15 Weird Facts About Jackie Kennedy's Relationship With William Walton

He was the friend who never wanted anything from her.
In a life organized around the management of who had access and what they were permitted to see, Jacqueline Kennedy's friendship with William Walton — the painter and journalist and Washington figure who had been one of JFK's closest friends before the marriage and who had become, across the Kennedy years and the decades that followed, one of Jackie's most trusted and most consistently present companions — was the friendship that asked the least of her and gave the most.
He was not a diplomat seeking her influence. He was not a journalist seeking her account. He was not a political figure seeking the specific and considerable asset of her association. He was a painter — a genuine one, who took the work seriously and who had built a career in the New York and Washington art worlds that was entirely his own — and a man of genuine warmth and genuine intelligence who had found in both JFK and Jackie the specific quality of intellectual and personal companionship that his own character most valued.
He was also, in the specific and private sense that mattered most to Jackie, safe. In a world full of people who wanted something from her, William Walton wanted only the friendship. The wanting of only the friendship was the rarest and the most valuable quality available in the world she inhabited.
She had trusted him completely. For the rest of her life.
Here are fifteen of the most significant and least told facts about the friendship that sustained her through the worst of everything.