Jacqueline Kennedy stood on the deck of Air Force One while her husband's blood was still staining her dress. Within 24 hours she had planned a state funeral watched by the entire world. Within two weeks she had moved herself and her children out of the White House, while quietly shaping how history would remember John F. Kennedy for the next hundred years.
What the cameras did not capture was what happened in the months and years that followed. She painted alone at four in the morning because she could not sleep. She called her sister in the middle of the night. While contemplating ending her own life, she asked a priest whether she would see Jack in the afterlife if she did. Eight years later she slipped secretly back into the White House and made them promise not to take any photographs.
These are 15 strange facts about Jackie Kennedy after the death of John F. Kennedy.
She began packing up the White House the day after the assassination. On the morning after Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Jacqueline Kennedy returned to the White House. She had spent the night at Bethesda Naval Hospital while doctors performed the official autopsy. When she returned in the early hours of November 23, 1963, she did not rest. By that evening she had asked her staff to begin packing their belongings.
President Johnson and Lady Bird had repeatedly assured her that she was not in a hurry and that no one was pressuring her to leave quickly. The offer of time and patience was genuine, but Jackie did not accept it. She requested that boxes be brought within two days of the funeral and began personally supervising the removal of her family's possessions.
She was also quietly arranging one final task: removing the bodies of her two infant children, lost with John Kennedy through miscarriage and premature birth, from their original graves and reburying them beside their father at Arlington National Cemetery. On December 6, 1963, exactly two weeks after the assassination, the Kennedy family left the White House. The speed and organization of the operation were exceptional by any measure.
She refused to change her bloodstained suit for twenty hours. When Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the 36th president of the United States aboard Air Force One at Love Field in Dallas on the afternoon of November 22, 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy stood beside him. She was still wearing the pink wool suit she had put on that morning, stained with her husband's blood.
She was offered a change of clothes before the swearing-in ceremony but refused. According to witnesses, she said she wanted them to see what they had done, with "they" most likely referring to those she believed responsible for the killing. The suit served as her testimony, worn before the cameras at the moment the transfer of presidential power was formalized. It was a deliberate act; she understood exactly what the image would convey.
She wore the suit for the rest of that day and into the following morning, roughly twenty hours in total. When she finally changed, the suit was set aside. It was sent to the National Archives before July 1964. It was never cleaned. It is preserved in a sealed, acid-free container in a windowless room in College Park, Maryland.
She designed John Kennedy's funeral herself, inspired by Abraham Lincoln's funeral, within hours of the assassination. While still at Bethesda Naval Hospital waiting for the autopsy to conclude, Jacqueline Kennedy began planning her husband's state funeral. She did not delegate the task to anyone; she oversaw it personally.
From the hospital on the night of November 22, she decided the funeral would mimic Abraham Lincoln's 1865 state funeral as closely as possible. She requested the same black draped catafalque that had held Lincoln's coffin in the Capitol rotunda, which was in storage and was brought out for the occasion. She specified that Kennedy's coffin be carried on a horse-drawn caisson, as Lincoln's had been. She ordered that the procession walk on foot from the White House to the cathedral, a distance of eight city blocks, rather than ride in cars. She chose the black riderless horse with reversed stirrups, a traditional symbol of the fallen warrior.
Secret Service agents were anxious about the walking procession, in the aftermath of an assassination whose perpetrator was not yet fully understood. Having dozens of heads of state walk through an open street in Washington was a security nightmare. But Jackie was undeterred and walked at the front of the procession herself. The televised funeral, watched by hundreds of millions around the world, became one of the most viewed events in media history.
She invented the Camelot myth. A week after the assassination, on a stormy night on November 29, 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy summoned journalist Theodore White to the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. White had written a famous account of John Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign. He was trusted and, more importantly, friendly.
Jackie spoke with White for four hours. According to his account, she was perfectly calm. She steered the conversation with a clear purpose. She wanted history to remember John Kennedy's presidency as a magical, unrepeatable moment. She wanted that image fixed in the public mind before political analysts and historians could establish a less glowing one.
The image she chose came from a Broadway musical that John Kennedy adored. She told White that her husband's favorite lines were from the closing song of "Camelot." "Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot." White wrote the piece in 45 minutes in a servant's room in the compound. Life magazine editors, pressing the presses at $30,000 an hour in overtime costs, objected that the Camelot references were too many. Jackie was in the room when White called to dictate the story. She shook her head, rejecting the suggestion to reduce the references, and kept them as they were. In the December 6, 1963, issue of Life, the Camelot metaphor was presented to the world, and it has never left.
She could not sleep, so she painted watercolors alone until four in the morning. In the months following the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy suffered from severe insomnia. She could not sleep at her mother's home in Newport, Rhode Island, where she stayed during that first dark winter. She developed a nightly ritual that those close to her noticed and later described in detail.
Unable to remain still, she would come down to the living room in the middle of the night, set up an easel in a corner, and open the French windows to let in the cold air from the bay. She would wrap herself in a robe and paint watercolors, working alone in near-total silence until about four in the morning. Then she would return upstairs and try to sleep, sometimes with the help of sedatives. Even so, sleep did not come fully on most nights.
When biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli described the post-traumatic stress Jackie experienced, the term now used to describe what she was suffering in 1963 and 1964, the nighttime painting sessions were part of the portrait he drew of a woman trying to overcome deep trauma by every means available to her. She maintained exceptional composure during the assassination, the hospital, the swearing-in, the funeral, and her departure from the White House. At night, the composure she held during the day collapsed.
She drank heavily, took pills, and admitted suicidal thoughts to a priest. In the months following the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy's private condition was far worse than the calm public figure the world watched. According to biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli, drawing on accounts from those close to her at the time, she cried constantly, could not sleep except with sedatives, drank heavily, and began talking about wanting to die.
Jackie consulted a Catholic priest named Father McSorley about a specific theological question: whether she would see Jack in the afterlife if she ended her life. She was not speaking abstractly. Her sister Lee Radziwill became so alarmed by these conversations that she rushed to Jackie's apartment on at least one occasion after a phone call in which Jackie said she wanted to take pills and vodka and not wake up. Lee removed everything she could find that might be used for that purpose.
In time, Jackie underwent psychotherapy and stopped drinking and taking pills entirely by the late 1960s. Taraborrelli later described her stopping as a defining trait of this woman. She made her decision and that was the end of it. But the period between November 1963 and the late 1960s was more fragile and desperate than almost anyone outside her immediate family knew.
She blamed herself for not reacting quickly enough to save him. Among the most painful aspects of Jacqueline Kennedy's grief in the years after the assassination was an internal conviction that she bore some responsibility for what happened. Not from a logical or realistic standpoint, but from psychological shock, she returned again and again to the question of whether she could have done something differently.
She told journalist Theodore White, during an interview just one week after the Dallas assassination, that she had been looking away at the moment the first shot was fired and that she had turned toward the crowd. She told White that she kept holding his head, trying to keep his brains from coming out. The precise details she shared with complete calm only seven days after the event were deeply affecting for White and for the historians and biographers who later read his notes.
She also told those close to her that she believed if she had been a little closer to one side, she would have been the victim instead of him. This feeling, the idea that she had survived something she should not have survived, became part of the burden she carried. Biographers who interviewed people from her inner circle described her as someone who never fully accepted the idea that she had done nothing wrong that day in Dallas, even though every logical understanding of the event made clear she could have done nothing.
Jacqueline Kennedy turned down three ambassadorial posts offered by President Lyndon Johnson. In the weeks following the assassination, President Johnson was looking for ways to help Jacqueline Kennedy and honor her husband's memory. He had enormous political resources at his disposal and wanted to use them. Among what he offered Jackie was an ambassadorship.
His first offer was to France. He knew she spoke fluent French, had studied in Paris, and had close ties to French culture, and that a diplomatic post there would give her a meaningful role and protection from the press in a country where she was genuinely admired. She declined. Johnson then offered her an ambassadorship to Mexico, which she also declined. Then he offered her a post in the United Kingdom, which she declined again.
She did succeed in securing one specific request from Johnson in those early days after the assassination. She asked him to rename the Florida space center after her husband. Within a week of the assassination, the Cape Canaveral launch facility was renamed the John F. Kennedy Space Center. The change reflected Jackie's determination to link her husband's name to established American institutions whenever she could. Later, she publicly praised Johnson for his kindness to her during that period, although her private views of him, as revealed years later in her sealed oral history recordings, were far less kind.
She returned the painting she loved most to the museum because it hurt too much. During the Kennedy years in the White House, Jacqueline Kennedy arranged for six watercolors by American artist John Singer Sargent to be loaned from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She placed them in the family sitting room on the second floor, the room where she and John F. Kennedy spent their evenings, where the children played on the floor, and where they sat with close friends away from the formal White House atmosphere.
After the assassination, she moved from the White House to Georgetown and asked the museum to loan four of the six Sargent paintings. In December 1963, she wrote a personal letter to the museum describing the room as the only room in the White House that was our happy private sitting room, and said she remembered those paintings when recalling her happiest memories with her husband sitting in his favorite chair with the Sargent paintings above his head.
Three months later, she wrote to the museum again, telling them she could no longer live with them. The paintings that had represented happiness were now bound up with loss. She returned them, and the museum kept them. Years later, the story of the loan and the return became part of a broader exhibition about art and the Kennedy presidency. The detail was small, but it embodied something important. Grief was not abstract; it was tied to specific objects, specific rooms, specific paintings on walls, and sometimes the only way to survive was to return them.
Bobby Kennedy became the closest person to her heart. After President Kennedy's assassination, the person Jacqueline Kennedy relied on most was not a family member, an old friend, a therapist, or an adviser. It was Robert Kennedy, the president's younger brother and the attorney general of the United States.
Bobby and Jackie had always been close, but the assassination transformed the relationship into what many who followed events closely described as the most prominent emotional bond in both their lives in the years that followed. He had accompanied Jackie to the hospital during a miscarriage years earlier, not John Kennedy. He became a surrogate father to Caroline and John Jr. after the assassination, visiting their apartment, taking them on outings, and maintaining a presence in their lives beyond mere duty.
When Robert Kennedy was shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in June 1968, after winning the California Democratic presidential primary, Jackie's reaction was not just grief but terror. She had now witnessed the assassination of two Kennedy men. She told those close to her that she feared what America might do to her children later. Her fear for her children's safety, and her conviction that the country was no longer safe for her family, became one of the main reasons she agreed to marry Aristotle Onassis only months later.
She left Washington because the city became unbearable. After leaving the White House on December 6, 1963, Jackie and her children first moved to a borrowed house in Georgetown, just a few buildings from the home she had shared with John Kennedy before the presidency. The plan was to stay in Washington. She had friends there. The children were in school there. It seemed logical.
But it did not work. Washington was full of reminders. The city was closely tied to everything she had lived through there. Wherever she went, she was recognized, stared at, and treated as a symbol of national mourning rather than a human being trying to live her life. The Georgetown house also attracted large crowds outside, with people standing on the sidewalk just to see whether she would come out. She could not move through the city without it becoming a major event.
By the summer of 1964, she decided to leave. She moved to New York City, to a 15-room apartment at 1045 Fifth Avenue on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Ironically, New York gave her more privacy than Washington. She could walk in Central Park, shop on Madison Avenue, and move through the city with a normalcy the capital would not allow. She spent the rest of her life in that apartment. She never lived in Washington again.
She received more than 800,000 condolence letters. In the weeks and months following the assassination, the mail arriving for Jacqueline Kennedy was unprecedented in American postal history. Letters came from across the United States and from countries around the world. By the time the count was complete, she had received more than 800,000 condolence letters.
She took these letters seriously. She did not simply respond with a form letter and move on; she worked with her team to respond personally to as many as possible. She also appeared on television on January 14, 1964, speaking from the attorney general's office, where she thanked the American people directly for the letters she had received and said the nation's love for her late husband was her source of support. This appearance was among the few public appearances she made during her year of mourning.
The sheer volume of letters showed the scale of grief that had settled over the country in those months, and it also represented an enormous practical burden on Jackie and her small team. She was managing the largest volume of unsolicited correspondence in American history while simultaneously dealing with her own post-traumatic stress, her children's grief, the move, the Manchester book arrangements, the oral history recordings with Schlesinger, and hundreds of other tasks imposed on her by the role of the president's widow. The letters were just one more burden, and she handled it thoroughly.
Jacqueline Kennedy returned to the White House secretly only once in her life. After leaving the White House on December 6, 1963, she did not return for eight years. She declined an invitation to attend the dedication of the White House Rose Garden named in her honor in April 1965. She declined all subsequent invitations and privately stated that she did not believe she could bear it.
In 1970, artist Aaron Shikler completed the official White House portraits of both Jacqueline and President Kennedy, commissioned by the White House Historical Association. When President Nixon and his wife Pat scheduled the public unveiling of the portraits for February 5, 1971, Pat Nixon wrote to Jackie personally. Jackie replied with a letter asking whether she and her children could slip in quietly beforehand to see the portraits privately, without any press, ceremony, or photographs.
Pat Nixon arranged everything, and a small military plane was sent to New York. On February 3, 1971, Jackie, Caroline, and John Jr. arrived at the South Lawn at 5:30 p.m. Only the president, the first lady, their daughters Tricia and Julie, the head usher, and the curator knew about the visit. No photographs were taken. The press was not informed until after they left. Jackie later wrote to Pat Nixon: "The day I always dreaded turned out to be one of the most precious ones I have spent with my children." Jackie never returned there again.
Jackie edited the journalist's article directly by phone while he dictated it. When Theodore White was dictating his Camelot article to Life magazine editors in the early hours of November 30, 1963, he was doing so by telephone from the servants' quarters at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. Jackie was nearby. She could hear the conversation when the editors told White they thought the Camelot references were too many and suggested reducing them. White noted that Jackie, who was following the conversation, shook her head clearly. The Camelot imagery stayed as it was.
Jackie also edited the printed version of the article before White's call, adding a line in pencil after the Camelot quote that read: "And it will never be that way again." She wrote these words twice in the manuscript, once at the end of the Camelot paragraph and once at the end of the article. White himself later described himself as Jackie's instrument in revealing the myth. He acknowledged that the article was not his journalistic work alone but the product of collaboration with Jackie as a partner in direction.
White donated his handwritten notes from the interview to the Kennedy Library in 1969, stipulating that they remain sealed until one year after Jackie's death. She died in May 1994. Her notes were published in May 1995, revealing in her own handwriting the extent of her contribution to the writing of the Camelot story.
She told someone she expected to spend the rest of her life waiting for it to end. Among the most affecting statements Jacqueline Kennedy made in the aftermath of the assassination was what she said to those closest to her in those first difficult months. She said she believed her life was over and that she would spend what remained of it waiting for the end.
This statement reflected the depth of what she was carrying. She was 34 years old when John Kennedy was assassinated. She lived another 30 years, during which she built a career as a book editor, raised two children who became remarkable adults, traveled, read, and eventually found something close to contentment with her companion Maurice Tempelsman in the final years of her life. She did not actually spend 30 years waiting to die.
She lived a life richer than that statement suggested, but the grief never entirely left her. Her biographer, J. Randy Taraborrelli, wrote that near the end of her life, even after more than thirty years of managing the aftermath of what happened in Dallas, Jackie told someone close to her how unfortunate it was to spend all that time tormented by something she could not change. She also said that perhaps this was what John Kennedy deserved, that she would never get over it.
She died in May 1994 at the age of 64, surrounded by her children and loved ones. In the end, she did not merely wait. She did far more than that. Jacqueline Kennedy spent the thirty years after Dallas as one of the most famous women in the world, while managing something almost none of those watching her could see. The grief, the insomnia, the nighttime painting sessions, the emergency calls to her sister, and the trip to the White House that had to be conducted in complete secrecy because she did not trust herself to hold together in public. She was calm on the day she fell apart in private, and then she gradually regained her balance.