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conceded, “or put his arm around me—that was naturally just distasteful to him.” Even when campaign aides asked Jack and Jackie to put their arms around each other for the cameras, JFK refused. “He wouldn’t be fake in any way,” Jackie said. “People just don’t understand him.”
    Long before Jack and Jackie were a couple, Jack’s friend and Senate colleague George Smathers of Florida noted that JFK “absolutely hated to be touched. If you put your hand on his shoulder, he would literally pull away. He just wasn’t brought up in a family where there was a lot of hugging and that sort of thing. It just made him terribly uncomfortable. It wasn’t like he could help himself. Jackie eventually broke through the wall, but it took her a long, long time.”
    Like Jack, Jackie grew up watching her parents treat each other with icy indifference. And, along with most members of her generation and her class, she viewed egregious displays of affection in public places as gauche.
    “Jackie was a very self-contained person, especially in the White House,” said Kennedy family photographer and close friend Jacques Lowe. “She very much lived her own life, as much as she was allowed to. Jack certainly wasn’t jumping into bed with her every night. But when they were both there, they made time for each other.”
    White House social secretary Letitia “Tish” Baldrige, who had known Jackie since when they were both students at Miss Porter’s School for Girls, in Farmington, Connecticut, insisted their day-to-day relationship was poignant. “Maybe they weren’t always madly ‘at’ one another,” Baldrige said, “but there were plenty of tender moments when I would catch him putting his arm around her waist, or she’d lean her head on his shoulder . . .”
    Throughout the day, Jack would find wry memos Jackie had planted around the White House to lift his spirits. “He’d read one of these little notes,” Baldrige said, “and burst out laughing. It was their private joke.”
    If Jack’s back was preventing him from falling asleep, Jackie would walk into the closet between their rooms and put the cast recording of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot on the “old Victrola.” In the role of King Arthur, Richard Burton belted out the president’s favorite line at the very end of the album: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment . . .”
    Indeed, even as JFK coped with one domestic and international crisis after another, the public perception of life in the Kennedy White House was one of wit and charm wrapped in a glistening chrysalis of style.
    From their first triumphant European tour, when Jack introduced himself as “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris,” to the sixty-six glittering state occasions they presided over with regal aplomb, the vital young president and his queenly first lady were the closest thing America had to royalty. “When they appeared at the top of those stairs,” veteran Washington Star reporter Betty Beale said of the Kennedys’ entrances at state dinners and formal receptions, “they were a glorious-looking, stunning couple—almost beyond belief. It was more a royal court than an administration.”

    NO ONE OUTSIDE A HANDFUL of intimates knew about the drama that played out behind the scenes: about Jack’s failing health and reckless womanizing, or how the very public loss of a child seemed to bring the president and the first lady closer than they had ever been before.
    In reality, during their brief time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Jack and Jackie were working on clearing away the emotional obstacles in their path. Their afternoon naps—of which there were hundreds during the course of Kennedy’s presidency—proved at least a desire for closeness, for true intimacy. So did the daiquiris in the Yellow Oval Room, the casual lunches on trays and the quiet dinners with friends, the time spent with the