with a foreign dignitary.
The private was freely given. The public was carefully withheld. The distinction was always hers to make. Fact nine. JFK. Privately admitted he never expected to win the 1960 election. The dinner party recording published by Smithsonian magazine captured JFK in a candid moment discussing the 1956 Democratic National Convention at which he had made a surprise run for the vice presidential nomination and come remarkably close to winning it before losing to Senator Estus Kaf of Tennessee.
In the recording, JFK told the table that he had not thought he was going to win, that he thought Kov deserved to win and that he was not desolate when it was over. just very tired. He was equally candid in other private settings about his 1960 presidential campaign. His conversation with Joan Lundberg, documented in Terra Barelli’s research, included his acknowledgement that politics was all he knew, and that if you took it away from him, his voice trailed off without completing the thought. He was a man who had always
been heading toward the presidency, who had organized his life around that destination, who had married partly in service of it, and who had in the private conversations captured in recordings and in accounts from people close to him, a more complicated and more uncertain relationship with his own ambition than the public narrative of inevitable Kennedy triumph suggested.
The dinner party recording in particular showed a JFK who was reflective and honest about his career in ways that his public appearances did not. He described starting his first congressional campaign in 1946 without knowing anyone in Boston, having spent most of his life away from the city he was running to represent.
He described the long labor of building support, the importance of starting early, and the uncertainty about whether any of it would work nationally. The man the camera showed was effortlessly presidential. The man at the dinner table was someone who had worked extremely hard for something he was not certain he would get. Fact 10. Jackie called the White House the one place that made being first lady bearable.
Despite her famous description of the White House as the most beautiful prison in the world, Jaclyn Kennedy also said something else about it in the oral history that sat alongside that description in a way that required both to be taken seriously. She told Schlesinger that she always thought there was one thing merciful about the White House, which made up for the goldfish bowl and the Secret Service and all the rest of it.
It was the only place you could be a mother and a wife in the same building as your husband at his job. The PBS account of the oral history release quoted the remark in full and noted what it revealed about the private meaning of the arrangement. The physical proximity to JFK, the ability to see him multiple times during the day, the capacity to walk from the residence to the Oval Office and back to join him for lunch, to be there when the afternoon nap happened, to have the children downstairs from where he was working was
something she had not anticipated valuing as much as she did. She had dreaded the White House. Once she was inside, it the thing she found most sustaining was the one thing the architecture made accidentally possible. It was also, in retrospect, the detail that made the loss most specific. When she left the White House in December of 1963, she was not simply leaving a building.
She was leaving the one physical arrangement in which the private life and the public life had been located in the same space at the same time in which she had been a wife and a mother and a first lady all at once without having to choose between them. The New York apartment was many things. But it was not that. The one mercy of the beautiful prison was that it had put her beside her husband in a way that nothing in their life before or after had managed. Fact 11.
JFK hired a comedian’s joke bank and never once told anyone about it. The collaboration between Mort Saul and JFK was not something Kennedy discussed publicly. He had a comedian writing material for his speaking engagements and a personal joke bank he drew from and he presented the results as his own, which was not exactly dishonest since O’Donnell was right that his most quoted witicisms were genuinely his own.
But the infrastructure behind the performance was a professional comedian on retainer paid by the same family that was simultaneously funding a presidential campaign. The Saul arrangement sat alongside the other invisible infrastructure of the Kennedy public performance. The team that managed his wardrobe changes, the valet who dressed him four times a day, the back brace that kept him upright in a way that looked like natural posture, the twice daily swims and twice daily baths that managed the pain he never publicly acknowledged. and the
tape recording system in the Oval Office that he had installed without telling most of the people whose conversations he was capturing. The public performance of JFK was supported by an apparatus of professional management so thorough and so carefully concealed that the gap between the appearance and the reality was essentially total.
Jackie was aware of some but not all of this infrastructure. She knew about the back brace and the medical situation because she lived with him. She knew about the tape recordings because the JFK library later confirmed that very few people were aware of the system. She described the reading habits and the humor and the wit with the easy familiarity of someone who had watched all of it being assembled over years without necessarily having a complete inventory of every component.
The version of JFK she described in the oral history was the private one which was itself extraordinary. The public version, as even she may not have fully known, was assembled from even more pieces than the private one. Fact 12. Jackie described no day or night for 13 days during the missile crisis.
Jackie Kennedy’s account of the Cuban missile crisis from the inside of the White House residence is one of the most intimate descriptions of a national emergency from the perspective of a first family in the American historical record. She did not describe the crisis in geopolitical terms. She described it in the terms of daily domestic life brought to an extreme.
There was no day or night. She said the normal rhythm of sleep and waking, of meal times and the afternoon nap in the morning newspapers, all of it dissolved into a continuous state of managed emergency in which the divisions between the hours ceased to function. She described national security adviser MC George Bundy appearing at the foot of their bed to wake the president during the night.
when something required his attention. She described walking past the Oval Office repeatedly during the day and JFK sometimes coming out to take her for a walk around the south lawn, not speaking much, just walking. She described sleeping beside him every time he came upstairs because she had told him she was not going anywhere and she kept that commitment across all 13 days.
>> >> The ABC News account of the oral history release noted that the crisis brought Jackie and JFK closer than they had ever been and that she had described being with him as the time she had felt most close to him in the marriage. The proximity was not romantic in any conventional sense.
It was the proximity of two people who had decided, one of them explicitly and the other by agreement that they were going to face the most dangerous moment of the 20th century together in the same building. He could have sent her away. He agreed not to. For 13 days, while the world was closer to nuclear war than it has ever been before or since, they walked quietly on the south lawn together and then went back inside. Fact 13.
JFK made dark jokes about Lincoln to his staff during [snorts] the most dangerous moments. The private humor John Kennedy used during moments of extreme tension was documented across multiple accounts from people who were with him during the most difficult periods of his presidency. The Lincoln references specifically appeared in two separate contexts during the Cuban missile crisis and both were captured in the historical record.
The ABC News account of the oral history cited a footnote in Schlesingers’s notes recording that at the conclusion of the crisis. Kennedy said to his brother, Robert Kennedy, that it might be the night to go to the theater. The reference was to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater on the night of the Union Army’s effective victory in the Civil War.
At the peak of Lincoln’s historical standing, JFK was making a joke that acknowledged his own historical significance while simultaneously invoking the assassination of the president he most admired and most consciously modeled himself on. It was, as the ABC account noted, an expression of his puckish humor as well as his recognition that his triumph in the nuclear standoff was of historical importance.
He said to Jackie in private that after the crisis, if anyone was ever going to shoot him, that would have been the day. The Lincoln parallel was not casual or accidental. Kennedy had studied Lincoln’s presidency with the seriousness of a historian, and the similarities between the two men, the physical health concealed from the public, the complicated marriages, the children who died young, the sense of historical destiny had been noted by Kennedy himself and by people around him. The jokes about
Lincoln were not simply dark humor. They were a man who understood exactly which historical figure he was being compared to and who had decided that the comparison was accurate enough to be used as a template for his own self-deprecating wit in the moments when the comparison felt most apt. Fact 14.
Jackie said JFK turned to her for security during the missile crisis. The most striking observation in the PBS NewsHour account of Jaclyn Kennedy’s oral history was made not by Jackie but by the historian who had studied the recordings most closely. He noted that in his experience studying presidents when a president does not have a great marriage and a major political crisis erupts.
The president usually does not want to spend much time with his wife and would rather be around his political team and close male associates. Kennedy’s first instinct when he discovered the Soviet missiles in Cuba. the historian noted, was to call Jackie, not his chief of staff, not his brother, Robert, not his national security team.
He called his wife and told her to bring the children and come home. And across the 13 days of the crisis, as the PBS account documented, he looked to her for security. He wanted her there not as a political asset or as a first lady performing a public function, but as the specific person whose presence made the situation more bearable.
The detail reframes something significant about the marriage. The affairs, the distance, the arranged quality of the beginning, the financial negotiations, the spy in the office. All of those things were real and documented. And simultaneously, when the world was closest to nuclear war, John Kennedy’s first call was to Jackie. He wanted her beside him.
He agreed not to send her away when she asked him not to. He came upstairs and slept beside her when the meetings allowed it. He took her out to walk on the south lawn without speaking much because the walking was enough. The marriage that had begun as an arrangement had become in the specific crucible of that October Fortnite.
Something more essential than any of the other categories applied to it. Fact 15. The White House years were the happiest time of Jackie’s life and the last time she said she felt truly close to him. Everything documented in this video. The 13 nights of the missile crisis. The weeping after the Bay of Pigs.
The dinner party recording where they argued about politics freely with their friends. The dark Lincoln jokes. The children in the Oval Office. The South Lawn walks. The afternoon nap arrangement. The Cuban cigars stockpiled the night before the embargo. And the morning in Fort Worth when he made a joke about her being slow to get ready and then told her she looked smashing when she came out.
All of it happened inside a period of less than a thousand days. Jackie Kennedy described those thousand days in the oral history she recorded 4 months after it ended as the happiest time of her life and the time when she felt most close to him. She said this having full knowledge of the affairs, the still birth, the financial arrangement with his father, the spy she had installed in his office, and the black hole she said she could never look down into.
She said it and she meant it. And both things were simultaneously true. It was the best and it was also all of those other things. She was buried beside him in May of 1994, Darlington National Cemetery, next to John Kennedy and next to Patrick. She had told her daughter Caroline not to cry about her dying because she expected to be with Caroline’s daddy when she went.
She had said near the end that the White House years were the happiest time. She had said that the loss of Patrick had made her feel she was finally getting through to him. She had said that the Cuban missile crisis was the time she had felt most close. All of those moments happened away from the cameras, in the residence, and on the south lawn, and in their Virginia weekend house, and in the 13 sleepless nights of October 1962. The public saw the performance.
This was the life behind it. They walked quietly on the south lawn during the Cuban Missile Crisis and then went back inside. He wept in the Virginia bedroom after the Bay of Pigs, and she stayed beside him. She told him she wanted to die with him on the lawn rather than live without him in a shelter.
He called her first when he found out about the missiles. They argued about politics at dinner parties in the way that two genuinely opinionated people argue directly with humor without performing composure for an audience. The cameras showed the composed couple. The life behind it was considerably more complicated, considerably more human, and by the account of the person who lived closest to it, considerably happier than anyone watching from the outside could fully understand.
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