The photograph showed a woman of almost   impossible composure, dark hair,    white gloves, a smile that gave nothing   away. The world watched Jackie Kennedy   and saw elegance so complete it looked   like armor. She was photographed at    state dinners and on the steps   of Air Force One and beside her husband   at a thousand events,    always precise, always controlled,   always performing  exactly what   the moment required of her.

 

 What the   photographs never showed was what she   was doing in the hours and years the   cameras were not pointed at her.    They never showed her burning a private   diary before she died so no one could   read it. They never showed her refusing   to  change out of a blood soaked   pink suit for 14 hours because she   wanted the world to see what had been   done.

 

 They never  showed her   telling a journalist she had no self   anymore or secretly arranging for   information from her husband’s office to   be passed to her or designing the    state funeral herself from   inside her grief. organizing every   detail with the precision of a woman who   knew exactly what she was doing while   her world was ending.

 

  Here are   15 weird facts about the private side of   Jackie Kennedy that the cameras never    captured. Fact one, she refused   to change out of the pink suit for 14   hours. On the  afternoon of   November 22nd, 1963,   Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the 36th   president of the United States aboard    Air Force 1 on the tarmac at   Dallas Love Field.

 

 Jackie Kennedy stood   beside him for the photograph. She was   still  wearing the pink Chanel   suit she had put on that morning in Fort   Worth. It was soaked in her husband’s   blood. She had been asked gently and   then more directly whether she wanted to    change clothes before the   swearing in. She said no.

 

 She said, “I   want them to see what they have done.”   She wore the suit for the rest of the   flight back to Washington. She wore it   when  she accompanied the casket   off the plane. She wore it for 14 hours   in total. The aid who had asked her to   change later wrote that Jackie had made   the same statement more than once,    not as grief, but as a   deliberate decision.

 

 She wanted the   image to exist. She wanted the record to   show what the afternoon had looked    like from where she had been   sitting. The suit was eventually folded   and given to her mother, who stored it   in a box. It has never been    publicly displayed. It sits in the   National Archives in the condition it   was in when Jackie finally took it off.

  She had made it a document    before anyone else thought to. Fact two,   she kept a private diary that    she burned before she died. Jackie   Kennedy was a writer from childhood. She   kept journals at  Basser and at   Miss Porter school. She wrote poetry   that she showed almost no one.

 

 She won a   vote writing contest at 21 with an essay   so  good the magazine offered her   a full-time position in Paris. and she   accepted it before her mother called her   home. She wrote letters that read like   literature.  The people who   received them kept them because they   were that good.

 

 And across various    periods of her adult life, she   kept a private diary, one she considered   genuinely private, meaning not intended   for any archive or future reader. Before   she died in May of 1994, she destroyed   it. No one who knew her well was   surprised. She had spent her entire   adult life managing what the public was   permitted to see, and she applied the   same precision to the historical record.

 

  The biographer Sarah Bradford, who   interviewed dozens of people close to   Jackie, believed the journals contained   the one version of her that none of the   public accounts had ever fully captured.   Not composed, not performing, not   managing anything, just the woman   underneath all of it. The performance   never stopped in public.

 

 The diary may   have been the one place it did. FAC3.   She installed an informant in JFK’s   office. Evelyn Lincoln was John   Kennedy’s personal secretary, and she   was loyal to him in the complete and   total way that a  great personal   secretary is loyal to the person they   work for. She was not, however, loyal   only to JFK.

 

 Jackie Kennedy had an   arrangement with Lincoln. Information   from the West Wing reached Jackie   through channels JFK had not   established, who visited the office, how   long they stayed, what the schedule   looked like, what happened after certain   meetings. Some of this found its way to   Jackie  through Lincoln. The   arrangement was practical rather than   theatrical in its origins.

 

 Jackie had   reasons to want information,    and she had found a reliable way to get   it. JFK was aware enough of his general   situation to be occasionally careful   around certain people. But the specific   details of what Lincoln reported and   when remain only partially documented in   the historical record.

 

 What is clear is   this. Jackie Kennedy for all the   serenity she projected publicly was a   person who understood that information   was a form of control and she had   organized her situation quietly and   without any announcement to make sure   she had more of it than she was   officially supposed to. Fact four. She   told a journalist she had no self.

 

 After   Dallas 9 days after the assassination,   Jackie Kennedy agreed to one extended   interview. She gave it to Theodore White   of Life magazine from Hyannisport   because she wanted to establish the   Camelot narrative before anyone else   could define it. The interview worked   exactly as she intended.

 

 The mythology   it produced shaped how the Kennedy   presidency was understood for the next   60 years. what White recorded in his   private  notes, notes sealed,   until after Jackie’s death, was   something different. Wrote that she had   told him in the conversation surrounding   the formal interview that she did not   know who she was anymore.

 

 She said she   had been so entirely organized around   JFK’s life and career and needs    that when he was gone, she could not   find a clear sense of what remained. She   said in language White recorded but   chose not to publish at the time, “I   have no self.” The woman who had spent   years being described as one of the most   self-possessed people in American public   life had described the interior   experience as its precise opposite.

 

 She   had been a role. The role was over. What   was underneath it was something she was   still trying to find. Fact five. Her   closest friends said they never fully   knew her. The list of people who   considered themselves genuinely close to   Jackie Kennedy is not long  and   almost every account from that list   contains the same observation.

 

 Bunny   Melon, perhaps her closest female friend   across decades, said there were parts of   Jackie she had simply never accessed.   Tish Baldridge, her social secretary who   had known her since boarding school,   wrote in her memoir that Jackie had a   room inside her that no one was invited   into.

 

  The journalist, George   Plimpmpton, said something similar. The   painter, William Walton, one of JFK’s   closest friends who remained close to   Jackie after the assassination, told a   biographer that she revealed herself in   pieces and withheld the rest without any   visible effort. These were not casual   acquaintances.

 

 These were her closest   friends  across 30 and 40 years.   And they were all describing the same   thing. A woman who was  present,   warm, engaged, and simultaneously not   fully there. Some essential part of her   was always behind glass. even with the   people she loved most. Her daughter   Caroline came closest to explaining it.

  She said her mother was a private   person, that the  privacy was   deliberate and complete, and that even   within the family, there were things   that simply were not discussed. The   armor was not just for the cameras. It   was the structure of the life. Fact    six, she spoke five languages   and translated sensitive documents for   the State Department.

 

 The public image   of Jackie Kennedy was for complicated   reasons frequently underestimated in   terms of raw intelligence. She was   beautiful.  She was stylish. And   those things tended to crowd out the   rest of the information. The rest of the   information included this. She spoke   French, Spanish, Italian, and Polish in   addition to English with French at near   native fluency from her year abroad and   [clears throat] her studies at the   Serban.

 

 She read and wrote in French    well enough to correspond with   Charles de Gaulle in his own language   and de Gaulle who was not easily moved   was visibly struck by her during the   White House years.  This was not   merely a social asset. She was   occasionally asked to review and   informally translate sensitive   diplomatic documents particularly around   the French-American relationship because   she was faster,  more precise,   and more attuned to nuance and tone than   the official State Department   translators. JFK trusted her judgment in   a way he did not trust the institutional   process. She had been absorbing   information about history and politics   and diplomacy since childhood. She had   specific considered views on all of it.   She kept them largely private in public.   In the oral history interviews she   recorded after Dallas. She did not. Fact   seven. She designed the Kennedy funeral   herself  in the middle of her   grief. By the time Air Force One landed

 

  at Andrews Air Force Base on the evening   of November 22nd, Jacqueline Kennedy had   already begun organizing the state   funeral. She had been on the plane for   the flight back from Dallas. She asked   for books about Lincoln’s funeral. She   had specific ideas forming and she began   communicating them before the plane   touched down.

 

 In the four days that   followed, she was the primary decision   maker for every significant element of   the ceremony.  The closed versus   open casket, the route of the   procession, the eternal flame at   Arlington, the decision to walk behind   the quesan rather than ride, the music,   the prayers. The people around her,   including Robert Kennedy and the White   House staff, were largely executing her   instructions.

 

 She was doing all of this   in acute shock while managing two small   children who had just lost their father   while receiving heads of state from   around the world. The historian who   studied the funeral planning most   closely wrote that the scale of what she   accomplished in those four days was   nearly incomprehensible given the   circumstances.

 

  She produced one of the most precisely   executed state ceremonies in American   history while living inside the worst   grief of her life. She said afterward   that she had wanted it to be right for   Jack. She made sure it was FACT8. She   was so private that even her children   said there were things never discussed.

 

  Caroline Kennedy was 5 years old when   her father was killed. John Kennedy Jr.   was three. Jackie Kennedy made a series   of deliberate decisions about how to   manage the assassination within the   family. And one of the most significant   was what she  chose not to say.   She did not in the years that followed   describe to her children what she had   witnessed in the motorcade.

 

 She did not   describe the 14 hours in the pink suit   or the flight back or the specific   nature of what she had seen. She did not   use her children as companions in her   grief. Even though the grief was total   and continuous, she kept the two things   entirely separate. She talked about   their father constantly.

 

  She   kept his memory present and specific.   She told them who he had been, what he   had believed, what he had loved. She   showed them photographs. She kept his   rocking chair. She just did not tell   them what she had seen. She said    many years later that she had not wanted   them to carry the specific images she   carried.

 

 She wanted them to have a   father in memory who was not defined by   the manner of his death. Whether she   succeeded is something only they could   answer.  She tried with   everything she had. Fact nine. She built   the Camelot myth deliberately and knew   exactly what she was doing. The word   Camelot was not an accident.

 

  It   was a choice and Jackie Kennedy made it   with the full understanding of what she   was building and why. In the Hyannis   Port interview with Theodore White 9   days after Dallas, she told him that   Jack had loved the learner and Loway   musical that he played the cast   recording on the gramophone at night   before bed  and that the final   lyric don’t let it be forgot that once   there was a spot for one brief shining   moment was how she wanted people to   remember his presidency.

 

 White, who   understood what she was giving him, used   it as the frame for his Life magazine   piece. The mythology was established   within 2 weeks of the assassination   before any other narrative could take   hold. What the private notes and later   accounts revealed was that Jackie was   entirely cleareyed about the operation.

 

  She knew she was constructing a legacy.   She knew the Camelot framing was partial   and romantic and would eventually be   challenged. She did it anyway because   she believed it was closer to the truth   of what JFK had meant  than   anything a more sober historical   accounting would produce in the   immediate aftermath.

 

 She was right that   it would be challenged. She was also   right that it stuck. She built it to   last and it did. Fact 10. She became a   serious book editor for 20 years and   refused to be treated as a celebrity.   After the assassination, after the White   House, after the years in New York,   Jacqueline Kennedy Onases became a   working book editor, she joined Viking   Press in 1975 and later moved to Double   Day where she worked for nearly two    decades until her death.

 

 She was   not an honorary editor or a prestige   acquisition. She was a working   professional who acquired books,   developed authors,    edited manuscripts, and showed up at the   office. Her colleagues at Double Day   described her as serious, demanding,    and entirely uninterested in   being treated as a spectacle.

 

 She took   the work seriously, and she expected the   same from everyone around her. She   worked on books about archaeology,   dance, Russian history,  and   Native American art. She championed   writers she believed in and pushed   projects she cared about through   institutional resistance.  She   was, by every account, from the people   who worked alongside her, exceptionally   good at it.

 

 She had been a first lady,   the most famous widow in the world. The   woman who had married Aristotle Onases   while the public reeled. And for the   last 20 years of her life, what she   wanted to be was a book editor. She   showed up. She did the work. She refused   to be anything else. Fact 11. She had a   complicated and largely hidden   relationship with her own fame.

 

 Jackie   Kennedy understood celebrity better than   almost anyone of her generation, which   makes sense because she helped invent   the modern version of it. She understood   that the image was a product, that it   could be shaped and managed and   deployed, and she managed hers with a   precision that later public figures   would spend careers trying to replicate.

 

  She also found the fame genuinely   unbearable in ways that she expressed   only to a very small number of people.   >>    >> She described being followed,   photographed, and watched as a kind of   violent. She moved to New York partly    to disappear into the city, to   be one person among millions, to walk on   the street without the event of her own   presence,  stopping everything   around her. She almost never succeeded.

 

  The photographers followed her to New   York. They followed her to Scorpios.   They followed her children. Ron Galella,   the paparazzo who made a career of   pursuing her, was the subject of a   restraining order she obtained after   years of legal effort. He violated it.   The surveillance never fully stopped.   She wrote in letters to friends that   what she wanted more than almost   anything was to be ordinary, to go   somewhere and not be recognized.

 

 To be   in a room where the room did not change   when she entered it. It happened rarely.   When it did, she described it as a kind   of relief so profound it was almost   physical. She had been one of the most   watched women in the world for 30 years.   Invisibility was the luxury she could   almost never  afford. FAC12.

 

  She was offered diplomatic posts after   Dallas and turned them all down. Lyndon   Johnson offered Jackie Kennedy a formal   diplomatic appointment after she had   established herself in New York   following the assassination. She   declined. Over the years that followed,   she was offered other roles positions   that would have given her a public   platform equivalent  to or   greater than the one she had occupied as   first lady. She declined those too.

 

 She   did not explain the refusals in great   detail to anyone who published what she   said. The people closest to her   understood the refusals as consistent   with a decision she had made in the   period immediately after Dallas. She was   not going to become a professional   widow.

 

 She was not going to organize her   public existence around being the keeper   of a legacy. However carefully she had   worked to establish that legacy in the   first place, she had done what she   needed to do. The Camelot interview, the   management of the historical record, the   funeral. Once those were accomplished,   she  intended to build a   different life.

 

 The different life was   books and privacy and her children and a   small circle of close friends and    late in her life a relationship   with Maurice Templesman that was by all   accounts genuinely happy and entirely   out of the public eye. She had been a   first lady. She chose not to perform   that identity for the remaining 30 years   of her existence. Fact 13.

 

 She wrote   poetry her entire life and almost none   of it has been published. The writing   ability that won her the Vogue Prize at   21 never stopped. She wrote poetry   across her entire adult life at the   White House in the years after Dallas   during the Onasis marriage in her   editing years right up until near the   end.

 

 She shared almost none of it   publicly. The poems she did share she   shared in letters to close friends   slipped in at the end of a  page   or enclosed separately with a note   asking the recipient not to pass them   along. Several survived because the   recipients kept them despite the   instruction. The ones that have been   described by people who read them were   by those accounts extremely good,   precise, unscentimental, formally   accomplished, nothing like what you   might expect from the woman.

 

 The public   image suggested she had been a writer   long before she was a first lady.    She remained a writer long   after. The public persona was   constructed partly from what she chose   to show and partly from what the world   decided to project onto her. The writing   was entirely hers, kept almost entirely   private, a record of the interior life   that the burned diary also contained and   that she was meticulous about   protecting.

 

 The version of Jackie   Kennedy that exists in the public record   is the one she allowed. The version in   the poems is the one she kept. Fact 14.   Her marriage to Onases was more   complicated than either the defense or   the condemnation.   Suggested when Jackie Kennedy married   Aristotle Onases in October of 1968, the   reaction in America was something close   to national betrayal.

 

 The widow who had   become the embodiment of dignified grief   had married a Greek shipping magnate 23   years her senior. a man who was by   multiple accounts difficult,   controlling, and already romantically   entangled with the opera singer Maria   Callas. What the reaction missed,   because the reaction was always about   what Jackie was doing to the public’s   idea of her rather than about Jackie   herself, was what she was actually   seeking.

 

 She told several close friends   in conversations that became part of the   biographical record after her death that   what she wanted from Onasses was safety.   She had watched her husband’s head   explode in her lap. She had received   death threats. Her brother-in-law,   Robert Kennedy, had been assassinated in   June of that same year, 68, 2 months   before she accepted Onasis’s proposal.

 

  She was afraid. Onasis was the richest   man she knew, and he had the resources   and the will to protect her and her   children in a way no one else could. The   marriage was not happy for most of its   duration. Onasis became cruel. He   reportedly showed visitors a copy of the   prenuptual agreement to demonstrate his   control over the arrangement.

 

 He began   divorce proceedings before his death in   1975,   but she had made the calculation she   needed to make at the moment she needed   to make it, and she had made it   honestly. She never claimed it was   something it was not. Fact 15. The White   House years were the happiest time of   her life, and she said so knowing   everything she knew.

 

 4 months after the   assassination, Jaclyn Kennedy sat down   with historian Arthur Schlesinger for a   series of recorded oral history   interviews. The recordings were sealed   for 50 years and released in 2011. They   are among everything else in the Kennedy   Historical Archive. The most complete   account of who she actually was that   exists in the public record.

 

 In those   interviews, with full knowledge of the   affairs, the still birth of Arabella in   1956,   the financial arrangements with Joseph   Kennedy senior, the informant she had   placed in her husband’s office, the   distance and the complications and the   black hole she said she could never look   down into.

 

 With all of that knowledge,   she described the White House years as   the happiest time of her life. She meant   it. Both things were simultaneously   true. It was the best time and it was   also all of those other things. She was   buried beside JFK at Arlington National   Cemetery in May of 1994 next to John   Kennedy and next to Patrick, the infant   son they had lost in August of 1963.

 

 She   had told her daughter Caroline not to   grieve her death because she expected to   be with Caroline’s father when she went.   The public saw the composed woman in the   white gloves. The life behind it was   considerably more complicated,   considerably more human, and by the   account of the person who lived it,   considerably richer than anyone watching   from the outside could fully understand.

 

  She kept almost all of it private.   Almost all of it. And what she did leave   behind in the sealed recordings and the   surviving letters and the accounts of   the few people she let close enough to   see is enough to understand that the   armor was real  and so was   everything it was protecting.

 

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