15 Weird Facts About Jackie Kennedy's Private Dinner Parties

15 Weird Facts About Jackie Kennedy's Private Dinner Parties The state dinners she organized were the most celebrated official meals in American history. Nobody talks about the dinners she gave for herself. The state dinners are in the record. The menus are preserved. The guest lists are documented. The diplomatic significance of what was served and to whom has been analyzed extensively by everyone from food writers to historians of the Kennedy administration. The state dinner was a professional event and it was treated as one, and the professional record of it is complete. The private dinner parties are almost entirely absent from the public record, and they were, in every account from the people who attended them, considerably more interesting. She gave small dinners. Six people, eight at most. The food was simple and genuinely good, not because she was being modest but because simplicity done correctly was her actual standard for what a dinner should be. The conversation was real — not the managed diplomatic engagement of the official table but the specific, direct, sometimes uncomfortable conversation of people who were interesting and who knew each other well enough to say what they actually thought. She was the most elegant host in America and her favorite dinner parties had nobody performing elegance for anyone. Here are fifteen weird facts about the private dinner parties of Jacqueline Kennedy.