15 Weird Facts About Jackie Kennedy’s Obsession With Privacy ht

She once told a close friend that the only thing worth having in life was something the world couldn’t take a photograph of. Jackie Kennedy [music] spent 30 years proving she meant it. She burned her diary. [music] She fought a paparazzo in court for years. She sealed her most honest recordings for 50 years and refused every memoir offer until the day she died.

The most watched woman in America was also quietly and methodically the most protected. Here are 15 weird facts about how she did it and why. Fact one, she burned her private diary. Before she died, Jackie Kennedy kept journals from girlhood. She kept them at Miss Porter school and at Vasser.

She kept them during her year in Paris. She kept them across her marriage to JFK [music] and into the years that followed. The people who knew about the journals understood they were genuinely private. Not the kind of private that means eventually archived, but the kind that means never meant for anyone else. Before she died in May of 1994, [music] she destroyed them.

She did not make a dramatic announcement about it. She simply made sure it was done. Her editors at Double Day knew she was meticulous about what she left behind. Her close friends were not surprised when it became clear the journals were gone. The biographer Sarah Bradford, who spent years interviewing people close to Jackie for her biography, said that those who knew her best, believed the journals contained the one version of Jackie that none of the public accounts had ever fully reached.

Unguarded, unedited, not managing anything or anyone. She had spent her entire adult life controlling what the world was permitted to see of her. She extended that control to the historical record. The most honest account of Jacqueline Kennedy that ever existed was written by her own hand and destroyed by her own hand.

And [music] that was exactly what she intended. Fact two, she fought a yearslong legal battle against a paparazzo. [music] His name was Ron Galella and he made Jaclyn Kennedy Onasses the central subject of his professional career. He followed her through Central Park. He hid outside her apartment building on Fifth Avenue. He jumped out from behind parked cars when she was walking.

He photographed her children at school, [music] on the street, at play. He was present, persistent, and entirely without shame about the pursuit. She sued him. The legal battle ran for years and produced one of the most significant early court rulings on the rights of public figures against press intrusion. In 1972, a federal judge ordered Gala to stay at least 50 yards from Jackie and 30 yard from her children.

Gala violated the order repeatedly. She took him back to court. the distances were increased. He continued operating as close to the legal limit as he could calculate. She described the experience in private correspondence as a form of stalking that the law was too slow to address and too reluctant to take seriously [music] because the subject was famous.

She wrote that fame in her experience did not reduce your right to safety. [music] It just meant that no one believed you needed it. Gala continued photographing her for years. He later sold the archive. It is now considered historically significant. [music] She never agreed that it was fact three. She asked friends to burn her letters.

The letters Jackie Kennedy wrote are by every account from the people who received them extraordinary. [music] They were long, specific, warm, observant, often funny, and written with the full attention of a person who took written language seriously as a form of thought. Friends who received them kept them because they read like nothing else in their correspondence.

Jackie asked many of them not to. She wrote notes at the end of letters or separate notes accompanying them asking the recipient to destroy what she had sent after reading. Some people did, some people did not because they could not bring themselves to because the letters were that good. The biographers who eventually tracked down the surviving correspondents treated each letter as a significant find because so many had been lost to exactly this request.

She was not asking out of paranoia. She was asking because she understood that letters are evidence, that the things she wrote freely to people she trusted were the things she would never have said in public, and that her public life had taught her very clearly what happened when private things became public.

She had watched words and images taken out of context and turned into whatever story was most convenient. She had watched the same process applied to people she loved. She wrote [music] freely and asked for the evidence to be removed. The tension between those two impulses, the need to express and the need to protect, ran through her entire life.

Fact four, she controlled what her children were allowed to say to the press, starting when they were toddlers. When Caroline Kennedy was four years old and living in the White House, a journalist obtained a small piece of information about what Caroline wanted for Christmas. Jackie Kennedy’s response was swift and [music] complete.

She issued a directive through her press secretary, Pierre Salinger, stating that under no circumstances would her children’s names appear in connection with Christmas wish lists, birthday parties, or any personal detail she had not authorized. The directive was not a suggestion.

Staff understood it was absolute. [music] She had decided very early in the White House years that her children would not be part of the public performance. They were present in photographs. She approved the famous image of John Jr. in the Oval Office. The family photographs that humanized JFK’s presidency, but those were controlled releases selected and authorized by her.

[music] The spontaneous detail, the off-hand remark from a nanny, the quote from a teacher. Those were sealed. As Caroline and Jon grew older, the system evolved with them. [music] They were taught quietly and consistently what could be said and what could not. They understood by the time they were old enough to be interviewed independently that their mother’s privacy was not a preference.

It was a [music] rule and the rule applied to her as a subject even in conversations with her own children’s friends. Caroline Kennedy [music] has maintained a version of the same system in her own life. The training held FACT5. She gave only one major interview in the last 20 years of her life.

After the Camelot interview with Theodore White in 1963, Jacqueline [music] Kennedy essentially withdrew from the press. She gave no extended interviews. [music] She did not write a memoir. She did not accept the profiles that were regularly proposed by every major publication in the country. She appeared in public and photographs.

She did not explain herself in words. [music] The one exception came late. In 1993, the year before her death, she agreed to speak with Publishers Weekly in conjunction with her work as an editor. It was a professional interview about books and editing. [music] It was not an interview about her life.

The interviewer noted that she answered questions about her work with warmth and specificity and deflected questions about anything else with a pleasantness that made the deflection feel like a gift. People who had spent years trying [music] to obtain interviews with her described the same experience.

She was so gracious in her refusals that the refusal almost felt like access. She had a gift for making the closed door feel briefly like an open one. It was in its way another form of control. You left the conversation feeling you had been given something when in fact [music] you had been given nothing she had not decided in advance to give.

She knew what she was doing. She had known since the White House. Fact six. She installed an informant [music] in JFK’s office to protect her own position privacy. For Jackie Kennedy was not merely about keeping herself hidden from the world. It was also about knowing more than other people knew she knew.

Evelyn Lincoln was John Kennedy’s personal secretary, efficient, devoted, and the keeper of the president’s daily life. She was also through an arrangement Jackie had established. A source of information for the first lady, what happened in the West Wing, who visited and for how long, what the schedule contained that did not appear on the official calendar.

Some of this reached Jackie through Lincoln. The arrangement reflected something essential about how Jackie operated. She had grown up watching her father, the charming and chronically unfaithful John Vernu Bouvier III, move through the world on charm alone, and she had understood from childhood that the people who appeared most confident were often the least informed.

She intended never to be that person. [music] She gathered information. She created channels for it. She maintained the appearance of serene detachment while making sure she knew exactly what was happening around her. The informant in her husband’s office was not a betrayal of trust. It was by her logic [music] the reasonable precaution of a woman who had decided she would not be the last to know things that directly concerned her.

She had learned that lesson early. She did not forget it. FAC7. She chose a publishing career specifically because it was not about her after Aristotle Onases died in 1975. Jacquellyn Kennedy Onasses [music] had choices. She was 56 years old, still among the most recognized women in the world and in possession of the financial resources and the name to do essentially anything she wanted.

She could have returned to the philanthropic and political world. She could have written the memoir that publishers were prepared to pay extraordinary amounts for. She could have in the language of the era leveraged her brand. She chose to become a book editor. The people who worked with her at Viking and later at Double Day were clear about something.

She did not want to be treated as a celebrity. She wanted to be treated as a colleague. She acquired books about archaeology, dance, [music] Russian history, Native American art, and ballet. She worked with authors patiently and in detail. She showed up at the office. She went to editorial meetings.

She did not want her name on the books she worked on. She actively resisted the impulse, which colleagues noted was institutionally present from her first day, to turn her editing career into a story about Jackie Kennedy. [music] She had spent decades as a subject. She had decided she was finished being a [music] subject.

The books were about the authors and the ideas. She was the person who helped shape them quietly out of the frame, the way she always preferred to work. [music] Fact eight, she sealed her oral history for 50 years. In the months following the assassination, Jackie Kennedy participated in a series of recorded interviews with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

, the sessions took place over several weeks in early 1964, 4 months after Dallas, and produced approximately 8 hours of recordings. She was candid in them in a way she was candid in almost no other preserved record about her marriage, about JFK’s personality, about the political operations around the presidency, about the [music] affairs, about her own uncertainty, about what the White House years had actually been like from the inside. Then she sealed them.

[music] The recordings were placed in the Kennedy Library under her instruction that they not be released for 50 years after her death. [music] She died in 1994. The recordings were released in 2011. She had calculated with precision the amount of time that would need to pass before the living people she spoke about some of them, the ones she was most candid about, would no longer be alive to be affected by what she had said.

She was honest in the recordings. She was also careful about when the honesty would land. The 50 years seal was not secrecy. It was timing. She understood that the same truth could be devastating or historical depending entirely on when it was released. She chose historical. She planned for it from the beginning.

Fact nine. She moved to New York after Dallas specifically [music] to disappear into the city after she left the White House in December of 1963. Jackie Kennedy moved to a townhouse on East 64th Street in Manhattan. She had chosen New York deliberately and her stated reason to close friends was one of the more honest things she said publicly about her own needs.

She wanted to be one person among millions. She wanted to walk on a street where she was not the event. She wanted to disappear. She failed repeatedly [music] and completely. The photographers found her townhouse within days. They found her on the street [music] in the mornings. They photographed her children going to school.

New York had not given her invisibility. It had given her a different and slightly more crowded version of the surveillance she had been trying to escape. [music] She moved to the apartment on Fifth Avenue and hired staff to manage arrivals and departures in a way that made casual photography more difficult.

She learned the city’s rhythms [music] and the photographers’s patterns well enough to find windows of genuine freedom, an early morning walk [music] before they were positioned, a route through the park that they had not yet mapped. She described these windows in letters as the best parts of her day. She had moved to New York to disappear and instead became a New York institution.

The city absorbed her without releasing her. She walked among [music] millions and remained unmistakably herself. Fact 10. She had rules about which rooms of her home were photographed and she never broke them. When Life magazine and other publications ran photographs of the White House restoration that Jackie oversaw in her first years as first lady, the photographs were precisely selected.

The public [music] rooms, the East Room, the red room, the blue room, the green room, the state dining room were [music] extensively documented. The private residence on the second and third floors appeared in almost none of the authorized photography. This was not accidental. Jackie had established a line geographic and categorical between the White House as a public institution and the White House as her family’s home.

[music] The public institution could be photographed for historical and educational purposes. The home could not. The same principle applied to every place she lived afterward. The Fifth Avenue apartment was never the subject of an authorized interior spread. [music] The house on Martha’s vineyard that she built in the 1980s was designed in part with privacy from aerial photography. in mind.

The landscape architecture directed the sightelines away from the structure in ways made distant photography unrevealing. Her home in New Jerseys horse country, Peac [music] was similarly managed. She understood that images of domestic space implied access to domestic life and domestic life was the thing she was most committed to protecting.

The public rooms were the performance. Everything behind them was hers. Fact 11. She wrote under a pseudonym as a young woman and kept it secret. Before she was Jackie Kennedy, before she was even Jackie Bouvier in the public sense, Jacqueline Bouvier submitted writing under a name that was not her own.

She had won the Vogue predis essay contest in 1951 under her real name. But in the years of her young journalism career and her early creative writing, she was protective [music] of the separation between her public social identity and her work as a writer. The habit of writing separately from her name, of keeping the creative and intellectual self, detached from the socialite self that her upbringing had produced stayed with her.

It was an early form of the same instinct that would later manifest in the sealed oral history, the burned diary, the unattributed editing work, and the poems shared only in private correspondence. She was from very early on a person who understood that names carry exposure and that the work she cared most about was the work she was least willing to expose.

The pseudonym [music] was a young woman’s version of a system she would spend the rest of her life refining. Keep the most essential things unnamed. Let the public have the image. Protect the substance. FAC12. She refused to write a memoir despite offers that were financially extraordinary. The offers began almost immediately after the assassination and continued for the rest of her life.

Publishers wanted Jackie Kennedy’s memoir the way they had wanted nothing else in the second half of the 20th century. The financial terms proposed particularly in the 1970s and 80s as memoir publishing became an industry [music] were extraordinary by any standard. She refused everyone. She never explained the refusals at length to anyone who published what she said.

But the explanation was not difficult to infer for the people who knew her. A memoir required choosing what to include and what to omit. And either choice was a form of exposure she was not willing to accept. If she wrote honestly, she exposed things and [music] people she had spent decades protecting, including her children, including herself.

If she wrote dishonestly, she produced a document that was not really hers and that she would have to live with as a public misrepresentation. There was also this. A memoir makes the author a subject again. It places you back in the center of the frame. She had worked too hard and too long to escape that frame to step back into it voluntarily, however much money was on the table. She died without a memoir.

She left the oral history sealed for 50 years as the record she had chosen. [music] She had decided what the account would be and when it would be available. That was the only kind of autobiography she was willing to produce. FAC13. She had a system for managing fan mail that kept her personal address completely hidden.

[music] The volume of mail that arrived for Jacqueline Kennedy after the assassination was [music] by accounts from the staff who processed it almost incomprehensible. Hundreds of thousands of letters in the weeks immediately following Dallas. Tens of thousands per year in the decades that followed.

Letters from people who felt they knew her, who wanted to offer condolences, who wanted to tell her what JFK had meant to them, who wanted something from her, who simply wanted to make contact with the most famous grieving woman in the world. She never received any of it directly. She had established a system in which all correspondence was routed through intermediaries for through the Kennedy Library’s administrative office, later through staff she maintained specifically for this purpose.

Nothing with a return address that implied a personal response, reached her in a way that could reveal where she actually lived, what she actually read, [music] or what she actually thought about any of it. The system meant she could theoretically respond to letters through staff without the respondent ever knowing whether she had seen the original. She was not being cruel.

[music] She was being careful. Every piece of direct information, her address, her schedule, her habits, her responses was a potential breach of the perimeter she maintained. The [music] mail system was one more layer of it designed with the same quiet thoroughess she applied to every other element of her private life. Fact 14.

She instructed her children specifically about what not to say after she died. In the months before her death from non-hodkkins lymphoma in the spring [music] of 1994, Jackie Kennedy had conversations with her children about what came after. Some of what she told them was about her expectations of where she was going.

She told Caroline she expected to be with Caroline’s father when she died. Some of what she told them was about the life she was leaving behind. She gave them instructions. The instructions were not by the accounts of the people who later spoke to biographers about what to say. They were primarily about what not to say.

She had spent her life managing the distance between the private self and the public record and she was still managing it from her deathbed. She wanted her children to understand the system she had maintained and to preserve it. She wanted them to know which questions were answerable and which were not, which details belonged to the family and which had already been given to the world, where the line was and why it was there.

Caroline Kennedy has maintained a version of her mother’s discipline about [music] privacy throughout her own public life. The instructions held the line remained approximately where Jackie had drawn it. The training she had begun when Caroline was 4 years old in the White House with the directive about Christmas wish lists concluded in a conversation 30 years later at the end of a life.

She was teaching the same lesson from the beginning to [music] the end. Some things are yours. Keep them. Fact 15. She said near the [music] end that the privacy had been worth it and that the most important things had stayed hers late in her life. In conversations with the small number of people she allowed genuinely close, Jacqueline Kennedy on Assus said something about privacy that was not what people expected from someone who had paid its costs so visibly and for so long.

She did not say she wished she had been more open. She did not say she regretted the sealed diary or the refused memoir or the 50-year hold on the recordings. She said that the most important things had stayed hers. The 13 nights of the Cuban missile crisis, walking quietly on the south lawn with Jack and then going back inside, [music] had stayed hers.

The Virginia bedroom, where she sat beside him while he wept [music] after the Bay of Pigs, had stayed hers. The dinner parties where they argued about politics freely with their closest friends had stayed hers. The mornings when he came upstairs for a few hours of sleep and she was there had stayed [music] hers.

The world had the photographs. The world had the pink suit, the white gloves, the composed face in a thousand images. The world had the Camelot myth she had built deliberately and carefully in the nine days after Dallas. It had the ceremonies and the performances and the image of a marriage that looked from the outside like the most perfectly composed thing in American public life.

She had everything else. She had built a wall around the life that mattered to her and she had maintained it across 30 years of the most aggressive public scrutiny in the world. Most of it held. The thing she wanted to keep, she kept. The thing she wanted to protect, she [music] protected.

She was buried beside JFK and beside Patrick at Arlington National Cemetery in May of 1994. [music] She had told her daughter not to grieve the dying. She said she was going somewhere she wanted to go. The most photographed woman in the world spent her life in pursuit of invisibility and came closer to achieving it than anyone who watched her from the outside ever fully understood.

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