Nobody has a perfect marriage. Some people have a marriage that becomes something real despite everything that was working against it from the beginning. The Kennedy marriage had a great deal working against it. It began as an arrangement negotiated between two families with different agendas. It continued through a decade of the affairs and the absences and the specific financial and physical and political tensions that the documentary record has gradually made visible.
It operated under the most intense public scrutiny of any marriage in American history. and it produced in its final years something that the oral history Jackie recorded four months after Dallas describes without ambivalence as the happiest time of her life. The distance between the difficult beginning and the genuinely good ending is the most interesting story about the Kennedy marriage and it is almost entirely absent from the popular account.
The popular account tends toward one of two versions. the Camelot mythology of the perfect partnership or the cynical correction of it that reduces the marriage to a transaction managed by two professionals. Both versions missed the same thing. The marriage was difficult in ways that were real and specific, and it became something more real and more essential than either version allows.
Here are 15 weird facts about the most difficult years of JFK and Jackie’s marriage. What those years actually looked like and what survived them. Fact one, the marriage began as essentially a transaction and both of them knew it. The engagement between John Kennedy and Jaclyn Bouvier in June of 1953 had been arranged in the specific sense that both families had been working toward it and both parties understood the terms of what they were entering.
Joseph Kennedy Senior had wanted a wife for his son who was socially acceptable, photogenic, and intelligent enough not to embarrass the family. Janet Aenclaus had wanted a husband for her daughter who was wealthy, politically prominent, and capable of providing the social establishment that the daughter of a somewhat tarnished social background required.
Jackie understood the transaction. She had watched her father’s charm substitute for character for the first 12 years of her life. and she was not naive about the difference between romantic love and strategic marriage. She was also 23 years old and living in a social world that did not offer many alternatives to the strategic marriage for women of her position.
And JFK was genuinely attractive and genuinely interesting. And the life she was entering was not a life she dreaded. JFK understood the transaction. He had been directed toward the political career for as long as he could remember. and the political career required a specific kind of wife and he had found one. He liked Jackie.
He was not at the beginning in love with her in the specific and total way that the Camelot mythology later suggested. They were honest with each other about what the beginning was. They managed the honesty privately. The public ceremony was the wedding of the century performed for 1200 guests at Street Mary’s Church in Newport with a dress Jackie had not chosen and a guest list she had not assembled. It was a beginning.
Fact two, the early years were marked by long separations and equality of distance that neither of them fully addressed. The first years of the Kennedy marriage, the mid 1950s, the senatorial years before the presidential campaign consumed, everything were years of significant physical separation. JFK traveled constantly for the political career, spending weeks at a time away from Washington in the states and cities where the building of the presidential campaign required his presence.
Jackie was in the Georgetown house managing the household, managing the public role of the senator’s wife, and managing the specific quality of isolation that the arrangement produced. She had been married to someone whose primary commitment was to an ambition that had been formed before she existed.
The career came first. The career had always come first. She had understood this entering the marriage and she had accepted it as the condition of the life. But the understanding of a thing and the daily experience of it are different and the daily experience of the early years was lonier than the understanding had prepared her for. She did not complain publicly.
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She managed the separation with the composure she managed everything and the people around them saw the senator and his young wife at the events and functions of Washington social life and saw the composed partnership the public occasions required. The private years were the years of a woman learning to inhabit a marriage that was organized primarily around her husband’s needs in a city she had not originally chosen without the specific forms of connection she had expected the marriage to provide. Fact three. The still birth of
Arabella in 1956 was one of the loneliest things she ever went through. In August of 1956, while JFK was abroad, Jacqueline Kennedy gave birth to a stillborn daughter. The baby whom she named Arabella was fullterm and the loss was total and specific in the way that pregnancy loss at full term is total and specific. JFK was not present.
He was on a vacation in the Mediterranean that he did not immediately cut short when he received the news. The decision to continue the trip rather than return immediately became one of the documented grievances of the early marriage evidence in the eyes of people who were close to Jackie in that period of the specific forms of distance that characterized those years.
He came back eventually. He came back to a wife who had been through a devastating loss while he was swimming in the Mediterranean and who had been through it with her sister Lee rather than with her husband and who had added the specific knowledge of his response to the specific grief of the loss. She did not discuss the still birth publicly.
She did not discuss her husband’s absence publicly. She did not discuss the specific dimension that the absence added to the loss the understanding of the hierarchy of priorities that the decision to stay on the trip represented. She kept all of it private, which was how she kept everything she had decided was hers to keep.
The still birth and the absence were the first of several moments in the early marriage when the distance was not abstract, but specific and felt. She carried them. She did not leave. Fact four, the affairs were conducted with a casualness that she found harder than the affairs themselves. The extrammarital affairs that John Kennedy conducted throughout the marriage were a sustained reality that Jackie Kennedy had known about from early in the marriage and that she had decided through the specific and cleareyed calculation she brought to every
impossible situation to accept as the condition on which the marriage was worth maintaining. She had made the calculation. The calculation was hers to make and she made it with the intelligence she brought to everything. The marriage offered her things she valued the life, eventually the White House, the proximity to JFK that she had come to value more than she had anticipated when it developed, and the affairs were the cost of the arrangement.
What was harder than the affairs themselves was the specific casualness with which they were conducted, the assumption that the Secret Service would manage it, the use of White House staff to facilitate arrangements, the specific quality of disregard for the possibility of her feelings that the casualness implied. She was not a person who was expected to mind and the not expecting her to mind was itself a form of dismissal that the affairs without the casualness would not have been. She minded.
She managed the minding privately through the information gathering system she had established through the specific quality of knowing more than she was supposed to know through the composed surface that covered the interior accounting. She did not confront. She did not produce the scene that the situation in many marriages would have produced.
She decided the marriage was worth what it cost and she paid the cost and she kept the decision as much to herself as she kept everything else. Fact five, the 1,960 campaign was exhausting in ways that were never acknowledged. The presidential campaign of 1960 was by any measure one of the most demanding political operations in American history.
the first television campaign, the first serious Catholic candidacy, the compressed and brutal schedule of a national campaign in a pre-jet era when the country was large and the logistics were brutal. Jackie Kennedy was pregnant during much of the campaign. She had given birth to John Jr. in November of 1960, 3 weeks after the election.
She had been visibly pregnant through the final months of the campaign’s most intense period. She had participated in the campaign activities that were deemed appropriate for a pregnant candidate’s wife while managing the pregnancy and the physical demands it placed on a body that was simultaneously being required to perform the role of the political spouse in the most significant campaign of the era.
The political operation had always considered her a liability, too cosmopolitan, too French, too sophisticated for the ordinary American voter. She had been managed and deployed in ways that emphasized her accessibility and minimized her distinctiveness. She had accepted the management with the same practical intelligence she accepted everything else about the political life she had entered.
By the election, she was exhausted in ways that the official account of the campaign did not capture and that the public had no access to. She had spent 9 months pregnant while managing a presidential campaign’s demands on the candidate’s wife. She had delivered John Jr. 3 weeks after her husband won the presidency. The transition from pregnancy to the White House began 2 months later.
She was 31 years old with a newborn and a 3-year-old and the first lady ship of the United States beginning in January. The exhaustion was real. The composed face was managing it. Fact six. The Bay of Pigs was the first time she saw him completely broken. 3 months into the presidency, JFK authorized the CIA backed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
The operation failed completely. The 1400 Cuban exiles who landed on the coast were quickly overwhelmed. More than a hundred were killed. Over a thousand were captured. Kennedy took public responsibility with the composure that the situation and his role required. In private, the weight of it was different.
Jackie had described what she witnessed in the sealed oral history with the specific precision of someone describing something she had not expected to see and had not forgotten. He had sat in the Virginia bedroom of their weekend house at Glenora with his head in his hands and wept. She had stayed beside him. She had not said the things that are said in those moments to perform comfort.
She had simply been there, which was what being there for the specific version of him that the private failure had produced required. She had seen him cry only a handful of times across the entire marriage. She counted them in the oral history with the care of a person for whom each instance had been significant enough to retain in precise detail.
The Bay of Pigs Virginia bedroom was one of them. He had been composed in public because the public required it. He had been broken in private because the situation produced it and she was the only person whose presence he could be broken in front of without the breaking becoming a political fact. The private grief was hers to witness and hers to keep. She witnessed it. She kept it.
Fact seven. The loss of Patrick was the third pregnancy loss and it changed something. On August 7th, 1963, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born 5 and a half weeks premature at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod. He weighed 4 lbs and 10 and a half ounces. He lived for 39 hours. He died on August 9th from highline membrane disease, the condition that premature lungs produce when they have not had enough time to develop.
He was the third child they had lost. Arabella had been still born in 1956. An earlier loss had preceded Caroline. Patrick was the third. JFK was at the hospital in Boston when Patrick died. The accounts from people present describe a quality of grief in him that was visible and complete in a way that his public composure had never permitted to be public.
He put his hand on the small coffin at the graveside and said something none of the people present could hear. Jackie was told later what he had said. She kept it private. What Jackie described in the oral history about the weeks after Patrick’s death was something she had not expected. that the loss, which was terrible, had produced in JFK a quality of tenderness and openness that had not been consistent before.
She felt in those weeks that she was finally getting through to him, that the loss had done something to the distance that the early years had produced. The last 3 months of JFK’s life were the months of this new closeness. They were in the car in Dallas, returning from an event in which the polls were showing his numbers in Texas improving.
She had gone to Texas because she had wanted to be with him. He had asked her to come because her presence had become his most significant political asset. Both things were true and both things had brought them to Dallas. Fact eight. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the most dangerous 13 days of their lives and it made them closer than anything else had.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was the most dangerous diplomatic confrontation of the Cold War, the closest the world has come to nuclear exchange since the invention of nuclear weapons. The public saw the composed president managing the confrontation with measured firmness. The private version was the 13 days during which Jackie Kennedy had refused to leave the White House, had told her husband she would rather die on the lawn with him than survive in a shelter without him, and had slept beside him every time he came upstairs
in the brief intervals between the crisis meetings. She had described those 13 days in the sealed oral history as the time she had felt most close to him in the entire marriage. Not most frightened, though that too, most close. The crisis had stripped away the distance and the management and the specific forms of separation that the ordinary structure of the marriage had contained, and what remained was two people in the same building in the most dangerous possible situation, entirely together. The XCOM recordings captured
JFK managing the crisis with a quality of judgment that his brother, Robert Kennedy, described afterward as the finest he had ever witnessed. Jackie was upstairs. She was walking with him on the south lawn in the brief windows between meetings. Not speaking much, just walking. She was sleeping beside him when the meetings paused for a few hours of rest.
She had been most close to him in the 13 days when the world was most close to ending. The extremity of the situation had produced the intimacy that the ordinary structure had not always permitted. Both of them understood this and neither of them would have chosen the crisis as the vehicle for arriving at the understanding.
Fact nine, the financial tensions were real and sustained and never fully resolved. The money problems of the Kennedy marriage were not the problems of people without money. They were the specific problems of a marriage in which two people had very different relationships to money and in which the formal financial arrangements were consistently in tension with the actual financial behavior.
Jackie spent she spent on clothes and on objects and on the acquisitions that constituted the physical world she was building. and she spent at rates that consistently exceeded the official allocations and that required the creative financial management she had always been practicing. JFK’s awareness of the general situation was managed carefully with the specific numbers kept from him and the general situation acknowledged when the press made acknowledgement unavoidable.
JFK, for his part, was essentially indifferent to money in the way that people who have never had to manage it are indifferent to it, not careless, but abstracted without the practical relationship to the daily financial realities that the marriage required someone to manage. Jackie managed them. The managing included managing what he knew about what she was spending.
The tension was real and it was recurring and it was managed on both sides through the specific accommodations each of them had developed for the aspects of the marriage they had decided to accept. He accepted that the clothes cost what they cost and did not press for the specific numbers.
She accepted that the political operations needs could override her own preferences and managed the frustration privately. Neither fully resolved the tension. Both found ways to live within it. Fact 10. The Kennedy family was a difficult institution to marry into, and she never fully joined it. The Kennedy family operated as an institution with its own culture, its own competitive ethos, its own demands on the people who were born into it and the people who married into it.
Jackie was not born into it, she married into it, and she spent 10 years navigating the specific challenges that the navigation required. The touch football games at Hyennus Port were not casual recreation. They were the family’s expression of the competitive culture it had been raised in the culture of Joseph Kennedy Senior’s household in which winning was the expectation and losing required explanation.
Jackie did not participate in the Dutch football games. She did not adopt the athletic culture. She maintained the French aesthetic and the literary interests and the specific quality of composed elegance that was as far from the Kennedy family’s boisterous informality as it was possible to be while living in the same compound.
The Kennedy women, Ethel, Jean, Pat had each in different ways adopted or accommodated the family culture. Jackie had not. She had maintained herself within the family’s gravitational field without being absorbed by it, which was a form of resistance that the family did not always receive easily. JFK did not ask her to change.
This was itself a form of respect, the acknowledgement that the specific distinctiveness she maintained was part of what he had chosen and that the choice had been genuine. But the family’s difficulty with her distinctiveness was real throughout the marriage, and the navigation of it was work she did without acknowledging that it was work.
Fact 11. She had moments of genuine doubt about whether the life she was living was the life she had wanted. The oral history that Jackie Kennedy recorded in the spring of 1964, sealed for 50 years, contains passages that the public account of the composed and satisfied first lady had not prepared people to find when the recordings were finally released.
She described the early years of the marriage with the honest account of a person who had not always been certain the life she was living was the right life for her. She had wanted to go to Paris after college. She had taken the Vogue pri to Paris which the magazine had offered her a position in France in exchange for winning and her mother had called her back from France to the social obligations of the debutant world and the strategic marriage market it served.
She had given up Paris for the trajectory her family’s world had laid out for her. She had sometimes in the early years of the marriage thought about the life that had not been taken. Not with bitterness. She was too honest for bitterness about choices that had been made, but with the specific quality of wondering that the unlived life produces.
She [snorts] had been in Paris once. She had been given a glimpse of what a different version of her life might have looked like. She had chosen, or had been guided toward a different one. The wondering was private, and it was occasional rather than constant, and it diminished, as the White House years produced the closeness that the earlier years had not always provided.
By the time of the oral history, she was describing the White House years as the happiest time of her life. Without the qualification of the wondering, the wondering had been answered by the living. Fact 12. JFK’s health crisis were private emergencies she managed without acknowledgement. the specific health crisis that JFK experienced across the marriage, the near-death experience in 1954 following the back surgery that produced profiles and courage during the recovery.
The daily management of the Addison’s disease and the chronic pain that was the hidden condition of the presidency were emergencies that Jackie managed as a private partner to someone who was simultaneously managing them as a public figure. She knew the full extent of the medical situation because she lived with it.
She had watched him manage the pain with a quality of will that she described in the oral history with specific admiration, the determination to live the life without concession to the physical reality that was attempting to limit it. She had watched the medical apparatus that the management required and she had maintained the silence about it that the political career required.
The specific fear she had carried across the marriage, the awareness that the person she was living with was managing a physical situation that was more serious than the public understood was the fear that people carry when they love someone who is not telling the world the full story of their health. She knew the full story.
She knew it could end in a way that the Addison’s disease made more likely than the vigorous presidential image suggested. It ended in a different way entirely on a specific afternoon in Dallas in a manner that the medical situation had not prepared either of them for. She had been afraid of losing him. She had lost him.
The loss was not the loss she had been afraid of and the unexpected form of it was its own specific dimension of the impossible situation. Fact 13. The transition from liability to asset changed how the marriage worked. The evolution of Jackie Kennedy from political liability to political asset was one of the most significant transformations of the Kennedy White House years, and it changed the marriage in ways that were not entirely comfortable for either of them.
She had been considered a liability by the political operation throughout the senatorial years and into the campaign. too French, too sophisticated, too unlikely to connect with the ordinary American voter that the campaign needed to reach. The operation had managed her appearances carefully, emphasizing the accessible elements and minimizing the distinctive ones.
And then the White House happened and the French trip happened and the American public’s response to Jackie Kennedy happened and the operation discovered that the liability had become the most powerful political asset in the Kennedy portfolio. She was more popular than the president. Everyone wanted to look like Jackie.
He was making jokes to foreign leaders about being the man who had accompanied Jackie Kennedy to their country. The discovery changed the dynamic in ways that were complicated. He had wanted a specific kind of wife at the beginning. He had gotten something considerably more powerful than what he had anticipated. She had been told throughout that she was a problem.
She had become the most important person in the operation. She was aware of all of this. She described it in the oral history with the dry precision she brought to every observation about the political world. She had been a liability. She had become an asset. He had never asked her to change. He had also asked her to come to Texas specifically because she was the asset that the Texas campaign needed. She had gone.
The asset and the wife were the same person on the afternoon in Dallas. Fact 14. The month before Dallas was the best period of the marriage and both of them were beginning to understand that the last month of the Kennedy marriage, the October and early November of 1963, the weeks after the closing of the grief for Patrick and before the departure for Texas was by the accounts of the people who were close to the family in that period, and by the internal evidence of Jackie’s own description in the oral history, the best the marriage
had been, the closeness that Patrick’s death had produced in JFK, the specific quality of tenderness and openness that Jackie had described as finally getting through to him was present in those weeks in ways that the earlier years had not consistently provided. He was calling more often.
He was present in the private life in the specific way that the private life required. They were closer in the daily texture of the thousand days than they had been in the years before. Jackie had decided to go to Texas partly because she wanted to be with him. The Texas trip was the political operations agenda and JFK had asked her to come because she was the asset the trip needed.
Those were the professional reasons she went. The personal reason was that the marriage was in the best period it had been in and she wanted to be where he was. On the morning of November 22nd in Fort Worth, he had made a joke about her being slow to get dressed. She had come out of the bedroom and he had told her she looked smashing.
They had gotten in the motorcade. By 12:30 in the afternoon in Dallas, the best period of the marriage was over. Fact 15. The most difficult years were the years before the marriage became what it actually was. The most honest account of the difficult years in the Kennedy marriage is not the account that focuses on the affairs or the financial tensions or the family politics or the distance of the early years.
Though all of those were real, it is the account that holds those things alongside the account of what the marriage became in spite of them. Jackie said the White House years were the happiest time of her life. She said it knowing everything she knew. She said it with the specific authority of someone who had lived through the difficult years and the better years and who was describing from the specific vantage point of the oral history the relationship between the two.
The difficult years were the years before the marriage had become what it was in the last thousand days. The years when the closeness was not yet fully there. when the arrangement was more visible as arrangement and less visible as something genuinely chosen. The years when the distance was more consistent than the connection.
Those years had produced the marriage that followed them in the way that difficult things sometimes produce their opposites by establishing the terms on which the opposite can be recognized when it arrives. She had known the difficult years fully. She had known the better years that followed them. She had been able to name the better years as the happiest time because she knew the full range of the comparison.
The difficult years were the necessary context for the years that were worth grieving for. Both were the marriage. Both were what she was describing when she sat in a room with a historian and a tape recorder 4 months after Dallas and said the words that the world would not hear for 50 years. She had told the truth.
The truth contained both. The difficult years and the best years were the same marriage. And the marriage was the thing she had lost. And the loss was proportional to what had been there. If this video gave you something to think about, leave a like and subscribe. There is always more to the story.
