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Along with the unforeseeable misfortunes—Jack's near-fatal illness, Jackie's two miscarriages—the Kennedys had some basic areas of incompatibility, and both were vigorous, determined individuals with emphatic tastes. Jack was a meat-and-potatoes man; Jackie favored the haute cuisine of France. Her arty friends bored him (on one occasion, when the lively arts dominated the dinner conversation, Jack simply left the table and retired early). The Senator thrived on large crowds of people; his lady preferred intimate groups of close friends. Jack read American history; Jackie wolfed down four or five novels, ranging from Colette to Kerouac, a week. They bought an estate at McLean, Va.—and soon discovered it was a mistake. Commuting to the Senate, Jack was frustrated by the 20-minute rush-hour traffic jams at Chain Bridge. "I was alone almost every weekend while Jack traveled the country making speeches," says Jackie. "It was all wrong." In the gossipy circle they moved in, it was an open secret that the Kennedys' married life was far from serene.
"The Way It Should Be." Some time before their third anniversary, Jack and Jackie Kennedy had a searching reappraisal of their problems. Concessions—many of them minor, but all of the sort that can make a difference over long periods of time—were made by each. Jack learned to like cheese and fruit for dessert. Jackie boned up on American history (and got an 89 on her final examination in a special course at Georgetown University), learned golf and water skiing. She has cut her smoking down to five cigarettes a day in deference to his wishes, and like Jack, will drink a daiquiri or old-fashioned before dinner. Under his wife's urgent supervision, Jack became a fastidious dresser, even went to art galleries to inspect pictures with her (he likes seascapes). Dinner parties became a ragout of mutual interests, with conversations ranging from the humanities at Jackie's end of the table to politics at Jack's. "The men all do talk most of the time," says Jackie. "But that's the way it should be. The women add something from time to time. You don't ring a bell and say, 'Now we are going to talk about books.' " By the time Caroline was born and they had settled in their comfortable Federal home in Georgetown, the Kennedys were well clear of the marital reefs.
In the larger bear hug of the Kennedy family, Jackie flatly refused to be smothered. After breaking an ankle at touch football, she resolutely withdrew from the family scrimmages. She firmly refused to attend the nightly family dinners at Hyannisport, where a dozen or more argumentative Kennedys were always in attendance ("Once a week is great. Not every night"). Last summer, during the Democratic Convention, she had a stockade fence erected around her Hyannisport home, as much to fence out the neighboring Kennedy small fry and animals as the prying public. The proof that she had won her intramural war of independence was evident on a recent cruise aboard Jack's sloop Victura, when Jack and the Radziwills sat with her in the stern, while she passed around oeufs en gelee and vin rosé from her hamper, and her Kennedy in-laws sprawled in the bow and lunched on peanut butter sandwiches and Cokes from a picnic basket.