15 Weird Facts About How Jackie Kennedy Survived the Unsurvivable Twice

15 Weird Facts About How Jackie Kennedy Survived the Unsurvivable Twice Most people never have to survive the unsurvivable once. She survived it twice. The first time was November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three. The second time was June fifth, nineteen sixty-eight. Between those two dates, she had spent five years rebuilding herself from the ruins of the first unsurvivable event — had built the Camelot narrative, had organized the historical legacy, had moved from Washington to New York, had found a way to be present for her children and present in the world with the specific and sustained quality of the person who has decided that the keeping going is what the situation requires. And then the second unsurvivable event had arrived and she had been required to survive it again. The question of how Jacqueline Kennedy had survived — not merely endured, but genuinely survived in the sense of building a genuine life from the ruins of each catastrophic loss — is one of the most significant and one of the least fully examined questions in the biographical literature about one of the most examined lives in American history. It is not a question with a simple answer. The survival had not been the product of a single resource or a single strategy or a single quality of character. It had been the product of the specific and accumulated combination of everything she was — the intelligence, the composure, the children, the private practices, the intellectual resources, the specific and formed understanding of loss that the Greek tragic tradition had given her, the specific and irreducible quality of the private self that had survived every external assault because it had been built, from very early in the life, to be worth surviving. Here are fifteen of the most significant facts about how she did it.