She was one of the most documented people in American history and some of her most consistent habits were never explained. Not hidden exactly, some of them were visible to the people around her for decades. Simply never discussed, >> >> never offered as explanation, never made the subject of the kind of public accounting that the rest of her life generated in such extraordinary volume.
She had a way of doing things that was entirely her own >> >> and the doing of it was all the explanation she considered necessary. Here are 15 of the most mysterious. Fact one, she wrote letters. She asked the recipients to burn and wrote them anyway. She knew the letters would be read.
She knew they were good enough to keep. She wrote to the people she trusted with a candor she permitted almost nowhere else >> >> and then she asked them to destroy the evidence. Some people did destroy them. Some could not. The letters that survived reached biographers as rare finds, long, specific, genuinely funny, emotionally precise in ways that suggested she had used the writing to think through things the conversation could only approximate.
She never stopped writing them and she never stopped asking for the burning. The habit was the contradiction held simultaneously. The need to express and the need to protect. She found the only solution available to her and maintained it for 40 years. She wrote. >> >> She asked for the fire. She wrote again.
Fact two, she kept journals she eventually destroyed and nobody knows what they said. She had kept journals since girlhood. By accounts from people who knew about them across different periods of her life they were genuinely private. Not the kind of private that means eventually archived but the kind that means never meant for anyone else.
Before she died, she destroyed them. The biographers who have come closest to understanding the journals believe they contained the unfiltered account of the marriage, the White House years and the grief after Dallas that no other source preserves. They believe the journals held the version of Jackie that none of the public accounts had ever fully reached, unguarded, unedited, saying exactly what she thought, she burned them.
The most honest account of Jacqueline Kennedy that ever existed was written by her own hand and destroyed by her own hand. >> >> That was always the intention. Fact three, she never explained why she refused to change out of the pink suit for 14 hours. She said one thing about it. She said, “I want them to see what they have done.
” Nobody pressed her on what that meant, exactly, or what she believed the scene would accomplish, or whether she had planned the decision in the car or on the plane, or whether it had arrived fully formed in the moment. She did not elaborate. She did not revisit the explanation. She said the one thing and kept the rest.
The suit is in the National Archives in the condition it was in when she finally took it off. The decision that kept her in it is in the same condition, preserved, available for examination, resistant to complete explanation. She had made a statement. The statement was the explanation. The interior of the decision remained hers.
Fact four, she had a habit of reading in the middle of conversations and nobody said anything. The people who worked with Jackie Kennedy at Doubleday described a specific behavior that they observed early in their relationships with her >> >> and then simply adapted to. She read during meetings.
Not entire manuscripts, specific pages, specific passages, the relevant material she was engaging with alongside the conversation rather than in place of it. She was not being rude. She was, by every account, >> >> fully present in the conversation while also fully present in the text. >> >> The two tracks of attention ran simultaneously and produced, in the discussion that followed, a quality of engagement with the specific material that suggested the reading and the listening had been genuinely parallel rather than one substituting for the
other. Nobody asked her to stop. The results of the habit to close, specific engagement with the actual text of the book she was working on, justified it. She had developed a way of reading that was compatible with conversation And the people around her adapted to it as simply one of the true and characteristic things about working with her.
Fact five, she spoke to her plants in French. The household staff in different properties she occupied across different periods of her life described the same thing without being asked. She talked to her plants, not affectionately, not in the manner of someone who finds the practice comforting, specifically in French, briefly, while attending to them in the mornings.
Nobody asked her about it. She did not volunteer an explanation. The French was consistent. She did not switch languages for the plants, and the brevity was consistent. It was part of the morning in the way the soft-boiled egg was part of the morning. Fixed, unremarked upon, simply how it was. Whether the French was the language of the instruction or the language of the intimacy whether she was speaking to the plants in the language she spoke when she was most privately herself was a question nobody thought to ask until she was no longer
available to answer into a room before she had assessed it from the doorway. The household staff who worked in her various residences described a consistent entry behavior that was so fixed and so characteristic that it had become, for people who knew her well, one of the clearest marks of her presence in a building.
She paused at the doorway before entering any room she had not recently been in. The pause was brief, a second, sometimes two. It was not hesitation. It was assessment. She was reading the room from the doorway with the specific intelligence of a person who needed to understand the spatial arrangement and the social landscape before she entered it, who did not walk into situations she had not assessed.
The habit was present in professional contexts and in private ones, at dinner parties and at furniture dealers and at public events. She entered, but she always assessed before she entered. The threshold was always a moment of information gathering before it was a crossing. Fact seven, >> >> she sent thank you notes for thank you notes.
Among the specific social practices she maintained across her adult life with a consistency that the people who corresponded with her found notable and occasionally puzzling. She sent acknowledgements for acknowledgements. Someone wrote to thank her, she wrote to thank them for the thank you. The habit ran against the conventional understanding that the thank you note is the end of the social obligation chain >> >> rather than a link in a chain that could continue indefinitely.
She treated it differently. The acknowledgement of generosity was itself a form of generosity that warranted acknowledgement. Her correspondence is, by accounts from everyone who received and kept her letters, consistently and genuinely good, specific, warm, funny in the dry register she reserved for private communication, never perfunctory.
The thank you for the thank you was written with the same care as the original thank you. It was, like everything she did, done completely. Fact eight. She rearranged objects in other people’s homes when she visited. Bunny Mellon, who was perhaps Jackie’s closest female friend across several decades, described a habit that she had observed and that other close friends confirmed.
When Jackie came to visit, objects moved. Not dramatically. Not in a way that required comment or produced friction. A vase repositioned. A lamp relocated 3 inches. The specific adjustment of an object in a room that her eye had identified as occupying the wrong position relative to everything around it.
She made the adjustment with the ease of someone who did not distinguish between her own spaces and the spaces of people she was comfortable with, who applied the same spatial intelligence everywhere without the self-consciousness that would have made the behavior remarkable. Nobody asked her to stop because the adjustments were invariably correct.
The thing she moved looked better where she had put it. >> >> The habit was the expression of an eye that could not stop seeing what was slightly wrong with the physical world around it. Fact nine. She had a specific route through Central Park she walked every day for decades and she never varied it.
The early morning walks she took in Central Park during the New York years followed a route that the household staff and the occasional friend who accompanied her described as fixed. She walked the same path at the same pace, covering the same ground that she had covered the day before >> >> and would cover the day after.
When she was asked, on the rare occasions anyone asked, why she kept the same route rather than varying it, she said she was still finding things she had not seen the time before. >> >> The answer was the answer of a person who was paying attention to the same thing across time and finding it different on each engagement, >> >> who understood that the route’s repetition was not sameness but depth.
She had been walking the same path through Central Park for 20 years, and she was still noticing new things in it. That was her relationship with everything she had decided was worth paying attention to. The same path, the increasing depth, the things that only revealed themselves across the accumulation of years.
Fact 10. She had an unusual habit of finishing every book she started, regardless of whether she liked it. Most readers stop books they are not enjoying. Jackie Kennedy >> >> did not. The people who worked with her at Doubleday and who discussed books with her across the years described a reader who finished everything she started, regardless of whether the engagement was positive or the book was meeting the standard she had brought to it.
When asked about this, she said she needed to know how it ended. The explanation sounded simpler than the practice it described. She was not interested in knowing the plot resolution. She was interested in understanding the full thing in having the complete experience of the object she had undertaken before she assessed it.
The assessment required completion. The completion was not optional. The habit meant she had read thousands of books all the way through, including many she had found wanting from early on. It also meant that her assessments, when she made them, were made from complete information rather than partial engagement.
She had earned the assessment by doing the reading. Fact 11, she never answered a question >> >> directly if she could ask one instead. The conversational habit that the people who knew Jackie Kennedy most consistently described as her most characteristic was her tendency to respond to questions with questions to redirect the conversational energy from >> >> information provision that a direct answer would have required toward the engagement that a question produced.
She was genuinely curious about other people. The questions were real. But the habit also served, consistently and perhaps not accidentally, >> >> the protection of private information. If someone asked her something she did not want to answer, she asked them something back. The conversation moved in the direction her question had sent it.
The original question was frequently not returned to. She had the social fluency to make this feel like engaged curiosity, rather than deflection. It was engaged curiosity. It was also deflection. Both were true, and she had found a conversational form that accomplished both simultaneously. Fact 12, she had a ritual of walking through her homes alone at night after everyone else was asleep.
The household staff in the White House and in the New York apartment and on Martha’s Vineyard described, in the various accounts that reached the biographical record, the same late-night behavior. After the children were asleep and the household had settled into its overnight quiet, she walked through the rooms, not restlessly, not in the manner of someone unable to sleep, deliberately, room to room, in the specific way of a person doing something they had decided to do, rather than something their body
was driving them toward. What she was doing in those walks was not recorded by anyone who would have known. She did not describe the practice. The staff who observed it did not interrupt it. The walks happened in the private hours, in the quiet of the household she had organized and maintained. And what they were for was known only to the person who was taking them.
Fact 13, she clips newspaper articles about herself without ever reading them. Among the more counterintuitive personal habits documented in accounts from people who managed the administrative aspects of her life across different periods was this. She had newspaper clippings about herself compiled by staff and she did not read them.
The clippings were kept. They were organized. They were part of a record she had evidently decided needed to exist. She simply did not engage with them herself. The record what the press was saying about her was maintained at a distance she had determined was the correct distance. This was not indifference to the press coverage.
It was a specific and deliberate management of the distance between herself and the public image the press was constructing. She had decided that engaging with the coverage, reading the descriptions of herself, reacting to the characterizations would influence the private self in ways she was not willing to permit.
The coverage existed. She kept it at arms length. The arms length was a discipline. Fact 14, she had a practice of sitting in complete silence for extended periods that made the people around her uncomfortable. The people who shared the closest proximity with Jackie Kennedy across different periods of her life, family, household staff, occasional visitors described the same experience.
She could sit in complete silence for extended periods in a way that produced discomfort in most of the people around her without producing any apparent discomfort in her. Not the silence of grief or the silence of anger. Simply silence, the comfortable, apparently voluntary absence of the ambient social conversation that most people generate to fill the space that silence creates.
She had learned to be alone with her thoughts in a way that the socially anxious around her found unnerving. The silence was not unfriendly. It was simply complete. She was present in the room and absent from the conversation and the two things coexisted without apparent contradiction for her. She had spent decades cultivating the interior life. The silence was its expression.
She had made her peace with it long before anyone else in the room had. Fact 15: She always said goodbye as though it were the last time, and nobody understood why until after Dallas. The people who knew Jackie Kennedy across different periods of her life described, when the biographical record was assembled, a quality of leave-taking that had always been slightly unusual, a specific quality of presence and completeness in her goodbyes that went beyond the social convention of the occasion. She said goodbye in the way
that people say goodbye >> >> when they are not certain there will be another opportunity. Fully. With specific attention to the specific person. Not dramatically, she was not theatrical in her leave-takings, but with a completeness that the people who received it sometimes found difficult to account for.
After Dallas, several of the people who had been on the receiving end of this quality of goodbye described understanding it differently. She had always known at some level that the people she loved were vulnerable in ways that the ordinary structure of a day did not acknowledge. She had said goodbye as though it mattered because she had understood that it did.
She had been right. And she had been expressing the understanding for years before it became the fact that confirmed it. The habit had been the private knowledge of a person who had been paying attention to what the world was actually like rather than what the ordinary structure of an ordinary day suggested it was.
She always said goodbye completely. It was the most mysterious habit, and in the end the most human one. If this video gave you something to think about, leave a like and subscribe. There is always more to the story. There’s always more to the story. There’s always more.
