15 Weird Facts About JFK and Jackie’s Hidden Daily Habits – HT

 

He read six newspapers every morning before his breakfast was finished. Then he swam before lunch, took a bath, took a nap for up to two hours, took another bath, changed  into a fresh suit, and went back to the Oval Office as though the day had only just started. He smoked four to five cigars a day, stockpiled 1,200 of them before a trade embargo, made Cuban  cigars illegal to import, and read books while walking down hallways, at dinner, and in the bathtub.

 She ate her breakfast alone in bed until 9:00 every morning  and wrote grocery instructions for the chef in French. He had his valet lay out a fresh outfit every single time he came out of the water, meaning the man who dressed him sometimes turned over four complete sets of clothing between sunrise and midnight.

 She joined him for the afternoon nap so reliably that she arranged her schedule around it every single day. Here are 15 weird facts about JFK and Jackie’s hidden daily habits. Fact one, JFK read six newspapers every morning before breakfast was over John F. Kennedy began every day the same way with newspapers. Not one  newspaper, not two, but six.

 According to the JFK Libraryies biographical account of his daily life, Kennedy read six newspapers while he ate his breakfast, working through them at a pace that suggested someone who had been doing this long enough that scanning for information had become automatic. >>  >> He did not skim the headlines and move on.

 He read his press secretary Pierre Salinger described Kennedy as a voracious consumer of print journalism. And in a December 1962 interview with NBC’s Sander Vaner, Kennedy himself described the press  as an invaluable arm of the presidency. A check on what was going on in the administration. He said more things came to his attention through newspapers that gave him information or caused him concern than through almost any other single channel.

 The morning newspaper reading was not a habit left over from before the presidency. It was a deliberate practice he maintained precisely because he believed it made him better at his job. Jackie, by contrast, described JFK’s reading habits to Arthur Schlesinger in a way that captured their unusual quality.  She said he read in the strangest way that he would read walking at meals, after dinner, in the bathtub, propping open a book on his bureau while he was doing his tie.

 She said he really read all the times you did not think you had time to read. The six morning newspapers were just the formal opening of a daily reading practice that ran continuously through almost every waking moment he was not in a meeting. Anything he wanted to remember, she said, he could always remember.  Fact two, JFK swam twice every single day for his back the White House swimming pool.

 Installed in 1933 for President Franklin Roosevelt’s physical therapy and used by the presidents who followed him saw more use during the Kennedy years than in almost any other administration. John Kennedy swam twice a day every  day as a fixed component of his medical management regime for the chronic back pain that  had plagued him since his 20s.

The back condition was severe and had a medical history spanning decades. Kennedy had undergone major spinal surgery in 1954 and again in 1955, he wore a rigid back brace  daily, a device so restrictive that on the day of the assassination in Dallas when he was struck by the first bullet. The brace held  his torso upright in a position that may have prevented him from reflexively ducking and made him more exposed to the second shot.

 His physician, Dr. Janet Travel and orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Hans Krauss, both incorporated swimming into his daily treatment protocol. The water supported his body weight in a way that reduced pressure on the damaged lumbar spine, and the movement  kept the supporting muscles active and functional.

 The pool had a mural of the American Virgin Islands painted on its walls in 1962 by artist Bernard Lamont, installed at JFK’s request to create an atmosphere that felt more like a Caribbean resort than a medical facility. He wanted to be somewhere pleasant while he did the thing he was medically required to do. The White House Historical Association documented both the mural and its  purpose.

The pool was decked over in 1970 when Richard Nixon expanded the White House press area  and the Kennedy era pool is now a workroom beneath the press briefing floor. Fact three, JFK changed his clothes up to four times every day. The daily swimming schedule, combined with the afternoon nap and the general pace of a presidential day that ran from early morning until late at night created a logistical requirement  that made JFK one of the most demanding wardrobes in the history of the White House. He changed his clothes up to four

times a day. Every swim required a fresh outfit afterward. Every nap required a change into something clean. Every formal evening engagement required another transition. The White House Historical Association’s profile of presidential valet documented the habit directly. Thomas also kept JFK’s clothes impeccable, describing it as no easy feat for a man known to change clothes three or four times a day.

 JFK’s valet, George E. Thomas, who had worked for Kennedy since 1947, when JFK was a freshman congressman and who would dress him one final time for his state funeral in November of 1963, was on constant call throughout each day. For this reason, he lived on the third floor of the White House residence specifically so that he could be available whenever the next wardrobe change was required.

The clothing habit was also connected to something JFK concealed carefully from the public. He wore a rigid back brace under his clothing everyday, and the brace required careful management when dressing and undressing. Thomas assisted him into it every morning and out of it at intervals throughout the day.

 JFK’s  jackets were specifically tailored with extra shoulder padding to allow the fabric to drape naturally over the brace without revealing its outline. The four times daily outfit change was not vanity. It was the intersection of a medical necessity, a hygiene requirement, and the tailoring demands of keeping a serious physical disability  completely invisible to the world.

 Fact four, JFK took a 1 to 2 hour nap every afternoon, and nobody was allowed to disturb  him. Just after lunch each day, President Kennedy went upstairs to the private residence and slept. The nap lasted somewhere between 1 and 2 hours, depending on the day’s schedule, and during those hours, the Kennedy household operated under a strict protocol.

 Chief Usher JB West later recalled the rule with precision. During those hours, the Kennedy doors were closed, no telephone calls were allowed, no folders were sent up, no interruptions from the staff, and nobody went upstairs for any reason. The nap was not optional or occasional. It was a fixed daily appointment built into the schedule with the same seriousness as the morning intelligence briefing or  the afternoon oval office sessions.

 JFK had apparently absorbed the habit from his predecessor Dwight Eisenhower, who was also a committed afternoon napper. According to sources who documented the practice across both administrations for Kennedy, whose daily workload routinely stretched past midnight,  the afternoon sleep was the mechanism that allowed a 12 plus hour workday to remain functional in its second half.

  The science behind the habit was not something Kennedy articulated publicly. But researchers who have since studied presidential performance during this era note that the postnap Kennedy was measurably different from the prenapy  in terms of energy engagement and the quality of his decision-making in late  afternoon and evening meetings.

The Cuban missile crisis which unfolded across 13 days  in October of 1962 with meetings running at all hours was managed by a president whose baseline daily routine included 2 hours of afternoon sleep. Whether that routine contributed to the quality of his judgment during that crisis is a question historians have visited more than once. Fact five.

  Jackie joined JFK for the afternoon nap everyday and arranged her schedule around  it. The afternoon nap was not something JFK did alone. According to one of the most widely shared details from the famous list of facts published by mattress firm’s blog on presidential sleeping habits. Drawing on historical accounts of the Kennedy White House routine, Jackie Kennedy joined her husband for the afternoon nap so reliably that she arranged her schedule around it every single day.

 If she had an engagement that conflicted with the nap, the engagement was moved. The detail was significant for several reasons.  It placed the two of them in genuine daily proximity in a way that their otherwise separate morning schedules and separate bedrooms did not. Jackie stayed in bed until 9:00 and had her breakfast on a tray in her room while JFK ate in his own room and then went to the Oval Office.

 The hours between 9:00 in the morning and the afternoon nap were largely parallel rather than shared. The nap was the daily overlap, the scheduled time when they were in the same room together  doing the same thing. Jackie described the White House years in her oral history interview with Slesinger as the happiest time of her life  and she cited specifically the physical closeness of having JFK’s office in the same building of seeing him so many times a day.

 The afternoon nap was one of the daily mechanisms that produced that closeness. For a couple whose marriage was otherwise navigating genuine difficulty, the shared daily nap was, among other things, a scheduled interval of ordinary domestic togetherness  that neither of them apparently was willing to give up.

 Fact six, JFK took two hot baths every day as pain management.  The twice daily swimming was not the only water-based element of JFK’s medical routine. He also took two hot baths every day. One before the afternoon nap and one in the early evening before dinner, specifically to manage the back pain that was a constant background condition of his presidency.

The baths were documented in multiple sources including the Sattva presidential sleep habits research and the Kendra Kenisonson biography of Kennedy’s daily discipline. Hot water therapy for spinal conditions was a wellestablished treatment approach  in the 1960s and Dr. Gravel incorporated it into Kennedy’s daily protocol alongside the swimming, the rocking chair, the back brace, and the targeted exercise sessions with Dr.

Krauss. The heat relaxed the muscle spasm around the damaged vertebrae, providing temporary relief from the chronic pain that Kennedy managed without complaint and  largely without public acknowledgement throughout his presidency. Kennedy’s stoicism about the pain was something Jackie noted directly in  her oral history sessions and something Richard Donahghue who participated in the JFK library forum on the oral history recordings specifically called out Kennedy did not complain about what was happening to him Donahghue said in

reference to the back condition he complained once Donahghue recalled about not having sufficient hot water to get a bath to relieve the pain  that was the extent of it the two daily baths were the quiet private infrastructure of of a functional presidency maintained by a man in serious physical difficulty who had decided that the difficulty was nobody’s business but his own.

 Fact seven. JFK smoked  four to five cigars every day and stockpiled 1,200 of them. Before a trade embargo, John Kennedy smoked between four and five cigars every day throughout his presidency, adding up to more than 4,000 cigars during his time in the White  House. According to the history facts account of surprising presidential daily habits, the cigar habit was not something he maintained publicly.

 It was a private daily ritual conducted in the residence and occasionally in the Oval Office that his staff was aware of and his public did not particularly discuss.  The most remarkable single expression of the habit came on the evening of February 6th, 1962, the night before Kennedy was scheduled to sign the executive order imposing a trade embargo on Cuba.

 Press Secretary Pierre Salinger has described in multiple accounts how Kennedy called him into the Oval Office that evening and asked him to acquire as many Cuban cigars as possible before  the embargo took effect at midnight. Salinger went out and returned with 1,200 premium Cuban cigars, specifically  H.

 Upman Pettit Upman’s, which were Kennedy’s preferred brand. Kennedy counted them, confirmed the number, and then signed the embargo order. The cigars were stored and used at the rate of his regular daily habit in the months that followed. The story has been told by Salinger in enough different contexts  and with enough consistent detail that it has become one of the better documented anecdotes of the Kennedy administration.

 It captured something real about Kennedy as a personality, the practical calculation, the humor about the situation, and the willingness  to do something mildly absurd in service of a genuine personal preference. He was about to make Cuban goods illegal to import into the United States. He made sure he was personally stocked first. Fact eight.

 Jackie wrote all her household instructions to the chef in French to keep her language sharp. Among the items auctioned through RR auction in July of 2023 were handwritten household notes  Jackie Kennedy had composed for her personal chef and housekeeper. The notes covered meal preparations, dietary specifications, and grocery preferences.

What the auction house highlighted alongside the content was the language in which a significant portion of them were written. French. Jackie wrote her household instructions in French deliberately as a daily exercise to maintain the fluency she had built during her year at the Sorbone in Paris in 1949 and through her French literature degree from George Washington University in 1951.

 Rather than treating the language as something she practiced during dedicated study time, she built it into the daily domestic management of her household. The grocery list became a  language lesson. The meal specification became a vocabulary exercise. The instruction to the chef became a small daily act of cultural maintenance.

  She also communicated with White House chef Renee Verdon entirely in French. Verdon, who had trained in Paris and Doville before immigrating to the United States, was more comfortable in his native language.  and Jackie’s fluency meant their kitchen conversations required no translation.

 The two of them discussed state dinner  menus, preparation techniques, and food presentation in French in the White House kitchen. As a matter of daily professional routine, the habit was consistent with everything else Jackie did.  She identified what she wanted to maintain, built the maintenance into the texture of her ordinary daily life,  and kept it there without ceremony or announcement.

Fact N. JFK read books  in the bathtub, at the table, and while walking down hallways, Jackie Kennedy’s description of her husband’s reading habits, preserved in the 1964 oral history interview that is now displayed as part of the JFK libraryies permanent exhibit in her voice remains one of the most vivid  portraits of JFK as a private person in the historical record.

She told Arthur Schlesinger that JFK read in the strangest way, that he would read walking, he would read at the table at meals, he would read after dinner, he would read in the bathtub, he would prop open a book on his bureau while he was doing his Thai. The JFK Libraries exhibit highlights the quote as central to understanding him as a person.

 He really read all the times you did not think you had time to read. The observation was not about a man who made time for reading by clearing his schedule. It was about a man who had restructured his relationship with time itself. Filling the interstitial moments that most people experience as transition, walking to a meeting, finishing a meal, getting dressed, with reading that was continuous and absorbing.

 Kennedy had kept notebooks of quotations since he was a young man, a habit passed down from his mother, Rose, who kept detailed note cards on each of her children from birth. He was the first president to invite a poet to recite at an inaugural ceremony, asking Robert Frost to read at his inauguration in 1961.

 In Schlesinger’s oral history sessions, Jackie described how she would be sitting next to him at some event and suddenly out would come in one of his speeches in a sentence that two weeks before in Georgetown he had read aloud to her one night because it interested him. He read everything, remembered everything, and used everything.

  Fact 10. JFK’s valressed him for the last time in a coffin and hid his monogram. George E.  Thomas had worked for John Kennedy since 1947 when JFK was a first-term congressman and Thomas was recommended to him by journalist Arthur Croc through a connection to the Kennedy family. He moved into the White House in January of 1961 and lived on the third floor.

 He was on constant call because his employer changed clothes up to four times a day. He traveled with Kennedy everywhere,  including to Vienna for the summit with Cruchef and to Dallas on November 22nd, 1963. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, the task of choosing JFK’s funeral clothing fell to his longtime aid, Dave Powers.

 Powers sought help from Thomas, and together they narrowed the options to eight suits with all necessary accessories and four pairs of shoes. When the shirt was selected, it carried a monogram. Thomas reminded Powers that Kennedy had a particular dislike of flashy or visible monograms. The suit jacket was arranged to conceal the initials.

 And then  Thomas performed the last personal act of a 16-year relationship. He folded Kennedy’s pocket handkerchief and slipped it into the jacket pocket precisely as he always had with the monogram turned inward and hidden. Thomas continued to live in Washington after Kennedy’s death. He worked as a confidential aid to chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation until he retired in 1978.

 He died in 1980 at the age of 72  largely unrecognized outside his small hometown of Berryville, Virginia, and the household  he had served for 16 years. The last joke Kennedy ever made, stepping off Air Force One into the Dallas sunlight just hours before he was shot, had been directed at Thomas. You know, George JFK told him, “I think this is a bigger town than you come from.

” It was the last conversation they ever had. Fact 11. Jackie kept her breakfast ritual identical every single day regardless of what was happening. While JFK’s morning began with six newspapers and a medically calibrated  breakfast eaten at the table in his room at a/4 to 8, Jackie’s morning began later and more quietly.

 She stayed in bed until around 9:00, receiving her breakfast on a tray brought by a butler. The tray held the same items every morning. orange juice, coffee with skim milk, toast, and a 4-minute soft-boiled egg. Nothing varied. Nothing was added or substituted  based on what the day held.

 The consistency was documented in her handwritten notes to the household chef, which specified the items and their preparation in precise detail. The egg was 4 minutes, not three, and not five. The coffee was with skim milk, not cream,  and not whole milk. The toast carried specific preparation requirements. Every element of the morning tray was fixed in writing, transmitted to the kitchen in advance,  and expected to arrive in the same form every time.

 The ritual was the private opening of a day that would often involve state level decisions,  management of the White House restoration, supervision of the children’s schedule, and the sustained performance of being Jaclyn Kennedy in public. She protected the morning tray with the same instinct she brought to every other aspect of her private life. It was hers.

  It was consistent. And it happened in a room where nobody could observe it. The breakfast in bed was not laziness.  It was the daily boundary between the private person who stayed in bed until 9 and the public person who stepped into the rest of it afterward. Fact 12. JFK could not bend over to put on his own shoes.

 The back brace that JFK wore daily was so restrictive that it prevented him from performing some of the most basic acts of self-care. According to the University of Virginia’s Miller Center research on George Thomas, Kennedy was a man who had a bad back and could not even bend over to put on his own shoes. Thomas helped him dress in the morning and undress in the evening everyday for 16 years.

 The physical limitation was kept entirely out of the public record. JFK’s image was built substantially on youth, vigor, and physical vitality. He had won the presidency at 43 against a man who looked older and more tired. And his administration had deliberately cultivated the impression of a young, energetic leader at the peak of his physical capacity.

 The reality was a man who could not tie his own shoes without pain, who required a valet to help him into a back brace each morning, who swam twice a day and bathed twice a day to manage an injury that the public was never told the full extent of. The back condition had been documented and concealed across multiple levels. His Addison’s  disease, a condition affecting the adrenal glands, was also kept from the public throughout his political career.

 The cortisone shots he received daily for the Addison’s  disease. As presidential historian Mark Updrove noted in the book, Incomparable Grace,  had the side effect of increasing his sexual drive, which his aids and associates were aware of, and his public was not. The physical reality of John Kennedy’s daily life  was in almost every dimension dramatically different from the image his administration presented.

 George Thomas was one of the very few people who knew the full picture and he never wrote about it. Fact 13. Jackie’s daily schedule was built around the children’s lunch and JFK’s afternoon nap. Despite the scale of what Jackie Kennedy was managing as first lady,  the two anchors around which her daily schedule was organized were domestic rather than official.

 The first was lunch with her children. The second was the afternoon nap with JFK. Both were treated as commitments that other things moved around rather than things that moved around other commitments. Her personal physician confirmed that Jackie kept to the children’s lunch even when her own plate consisted of just an apple. The White House school she had established in the third floor salarium for Caroline and the children of White House staff members had a schedule that she monitored closely.

 She was present for bedtime whenever the evening schedule allowed it. The children’s daily routine was the backbone of her day in a way that the restoration meetings and correspondence with foreign dignitaries were not. And she said so directly. If you bungle raising your children, she told People magazine years later. She did not think whatever else you did well would matter very much.

 The nap arrangement described earlier in this video meant that the middle of each afternoon was reserved for time with her husband. Two people whose marriage was carrying real weight navigated it partly through this daily scheduled unhurried proximity  in the middle of a 12-hour working day.

 The household staff knew not to interrupt. Nobody went upstairs. for 1 to two hours every afternoon in the White House. The president and the  first lady were simply asleep in the same building, which was in the context of everything else going on around them one of the quieter and more human things the historical  record captures about the people they actually were. Fact 14.

JFK read books propped on his bureau while getting dressed. Jackie’s description of JFK’s reading habits included one detail that has stayed in the memory of everyone who has encountered it since the oral history was released in 2011. He would prop open a book on his bureau while he was doing his tie.

 He would read a little of it in the fragments of time between the tasks of getting dressed, catching sentences in the 30 seconds it took to knot his tie. Returning to it in the seconds before picking up his jacket, treating the bureau surface as a reading stand for the moments when his hands were occupied with something else. The image was one that Jackie clearly found both characteristic and  revealing.

She described it to Schlesinger without apparent irritation or admiration, simply as an accurate observation about how JFK was built. He could not be in a room with a book without opening it.  He could not have a free minute without filling it with reading. And anything he read, she added that he wanted to remember, he could always remember.

 The retention was complete enough that she would be sitting next to him on a public platform and hear him use in a speech, a sentence he had read aloud to her in Georgetown two weeks before because it had interested him. JFK had described his own relationship with politics in a quote he used repeatedly. He saw how ideally politics filled the Greek definition of happiness which he described as a full use of one’s powers along lines of excellence in a lifefording scope.

 The reading habit was the daily expression of the same  instinct. The bureau, the bathtub, the dinner table, the hallway, all became reading opportunities for a man who had decided that the fullest possible use of every available minute was simply the correct way to live.  Fact 15.

 Both of them called the White House years the happiest time. Despite everything, the daily habits documented in this video were the habits of two people managing an extraordinary amount simultaneously. JFK was managing a chronic serious physical condition, a pharmacological dependency on injections whose contents he did not fully understand, a marriage under strain, a cold war that came within days of becoming a nuclear exchange, and the daily demands of the most powerful office in the world.

 Jackie was managing a massive restoration project, the rearing of two small children, the performance of first lady on the world stage, and a marriage in which she was aware of more than she was supposed to know.  And yet, Jackie told Arthur Schlesinger in the spring of 1964, just months after the assassination, that the White House years were the happiest time of her life.

 She said it was really the happiest time and that it was when they were the closest. She said she had not realized at the time the physical closeness of having his office in the same building and seeing him so many times a day. JFK, for his part, never gave a formal accounting of what those years meant to him.  But the daily habits tell their own version of the story.

 The six newspapers and the four outfit changes and the twice daily swims and the two hot baths  and the four to five cigars and the books propped on the bureau and the nap that nobody was allowed to interrupt. All of it was the daily texture of a life lived with full intensity inside a building that was simultaneously a home, an office, a stage, and a medical facility.

He did not complain about the back pain. He read at every possible opportunity. He made sure he had 1,200 Cuban cigars before the embargo took effect, and every afternoon for 1 to two hours, the doors were closed, the phone calls were held,  and nobody went upstairs for any reason.

 The daily habits of JFK and Jackie were  taken together, a portrait of two people who had built very specific routines around very specific needs and were maintaining those routines with remarkable consistency inside one of the most scrutinized buildings on Earth. He read everything, swam twice, napped deeply, changed four times, and stockpiled cigars against embargos.

 She stayed in bed until 9:00, wrote grocery lists in French, and arranged her entire afternoon around a 2-hour window when nobody was allowed to knock. The habits were hidden not because they were shameful, but because they were private, and privacy was the one thing both of them guarded most carefully of all. If this video gave you something to think about, leave a like and subscribe.

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