Jacqueline & Jack Kennedy Story Time: Romance + Wit
1. Edward Kennedy talked of his brother’s love for Jackie, saying, “My brother really was smitten with her right from the very beginning when he first met her at dinner. Members of the family knew right away that she was very special to him, and saw the developing of their relationship. I remember her coming up to Cape Cod at that time and involving herself in the life of the family. He was fascinated by her intelligence: they read together, pained together, enjoyed good conversation together and walks together.”
2. “Both loved books and presented them to one another as gifts. Both of them were writers…Both had lived abroad. Both ignored their wealth and made their own way in the world, among people who were not equally affluent. Both kept their personal lives to themselves." (Mini Rhea on how Jack and Jackie fit together so well.)
3. On Jackie’s trip to Paris, when she was supposed to be taking her mind away from Jack on her mother’s orders, "kept buying all these political books and telling me they were for her stepfather. I knew perfectly well they were for Jack. He loved Aldous Huxley, and so she had a whole suitcase full of him. He had asked her about marriage before we [Aileen and Jackie] left and she was having a very hard time making up her mind about whether she wanted to marry. After the coronation, we went over to Paris. We just went out, to bookstores, to antique stores, to the Louvre. I don’t think it was indecision about him. She was worried about being taken over by politics and another family, because she always wanted to be herself, and I think that losing her own personality was what she was most worried about.” (Aileen Bowdoin Train)
4. On the prospect of engagement while Jackie was away in England, Janet received a call from Jack: “He called me up from, I think, Cape Cod, the day she was flying back…I said,” She’s landing in New York and then flying down to Washington.“ He said, "That plane, I think, stops in Boston and I’m going to meet her there.” It was the first time that I felt that this was really a serious romance, at least on his part. I had suspected that Jackie cared a lot although she had never really said so because she is the sort of girl who covers her feelings.“
5. After their marriage, Jackie wanted to help Jack and be involved in the things he loved, chiefly politics. She packed him lunches, watched him give speeches with great delight, wrote his witty notes to send with the page boy, and helped him do research and answer mail. Many mornings, she drove jack to his office and stayed to help read through the Congressional Record for issues on educational programs. According to Dave powers, Jackie was "a perfectionist; anything she did, she wanted to do very well–and she became very, very good at it. That went for politics too. She worked logically, starting with what she did well. She was excellent with languages. She realized that she could help him with the ethnic mail that came into the Boston office from all over Massachusetts–Italians, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Polish.”
6. Jackie dealt with stress, change, and the impact of being First Lady through her humor and pen (writing and art). She tended to dash off humorous sketches of white house workers, people surrounding her, friends–and most infamously her husband was not spared the pen. She drew him on the road-washing his socks in a hotel bathroom- and another for their anniversary, which showed her putting face cream on at her dressing table while he moaned from under the sheets, “I demand my marital rights!”
7. Jackie would leave cartoons and limericks fro Jack in unexpected places to cheer him up when the nation’s affairs were going badly. She would arrange for a special treat–like Joe’s Stone Crabs from Miami–old friends would pay morale boosting calls at her prompting. Her most effective weapon was a surprise visit to his office with the children. And she labored more over his birthday celebrations than over nay state dinner. Many days she would be waiting by the elevator to help him when he emerged from it, dragging himself on crutches. (Letitia Baldrige)
8. Many aides and friends noticed how Jack lavished his focus on her. “He enjoyed her reaction when he surprised her in the family quarters by bringing up guests that she revered, like Robert Frost. On a photo of him and Jackie, he inscribed ‘For Mummy and Uncle Hugh D–with thanks for helping to create the best of half of this photograph.” He told one friend, “you have no idea what a help Jackie is to me, and what she has meant to me. Didn’t she look beautiful?” While the cost of her tastes often set him off, in fact, it was he who usually surprised her with gifts of the sort she cherished– a Renoir drawing, for example, was his first White House Christmas present to her. Arthur Schlessinger says “Jack loves picking out gifts for her; her birthdays would be a profusion of boxes from Keljman and drawings from Wildenstein.”
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