15 Weird Facts About JFK and Jackie’s Very Different Personalities HT

 

They looked perfect together. That was the thing everyone agreed on. From the moment they appeared in public as a couple in the early 1950s to the last photographs taken in Dallas on the morning of November 22nd, 1963, the dark-haired senator and his elegant young wife, the wit  and the composure, the energy and the stillness, they looked like they had been designed to stand beside each other.

What the cameras could not show was how genuinely, fundamentally different they were as people. Not different in the way that opposites attract, though there was some of that, but different in ways that ran so deep they shaped everything about how the marriage worked, how the White House functioned, how they each experienced the same events, and how they remembered the same years.

 He was restless. She was still. He needed people constantly around him. She needed long stretches of solitude to function. >>  >> He processed the world out loud, at speed, in company. She processed it privately, on paper, in silence.  He was physically incapable of being bored.

 She was capable of a quality of focused attention that people who witnessed it described as almost otherworldly. The differences created friction. They also created, in the specific crucible of the White House years and the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the thousand days they spent in the same building doing the most consequential work either of them would ever do, something that neither of them had fully expected when the arrangement began.

The oral history that Jackie recorded 4 months after Dallas and sealed for 50 years is, among other things, a document of a person slowly understanding that the person they had married for complicated reasons had become,  against all odds and against the logic of how it had started, the person  they could not imagine living without.

 Here are 15 weird facts about how different they were, what those differences produced, and what they ultimately meant. Fact one. He needed constant company. She needed solitude to survive. John Kennedy was not a person who was comfortable alone. The people who knew him well across his life from his school years at Choate and his time at Harvard, through the congressional and Senate years >>  >> and into the presidency, described a man who wanted people around him essentially all the time.

He wanted the room full. He wanted conversation. He wanted movement  and noise and the specific energy that came from being among people who were engaged with the same things he was  engaged with. He had been this way since childhood. Partly because the Kennedy household was itself a form of controlled chaos, nine children, constant guests, a father who ran the family like a competitive enterprise, and partly because his own temperament simply required stimulation the way other people required quiet. He

got bored easily and he did not manage boredom well.  The people around him learned to keep the environment active because the alternative, a quiet room with not enough happening, produced a restlessness in JFK that was uncomfortable to witness. Jackie  Kennedy was the opposite of this in almost every measurable way.

She needed quiet the way other people needed oxygen. She read for hours in complete silence. She painted. She took long solitary walks. She could spend an entire afternoon alone in a room with a book and emerge from it rested and restored in a way that no amount of social engagement produced in her. The White House years, with their relentless public schedule  and constant stream of visitors and events, were in some ways the most socially demanding years of her life, and she managed them by finding and protecting pockets of

solitude wherever she could. The contrast meant that the same household could feel, depending on which of them you were, either perfectly energized or completely overwhelming. He wanted the doors open and the room full. She wanted the doors closed and the room  quiet. They had built a life that was structurally more his than hers.

 In this  regard, she managed it. But the management cost her something, and the people who watched her closely could see the cost in the way she moved toward the exits at the end of the long evenings when the guests finally left. Fact two. He processed everything out loud. She processed everything  on paper. One of the most striking things about reading the accounts of people  who spent serious time with both Kennedys is how different their modes of thinking were. John Kennedy thought by talking.

He processed new information by arguing  about it, by testing it against other people’s reactions, by stating a position and seeing what came back. His aides described  meetings in which he would take a position at the start and a completely different position by the end, not because he was unstable, but because the conversation had been the thinking and the thinking had moved him somewhere new.

 This was exciting and occasionally exhausting to be around. >>  >> You never quite knew which JFK you were getting because he himself did not always know until the room  started talking. Jackie Kennedy thought by writing. She had kept journals since girlhood. She wrote letters the way other people had conversations, long, specific, carefully constructed letters that were clearly the place where she worked out what she actually thought about whatever she was dealing with.

 The biographers who studied her correspondence noted that the letters written during difficult periods were often more emotionally precise than anything she said to the same people in person >>  >> because the page gave her the space to find the exact thought that the conversation had only approximated. >>  >> She did not argue her way to conclusions.

 She wrote her way to them privately and then presented what she had arrived at. >>  >> This made her, in political terms, a more opaque partner than JFK’s other close advisers because you could not see the thinking as it happened. You only got the result. JFK, who needed the external argument to think, occasionally found this maddening.

 She was not withholding. She was simply working in a different medium and the medium was one he did not have full access  to. Fact three. He was indifferent to his surroundings. She was transformed by them. John Kennedy could sleep on an airplane, eat a bad meal without noticing, walk through a badly furnished room without registering it, >>  >> and function with equal energy and focus in a beautiful space and an ugly  one.

 The physical environment was, to him, largely irrelevant. What mattered was what was happening in the room, not what the room looked like. Jackie  Kennedy experienced physical space as acutely as some people experience music. The wrong room made her uncomfortable in a way she could not entirely suppress. The right room, the right proportions, the right light, the right objects placed in relation to each other produced in her something close to contentment that a good conversation or a well-run event produced in him.

 She had an almost neurological sensitivity to her surroundings and she had, from very early in her life, >>  >> responded to that sensitivity by becoming skilled at creating spaces that met her own standard. The White House restoration project, which she undertook in the first months of the administration and which produced the most significant transformation of the building’s  public spaces in the 20th century, was partly a cultural and historical project and partly  a deeply personal one.

She was going to live there. She could not live in what it had been. The restoration was the act of  making a place she could actually inhabit, and she brought to it the total attention of a person for whom the difference between a room that was right >>  >> and a room that was wrong was the difference between being able to function and not.

 JFK supported  the restoration. He was proud of the result. He also did not fully understand why it had mattered so urgently to her because the urgency came from a part of human experience that was simply not part of how he moved through the world. He lived inside his mind. She lived inside the physical world around her.

 The same room felt completely different depending on which of them was in it. Fact four. He was hilarious in company. She was quietly funny when she chose to be. John Kennedy’s humor was famous and it was genuine. >>  >> His press conferences were remarkable events partly because of the wit he deployed, the self-deprecating observations, the perfectly timed reversals, the historical references used for comic effect, the joke bank he maintained, partly with material from the comedian Mort Sahl who wrote for him, was real, but his closest aides

insisted  that his best lines were his own, that the original wit was faster and sharper than anything a writer produced for him. He was funny >>  >> in the way that certain people are funny who cannot help it, who see the absurdity in situations before they see anything else, who make the joke before they make the serious point, whose humor is the fastest expression of their intelligence.

 He was funny at press conferences, funny at dinner parties, funny in small groups, funny one-on-one. The people who worked for him remembered the humor as one of the most defining things  about being in the room with him. It changed the atmosphere. It made everything lighter. Jackie  Kennedy was funny in a completely different register.

 She was not performatively funny. She did not work a room with wit the way he did. Her humor was quieter, more private, more subversive, the kind that you caught if you were paying close attention and missed entirely if you were not. It appeared in her letters, which were often genuinely funny in a dry  and precise way that made the recipients red lines allowed to each other.

 It appeared in her oral history, in the Schlesinger recordings, in the careful observations she made about the political world around her with the detachment of someone who found the whole enterprise faintly absurd. She was also, by several accounts, very good at mimicry. She could reproduce voices and mannerisms with a sharpness that people who witnessed it found startling from someone who presented such composed surfaces in public.

 She did this only in very private settings,  for very small audiences, and then put it away. The humor was real. It was just not for general distribution. Fact five, he read everything quickly. She read everything slowly >>  >> and kept it. John Kennedy’s reading was famous for its speed.

 He had taken a speed reading course and could move through a document or a book at a pace that startled people who  watched him. He read newspapers several at a time processing the relevant sections at extraordinary speed >>  >> and retaining what mattered. He read memos on the way to meetings and was ready to discuss them before the meeting started.

 The reading was fast, efficient and comprehensive in a way that seemed impossible until you watched it happen. Jackie Kennedy read slowly and with total absorption. She read the way she did everything that she considered worth doing completely  with full attention at the pace the material required rather than the pace her schedule demanded.

>>  >> She read in the bathtub. She read at her desk. She read late at night. She read the same books multiple times which JFK almost never did because having read something once he retained it well enough that the second reading felt redundant. She kept the books. Her personal library was extensive and carefully organized full of volumes that had been read  and marked and returned to.

 Books were objects to her in a way they were not to him. Things with physical  presence and history. Things you kept and lived with rather than processed and moved past. Her editors at Doubleday noted that her knowledge of the book she had worked on years after publication was often more detailed than the author’s own.

 She had read them slowly enough to keep them. The difference in how they read reflect something deeper about how they each processed  time. He was always moving toward the next thing. She was always trying to be fully inside the thing she was in. The same newspaper at breakfast was for him 10 minutes of rapid acquisition and for her a slower engagement with two or three pieces that actually interested her.

 They were both intelligent thoroughly. But the intelligence moved differently. Fact six, >>  >> he was physically fearless. She was privately cautious. John Kennedy’s relationship with physical risk was complicated by the fact that his body had been failing him in various ways for most of his adult life. The back problems, the Addison’s disease, >>  >> the chronic pain he managed with a medical regimen that he concealed from the public completely.

 He was a man in genuine and significant physical distress for much of his presidency  and he moved through the world as though none of it was happening. The fearlessness was not bravado. It was something more fundamental. A genuine orientation toward action that had been present since his childhood reinforced by the war, >>  >> by the naval rescue operation after PT 109, by the simple fact of having faced serious physical danger and come through  it.

He had been sick and injured most of his life and he had not stopped doing things because of it. The fear, if it existed, had been managed into something that looked from the outside like the absence of fear entirely. >>  >> Jackie Kennedy’s caution expressed itself differently and in different domains.

 She was a competent equestrian who nonetheless rode with awareness of risk. She was a careful manager of her children’s physical  safety in ways that JFK, who had been raised in a household that treated minor injuries as unremarkable, did not always match. She was alert to danger in social and political situations. The oral history reveals a woman who had been paying close attention to the threats around her husband in the years before Dallas and who had registered a quality of menace >>  >> in certain environments that the people

responsible for his security had not fully registered.  She was not timid. She had after all refused to leave the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis and told her husband she would rather die on the lawn than survive in a shelter without him. The caution was not about her own safety particularly.

 It was about the people she was responsible for and about the situation she could see were dangerous before others could see it. She read the room for threat in a way that he, who moved through every room as though it were friendly territory, did not. Fact seven, he needed  very little sleep. She needed and valued it deeply.

 John Kennedy famously functioned on less sleep than almost anyone around him. Four or five hours was sufficient on most nights. He was awake early moving through the day at the pace that his restless intelligence required and not visibly depleted by the hours he had not spent sleeping. His medical situation required twice daily swims  and baths to manage the pain.

And the nap was a genuine medical necessity as much as a preference. But the overall volume of sleep he needed was simply lower than average. Jackie Kennedy valued sleep the way she valued every other form of genuine restoration completely  and without apology. She was not a person who wore sleeplessness as a badge of productivity the way that certain political environments encouraged.

 She went to bed when she needed to go to bed. She protected the children’s sleep schedules with the same seriousness she brought to everything involving the children. She understood in a way that the culture around her often did not that the quality of her attention and her functioning was directly connected to whether she had slept adequately.

 This created in the White House years a household with two very different rhythms. He was up early  and moving. She was up later with the children’s morning routines taking priority over any immediate dive into the day’s  news. He wanted the newspapers and the intelligence briefings at first light. She wanted the morning to belong to the domestic life before the political life asserted itself.

 The Cuban Missile Crisis collapsed  this entirely. There was, in her words, no day or night for 13 days. She stayed beside him when he came upstairs, slept when he slept, was awake when he was awake. And the ordinary structure of the household dissolved into the continuous emergency of the fortnight. >>  >> It was the one period in the White House years when the two rhythms became one not by negotiation or compromise but by the simple fact that the stakes were too high for the ordinary structure to hold.

Fact eight, he was deeply social with everyone. She was deeply social with very few people. The warmth John Kennedy projected in public was genuine and it was not limited to the formal performances that public life required. He was interested in people and taxi drivers and senators  and foreign dignitaries and the kitchen staff and the journalists who covered him and the aids who worked for him.

>>  >> He remembered names. He asked questions and listened to the answers. He had the quality that great politicians have of making the person in front of them feel briefly and convincingly  like the most important person in the room. This was not manipulation exactly. It was genuine curiosity broadly applied.

 He was interested in people the way he was interested in ideas promiscuously, energetically without the hierarchy that said some people were worth being curious about and others were not. Jackie Kennedy’s social warmth was narrower and within its narrowness considerably deeper. She was not interested in large numbers of people. >>  >> She was intensely interested in very small numbers of people and within those relationships she gave a quality of attention that the recipients described as one of the most remarkable things they had ever experienced.

>>  >> Her close friend said she remembered everything, every conversation, every detail you had mentioned about your life, every book you had told her you were reading months ago. She followed up. She paid attention. She was, in the concentrated beam of her interest, more present than almost anyone they had ever known.

The difference meant  that state dinners and large social events were experientially completely different for each of them. He was energized by the room full of people. She was managing the room full of people doing it well and with visible warmth but ultimately waiting for the moment when it was over and she could be with the three or four people she actually wanted to be with.

He collected people. She selected them. Both approaches were genuine. They simply operated on entirely different scales. Fact nine, he was competitive about everything. She was competitive about almost nothing. The Kennedy family competitiveness was institutional and  it was intense. The children had been raised in a household where winning was the default expectation and losing required explanation.

 The football games on the lawn at Hyannis Port were not casual. The sailing races were not casual. The dinner table arguments were not casual. Everything was, to some degree, a contest >>  >> and you were expected to approach every contest with the intention of winning it. JFK had absorbed this completely. He was competitive about politics obviously but also about everything else.

 The touch football games, the sailing, the physical challenges, the speed reading, the first to get the joke. The competitiveness was so ingrained that the people around him sometimes could not tell where the natural inclination ended >>  >> and the family conditioning began. It was simply how he was oriented. Jackie Kennedy had not been raised this way and she was not this way.

She was not competitive in any of the domains the Kennedy family treated as contests. She did not race to win. >>  >> She did not argue to prevail. She had no interest in the athletic competitions that consumed the Kennedy siblings and cousins. >>  >> She was the one person in the family who had arrived from outside the competitive structure >>  >> and who neither adopted it nor resented it but simply declined to participate in it on its own terms.

 She competed in other ways. The White House restoration, the management of the family’s historical legacy, the building of the Camelot narrative. But these were competitions she ran internally against her own standards not against other people. She did not need to beat anyone.  She needed to do the thing right. The distinction was one that the Kennedy family did not fully understand and that she never fully explained.

 She simply did not play the game and she was secure enough in who she was that the not playing never looked like losing. Fact 10, he hated being alone with his thoughts.  She sought it. The twice daily naps that JFK took during the White House years >>  >> were not, by the accounts of the people who observed his household, periods of genuine solitude in the way that the word solitude implies.

  He came upstairs. He rested. He slept briefly and then he was back in the world, back in the conversation, back in the room, the rest was physical. >>  >> It was not the kind of inward quiet that certain people require in order to know what they actually think  and feel.

 He did not, as far as the record shows, spend significant time alone with his thoughts by preference. >>  >> The thinking happened in conversation. The processing happened in the presence of other people. When things were very bad after the Bay of Pigs, during the worst periods of the missile crisis, >>  >> he wept with Jackie in private.

Which was itself a form of not being alone. Because she was there, and her presence was what made the private grief bearable. Jackie Kennedy sought solitude the way he sought company consistently, instinctively, as a basic need rather than a preference. She needed time alone  in order to understand what she thought and felt.

The letters, the journals, the long solitary walks, the hours in a room with a book. These were not leisure activities. They were the mechanism by which she processed experience. Without them, she did not know what she actually thought about the things that were happening to her.

 The White House years gave her less solitude than any period of her adult life, and the oral history she recorded afterward, the long and candid conversations with Schlesinger in the spring of 1964, may have functioned partly as a substitute for the private processing that the preceding 3 years had not permitted. She finally had a room and a recorder and a sympathetic listener and time to say what she had observed and felt >>  >> and thought across those thousand days.

She used it fully. It was, among other things, the solitude she had not been able to have while she was living it. >>  >> Fact 11. He lived entirely in the present. She lived in the past and the future simultaneously. John Kennedy’s relationship with time was almost entirely present tense. He was engaged with what was happening now, >>  >> what needed to be decided today, what the current situation required.

 The historical references he deployed so fluently in speeches and conversation were not evidence of living in the past. >>  >> They were tools brought forward into the present and applied to current problems, and then set down again. He used history. He did not dwell in it. >>  >> He was also not, by temperament, a person who worried about the future in the private ruminative way that some people worry.

 He had a politician’s relationship with the future. It was something to be shaped and managed through action in the present. Anxiety about what might happen was not a particularly useful tool for him, and he did not spend much time with it. Jackie Kennedy lived in time differently. She was a person with a strong and active historical sense, not just about grand historical events, but about the specific history of her own life, the precise texture of particular moments, the exact quality of a conversation or an afternoon or a period.

Her memory was detailed and specific  in a way that people around her found remarkable. She remembered how rooms had smelled and what people had been wearing and the specific words that had been used in conversations years before. She was also a person who thought about the future with a kind of long-range seriousness that his present tense orientation did not match.

 The sealing of the oral history for 50 years, the management of the historical record after Dallas, >>  >> the instructions to her children about what to say after she was gone. These were the actions of a person who was thinking in decades and generations rather than in news cycles and political  terms.

 She was building things meant to last. He was managing what was in front of him. Both approaches were expressions of genuine intelligence. They simply operated in completely different temporal registers. >>  >> Fact 12. He was careless with secrets. She was a vault. John Kennedy’s personal habits in the White House were not, by any reasonable standard, discreet.

 The affairs were conducted with a casualness that was remarkable given the scale of the surveillance apparatus surrounding the presidency, the pool parties in the White House with women who were not his wife, the use of staff to facilitate arrangements, the assumption that the Secret Service would manage the situation without incident.

 This was not the behavior of a man with a finely developed sense of operational security about his personal life. He was also, in his professional capacity, a man whose most private thoughts ended up in the rooms of the people he trusted most, because thinking out loud was how he thought, and thinking out loud is inherently permeable.

 His aids knew where he actually stood on things before the official position had been determined. His closest friends knew the private assessment of foreign leaders and domestic political figures that never appeared in any official document. He trusted people with what he knew, and the people he trusted held it, but the information moved because he needed it to move in order  to think.

Jackie Kennedy operated in the opposite register. She was, by the accounts of everyone who was close to her, extraordinarily careful with information. She did not repeat things she had been told in confidence. She did not share what she knew about people beyond what the situation required. The oral  history, sealed for 50 years, was the most complete act of information management in her life.

She said what she needed to say, and she controlled exactly when it would become available.  The people who worked for her understood that what happened in her household stayed  there. The informant she had placed in JFK’s office was not a contradiction of this. She was gathering information into a vault that only she controlled.

What came in stayed in. What went out, she decided. The asymmetry between them on this dimension was almost total. And it meant that the private life of the Kennedy marriage was, to a very significant degree, >>  >> held by one person, the one who never talked. Fact 13. He was  at his best in crisis.

She was at her best in the long game. The Cuban missile crisis produced  in John Kennedy something that the people around him described as a kind of clarification. The urgent, active, world-historical stakes of the situation were exactly the conditions under which he functioned at his highest level.

 The need for quick analysis, decisive action, the management of competing advisers, the poker game with the Soviet Union he had been, in some essential way, >>  >> built for exactly this. His brother, Robert Kennedy, wrote afterward that he had never seen anyone under that kind of pressure maintain that quality of judgment.

 The crisis brought out the best of him. Jackie Kennedy’s great performances were different in nature. They were not the performances of the acute moment, but of the sustained effort across time. The White House restoration took 2 years of relentless work committee management, fundraising, historical research, design decisions, political negotiation, the management of the Kennedy legacy after Dallas, which she began 9 days after the assassination and continued for the rest of her life, was a decades-long project of extraordinary precision.

The decision to seal the oral history for 50 years was a move that would not pay off for longer than she would live to see. >>  >> She did not shine in the acute crisis the way he did. The Dallas footage of her in the immediate  aftermath, the pink suit, the swearing-in, the composition was remarkable, but it was remarkable in a different way from his performance in the ExComm meetings.

 She was enduring. He was deciding. Both are forms of strength, but they are not the same form. Together, in the White House years, they covered the full spectrum. His capacity for decisive action in the acute moment and her capacity for the sustained patient management of consequences that extended far beyond the moment.

 The partnership was not always easy, >>  >> and it was not always equal. But in terms of what each of them brought to the enterprise, it was, without either of them fully designing it that way, remarkably  complete. Fact 14. He was optimistic by nature. She was realistic by training. John Kennedy’s public optimism was genuine, >>  >> and it was not merely performance.

 The ask not what your country can do for you was not a piece of political theater disconnected from how he actually saw the world. He believed in the capacity for progress. He believed that problems had solutions and that the right combination of intelligence and political will could find them.

 He had a fundamental orientation toward what was possible that shaped everything from his domestic policy to his management  of the missile crisis. The optimism coexisted with a dark wit and a realistic assessment of human nature. He was not naive, but the default setting, the place he returned to when the situation was ambiguous, was something close to hope.

Jackie Kennedy’s default setting was more complicated. >>  >> She had grown up watching her father, brilliant and charming and chronically self-destructive, and the lesson she had taken from that observation was not a simple one. She had watched a man with every advantage consistently fail to use them.

She had watched charm operate as a substitute for character. She had learned, earlier than most people learn it, that the gap between what people presented and what they were was often large and worth tracking. She was not cynical. The oral history is full of genuine admiration for JFK’s intelligence, his courage, his management of the missile crisis, his instincts about history and his own place in it.

 The admiration was real, and it was earned. But she held it alongside a realism about human nature that his optimism did not always accommodate. She saw what he was. She loved what he was. She was not confused about the gap between the two things. The combination of his optimism and her realism produced, in their best conversations, the dinner party recording, the South Lawn walks during the missile crisis, >>  >> the evenings in the White House residence when the public schedule was over something more complete than either of them arrived at alone. He pushed

toward what was possible. She kept track of what was true. The marriage, at its best, was the conversation between those two orientations. Fact 15.  They were different enough that it should not have worked, and close enough that at the end, she could not imagine >>  >> anything else. The arrangement had been practical from the beginning. Joe Kennedy Sr.

 had wanted a wife for his son who was socially acceptable, photogenic, and intelligent enough not to embarrass the family. >>  >> Jackie’s mother had wanted a husband for her daughter who was wealthy, prominent, and capable of providing the kind of establishment life that Janet Auchincloss considered the appropriate destination for a woman of her daughter’s background.

 The wedding in 1953 was, by the honest account of several people close to both families, as much a transaction as a romance. What neither family had calculated was what would happen when two people this different, this  intelligent, and this fundamentally committed to their own authentic selves, spent enough time together in enough significant situations to actually know each other.

He came to depend on her in ways that surprised the people around him. When the Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba, his first call was not to his chief of staff or his national security adviser or his brother. It was to Jackie.  He told her to bring the children and come home. He wanted her there.

 Across the 13 days that followed, he looked to her for the specific form of steadiness that she alone provided, not the political counsel of his advisers or the brotherly solidarity of Robert, but the presence of the one person whose judgment of him was both completely honest and completely on his side. She had come to love him in a way that,  by the time of Dallas, had reordered everything she thought she understood about herself and about the marriage.

 The oral history she recorded 4 months after his death is not the document of a woman performing widowhood. It is the document of a woman who had lost the person who had become, despite all the early reasons to think otherwise, the organizing fact of her life. She said the White House years were the happiest time of her life. She said the Cuban missile crisis was the time she had felt most close to him.

 She said those things having full knowledge of everything the marriage had been, the affairs, the distance, the arranged beginning, the black hole she said she could never look down into. Both things were true. The differences were real, and they were permanent, and they never fully resolved. And the closeness was also real, and it had grown out of the differences rather than despite them.

 Because the two people this different had spent a thousand days in the same building doing consequential work, and had found,  in the negotiation between his temperament and hers, something that neither of them had fully expected. And that neither of them could have found with anyone more like themselves.

 She was buried beside him at Arlington in 1994. She had told her daughter not to grieve. She said she expected to be with him. She had loved a man almost entirely unlike her. She had built her life around it. She had never, in the end, found any reason to regret it. If this video gave you something to think about, leave a like and subscribe.

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