20 things John F. Kennedy loved that you can still buy today. In February 1962, before he signed the executive order banning trade with Cuba, John F. Kennedy sent his press secretary Pierre Salinger to find a thousand H. Upman petite coronas before morning. Salinger came back with 1,200. Kennedy signed the embargo. The cigars went into a humidor in the residence.
The most famous personal stockpile in American political history began burning down on February 7th, 1962. You can still buy that cigar about $15 for one. H. Upman moved its non-Cuban operation to the Dominican Republic after the revolution. And the Petite Corona has been rolled continuously for over a century. Almost everything else Kennedy chose for himself is the same story.
still made, still findable. Some of it not what people think. This is John F. Kennedy’s life item by item. Hyannis Port begin on the Cape. The Kennedy compound on Nantucket Sound, 6 acres bought by Joseph Kennedy in 1928. The summer wardrobe Kennedy wore on that lawn is the wardrobe almost every American man inherited. The Brooks Brothers twobutton suit.
Brooks Brothers opened on Catherine and Cherry Streets in lower Manhattan in 1818. They tailored Lincoln’s second inauguration coat, the same coat he was wearing the night booth shot him at Ford’s Theater with an eagle embroidered into the lining and the words, “One country, one destiny.” Kennedy was a customer at Harvard in the Senate through his presidency.
The deliberate American silhouette he wore better than any politician of his generation. The Madison fit around $800 is the closest current model. The slimmer cut in the modern range is called the Fitzgerald. Brooks Brothers named it after him. The boat shoes Sperry topsider about $100. The shoe Paul Sperry invented in 1935. Sperry was a Connecticut sailor who had nearly died falling from a slick deck.
The answer came one cold winter day in his own yard when he watched his cocker spaniel prince run across ice without slipping. He looked at the dog’s paws, took a pen knife to a piece of rubber, and cut the herring bone pattern from the pads into a shoe sole. The US Navy adopted the design in 1939. Kennedy, a Navy lieutenant who commanded PT 109 in the Solomon Islands, wore them in service and never stopped. The model in production today is mechanically identical.
The Nantucket Reds Murray’s Tuggy Shop on Main Street, Nantucket, around $90. Phil Murray bought the store in 1945. His son still runs it. The fabric is dyed cotton canvas in a salmon color that fades with washing in salt water into the soft pink the island is named for. The trousers were never meant to be ironed or look new. The fading is the point. Kennedy wore them. So did his brothers.
So did half of Hyannis. The trousers became the uniform of an American summer the Kennedys helped invent on television. The sunglasses. This is the one almost everyone gets wrong. The sunglasses Kennedy wore on the deck of the Honey Fits were not Ray-B bands. The originals were the American optical Saratoga made in Southbridge, Massachusetts. Tortoise shell acetate frame.
AOWear has reissued the model in the original specifications about $240. American Optical was founded in Southbridge in 1833. By the early 1960s, the town was nicknamed the Eye of the Commonwealth, and AO held contracts to manufacture eyewear for NASA, the US military, and the President of the United States. On September 30th, 1958, then Senator Kennedy visited the factory and was photographed walking through the floor with the workers. The Saratoga is what he wore home.
He bought multiple pairs and had them fitted with prescription lenses. The Rayban Wayfairer story attached itself to him decades after his death. The Kennedy Library has the originals in a glass case in Boston. The LLBAN main hunting shoe founded by Leon Leonwood Bean in Freeport, Maine in 1912. Built today in Brunswick about $170. Bean was a 40-year-old hunter tired of wet feet.
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He stitched leather uppers to rubber duck hunting bottoms, sold a hundred pairs through a mail order flyer, and 90 of those hundred came back. The stitching tore through the rubber. He refunded every customer, borrowed $400, redesigned the boot with triple line stitching and a tougher rubber, and sent each disappointed customer a free replacement. The triple line stitch is what is being made today.
Kennedy wore them at the compound and on the rare occasions he was photographed hunting. Bobby wore them. Ted wore them. The boot became a Kennedy family object handed down through three generations. Washington. The Kennedy of Hyannisport and the Kennedy of the West Wing wore different uniforms. The summer wardrobe was American.
The working wardrobe was European by careful choice. and he never publicized the French shirt maker. Reporters figured it out by reading the button hole. Charveet dress shirts. Charveet founded in 1838 at 28 Place Van in Paris is the oldest shirt maker in continuous operation in Europe. The shop has not moved. A bespoke char, 30 of them on the collar alone. Each shirt takes 30 days to make.
There are 400 shades of white in the bespoke shirtings. Kennedy was not the only president on their books. Charles de Gaulle was such a devoted customer that when Char’s heirs nearly sold the company to an American buyer in 1965, the French government intervened. De Gaul himself encouraged a man named Dennis Colban to buy it instead. Charvet remained French.
Edward IIIth, the Duke of Windsor, and Marcel P were also customers. A bespoke commission today begins around 800. Charvet ties. The same shop made his ties. Charvets silks are woven on archival looms in lion in patterns going back to the 1840s. Some of the patterns Kennedy chose from in the 1960s are still in the binder. Each tie has a second shade woven in beneath the surface visible only at certain angles.
Kennedy commissioned narrow ones 2 and a4 in wide. The slim sharet four-fold became part of the visual vocabulary of the new frontier about $250. The Alden tassel loafer Alden Shoe Company middle Massachusetts founded 1884. The last great shoe maker in New England, family-owned, still operating in the original plant. Alden invented the tassel loafer.
Kennedy wore the Alden 663 in shell Cordovan almost daily paired with khaki trousers and a navy blazer. The silhouette he created became the archetypal American casual look of the early 1960s. Alden still produces the 663 in the original specifications. They renamed it the JFK loafer about $650 in Shell Cordovan made by hand in Massachusetts. What he carried on his person. Three objects went almost everywhere with him.
Two were anniversary gifts from Jackie. All three are now museum pieces or vanished into private collections. The Cardier tank. Cardier introduced the tank in 1917 designed by Louis Cardier modeled on the silhouette of a Renault FT tank he had seen on the Western Front. Kennedy’s tank Louis Cardier was an anniversary gift from Jackie.
She gave it to him in 1957 to mark their fourth 18 karat yellow gold. The case back engraved with his initials and the family arms. He wore it for the rest of his life. He was wearing it the morning of November 22nd, 1963. After the assassination, the watch was returned to Jackie at Parkland Hospital. She gave it to Evelyn Lincoln, his personal secretary, who eventually sold it to Robert L.
White, the most prominent private collector of Kennedy memorabilia. Its current whereabouts are unknown. The current tank Lou Cardier in yellow gold runs around $14,000 with the same proportions Louis Cardier drew in 1917. The Omega Ultra Thin Reference O T3980 yellow gold 26 mm across. Kennedy received the watch from Grant Stockdale, a Florida friend in 1960 while he was running for president.
Stockdale had it engraved before the votes were counted. President of the United States John F. Kennedy from his friend Grant Kennedy wore it at the inauguration on January 20th, 1961. The Omega Museum in Beiel, Switzerland, holds it now. The current descendant, the Devil Traor Ultra Thin, runs around $6,000. The PT 109 tie clip. In August 1943, Lieutenant John F.
Kennedy was commanding a patrol torpedo boat PT 109 in the Solomon Islands when a Japanese destroyer split his boat in half. Two of his crew died. Kennedy swam 4 m towing an injured crewman by a strap clenched between his teeth, then organized a rescue from a small island over the next 6 days. He came home with a back injury he carried for the rest of his life.
The tie clip is a small gold pin in the shape of the boat. Kennedy commissioned them after the 1960 election. He gave them to staff, journalists, the Air Force One crew, friends from Boston. The original molds still exist. Reproductions are sold at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library gift shop around $45. The only object on this list Kennedy himself designed the desk.
The Hermes briefcase black crocodile single buckle trapezoidal silhouette built at the Hermes workshops on Ru Duoborg Saint Onore. Jackie gave it to him in 1953, the year they married. It was a Saka de Pesh, the dispatch bag Hermes had introduced in 1937. Kennedy used it daily for 10 years. He carried it to Vienna for the meeting with Kruch. He carried it to Dallas.
After his death, the briefcase surfaced at Gernzi’s auction in 1998 and sold for $700,000. The Hermes Sak Adesh is still made in those same workshops. The silhouette has not changed since 1937. The crocodile version by special order has a 4 to 5ear waiting list. The Estherbrook fountain pen. Essed in Camden, New Jersey in 1858. By tradition, presidents use multiple pens to sign a single piece of legislation, then give the pens to the people in the room.
Kennedy used Estherbrook dipwriters with the standard government 2668 nib engraved the president the White House. He gave away dozens during his thousand days in office. The most famous of those pens were used after his death. Kennedy introduced the Civil Rights Act in June 1963 and did not live to sign it. Lynden Johnson signed it on July 2nd, 1964. using more than 75 identical Estherbrook fountain pens. One went to Martin Luther King Jr.
, six went to Robert Kennedy. The pens that made the act real were the same model Kennedy had been using for 3 years. The original company closed in 1971. The brand was relaunched in 2018. The SD model is back in production around $200. The MLANC 149 Meister $149 about $850. Kennedy used three pens regularly.
The Essterbrook for signings, the Parker 45 for correspondence, the Mont Blanc 149 for personal letters, black resin barrel, goldplated cap, the white star at the crown. The 149 entered production in 1952 and became the desk pen of every western leader sitting across the table from him. Deg Gaul Adinau McMillan. The pen has not been redesigned in 70 years. What he kept private. The cigars. H. Upman Petite Corona. The cigar from the opening.
Salinger told the story himself decades later in a 1992 essay for cigar afficionado. Kennedy averaged four to five cigars a day and he died with cigars from the original 1200 still locked in the humidor. H Upman was founded in Havana in 1844 by a German banker named Herman Upman. After the revolution, the business split. The Cuban factory still operates in Havana.
The non-Cuban operation runs out of the Dominican Republic. The Dominican version is what an American can legally buy. The fragrance 8 and Bob about $180. The story is romantic and contested as told by the brand. In the summer of 1937, a 20-year-old Kennedy was traveling through the south of France with his college friend Lem Billings when he met an aristocrat named Albert Fukquet who blended his own cologne.
Kennedy asked for a sample. After Kennedy returned home, Fukquet sent eight bottles with a note and one for Bob. Robert Kennedy was 11. Fuket died in a car accident the following year. During the Nazi occupation, his butler, Phipe, hid the cologne inside handcut books to evade confiscation. The Kennedy connection has not been independently verified.
The pre-war French formula behind the modern relaunch is documented. Flores, founded 1730 on German Street, London. Same address. Flores number 89 is the fragrance Kennedy is reported to have worn for formal occasions about $170. Aqua Dearma Colonia founded in Parma in 1916. Light citrus driven the Mediterranean cologne of summer at the Cape about $130. The mind profiles in courage.
Kennedy began the book in 1954 while recovering from spinal surgery in Palm Beach lying flat across two long convolescences. His speech writer Ted Sorenson did the bulk of the drafting. The book profiles eight US senators who took unpopular stands of conscience. Published January 1st, 1956. Won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957. Still in print. About $18 in paperback. From Russia with love.
In 1955, Kennedy was sick at home and sent for a book. A Newport friend named Marian Oatsy Lighter sent over her copy of Casino Royale, the first James Bond novel. The Kennedys were hooked and ordered each new one as it came out. In March 1961, the journalist Hugh Sidi published a list of Kennedy’s 10 favorite books in Life magazine.
Lord David Ceil’s biography of Lord Melbourne was at the top. From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming was at number nine. The only work of fiction on the list. The article ran on a Friday. By Monday, Fleming’s American sales had quadrupled. Within 5 years, he had sold 30 million copies in the United States. The James Bond franchise, as it exists today, is built on a foundation Kennedy laid by accident with one line in a magazine.
The last film John F. Kennedy ever watched was the screen adaptation of From Russia with Love on the night of November 21st, 1963. He flew to Texas the next morning. The book is in print, about $16. The Carolina Rocker. In 1955, Kennedy’s physician, Dr. Janet Travel, bought a handbuilt rocking chair from the PNP chair company in Ashbro, North Carolina.
The model was listed in their catalog as style number 1000. Travel named it the Carolina Rocker and began prescribing it for chronic back pain. Kennedy was one of her patients. He took the chair to the Senate. When he became president, it was the only piece of furniture he brought to the White House from his Senate office. He bought 11 more placed in the Oval Office on Air Force One at Hyannis Port at Palm Beach on the presidential yachts. Photographs show him in it during cabinet meetings with Edward R.
Muro with foreign heads of state. After the Oval Office photographs began circulating, PNP started receiving 4 to 500 phone orders a day. They were invited to the White House and politely declined. PNP closed in 2008. The Troutman Chair Company of North Carolina acquired the original pattern and tooling in 2009. They build it today by hand from steam bent oak with a woven cane seat. About $650.
One more. Rose Kennedy’s recipe, the one Kennedy ate at Hyannis his entire life. Two pounds of hadock, a piece of salt, pork, onion, potatoes, butter, milk, bay leaf, slow simmer, served with oyster crackers in a white ceramic bowl. The recipe is held in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library archives. About $20 to make for four people. Rose lived to 104.
She made the chowder for nine children, 28 grandchildren, and a husband who became one of the most powerful men in American politics. She made it for John before he was a senator, before he was a president, before he was a memory. There is a particular kind of New England sundae in that recipe. A slate blue afternoon over the sound, the smell of fishtock and butter coming through a screen door.
you will understand why he kept going home. A pair of boat shoes, a cigar, a fountain pen, a bowl of chowder. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963. He was 30 days short of 47. The era he ran is over. The objects he kept close are still here, built by the same companies, in some cases in the same buildings, by the great grandchildren of the people who built them for him. If something on this list spoke to you, every product is linked in the description below.
Choose carefully. He had a thousand days. Thank you everyone so much for watching Cultured Elegance. If you’d love to support the channel, you can become a channel member today by clicking join at the bottom of the screen. Thank you everyone so much for watching and I’ll see you in the next
