The day I climbed over Jackie Kennedy’s wall and snuck in to find her face down,

When the nation pictures Jackie Kennedy Onassis these days, it is often the image of the grieving First Lady that first springs to mind, head downcast, her pink Chanel suit stained by the blood of her murdered husband.

Or perhaps it’s a vision of the cool, impeccably dressed WASP: all oversized bug-eye sunglasses, Hermes scarves, Cartier Tank watch and Oleg Cassini suits.

But in his newly published, posthumous memoir, architect John Carl Warnecke paints a portrait of the beloved icon that reveals an unexpectedly playful – and downright sexy – side few were lucky enough to see.

Jackie and Warnecke met when he was chosen to design Lafayette Square, the celebrated seven-acre public park in Washington DC, in 1962.

But it wasn’t until the following year, after the president was assassinated in Texas, that they grew closer, working together to create JFK’s eternal flame memorial at Arlington.

They didn’t act on their feelings, he says, until the fall of 1964. But things moved fast, and by the end of that year, they were so in love, they were already discussing the prospect of marriage.

‘It could not be avoided,’ he wrote. ‘There was no doubt in Jackie’s mind that we should get married, and I was enough in love to be open to it. The question was when?’

However, Bobby Kennedy disapproved of the romance – or at least the timing of it.

‘Bobby, I was convinced, would not approve of Jackie marrying now,’ wrote Warnecke. ‘Considering the enormity of the national tragedy of Jack’s assassination, I agreed it was just too soon.’ 

So, while not yet an official couple, they spent as much time together as possible and, in 1966, they took their romance to Hawaii, where they enjoyed a kind of freedom they had never been able to enjoy in DC or New York. 

‘As soon as Jackie set foot in her Hawaiian house, which she had rented for a month, she phoned me,’ wrote Warnecke. ‘She asked me to come and see her place on the beach, about a mile south of my house.’

He decided to walk to her vacation home along the sand and, as he climbed over a low wall to get to the property, he spotted Jackie sunbathing.

‘There she was, lying face down on a large beach towel with an enormous straw hat covering her head. But, to my amazement, not a single piece of clothing covered the rest of her body. She was completely nude.

‘I took her by surprise and she gasped, but she could see I liked what I saw.

‘She looked beautiful and, of course, relieved that it was me and not a stranger who had discovered her basking in the tropical sunshine. She believed she was incognito and that she was protected by the wall.’

On another evening, they were planning to go out for dinner when she surprised him yet again with her uninhibited sexuality.

‘We may have had a drink or two before planning to go out to dinner,’ he wrote.

‘What I remember next is that the car was already out of the garage, pointing toward the road, when I slid behind the wheel and turned on the ignition. With my eyes fixed on the door, I waited for Jackie to come out of the house.

‘Suddenly, I was startled to realize that Jackie was already in the car, sitting in the back, smiling. But what amazed me most was that she did not have a stitch of clothing on. She was naked and smiling.’

They drove off in his convertible as Jackie sang out: ‘Free at last! Free at last!’

Warnecke wrote: ‘She had me in her power with all her beauty. She kept saying, “I’m all yours. All of me. I’m letting you know how much I love you.”‘

Later, he wrote: ‘We arrived at a beautiful spot at the edge of the sea that was ours alone – a private cul-de-sac near my house and the beach.

‘At last, surrounded by moonlight and the sounds of the nearby ocean, we laughed, then fully enjoyed the moment.’

While Jack Kennedy’s sexual escapades are part of his enduring mythology – chief among them his supposed affair with Marilyn Monroe – Jackie’s loves are a less gossiped about element of the Camelot legend.

And yet, in their 2025 biography of Kennedy’s chief advisor, authors Philip Taubman and William Taubman suggested that Jackie and Robert McNamara had a deep intellectual – and possibly romantic – connection.

Ed Klein, in his 1999 biography Just Jackie, also mentioned possible entanglements with her secret service detail, Clint Hill, the man who had swept her into the back of the presidential limousine that day in Dallas.

There were reports, too, of a one-night stand with actor Paul Newman, and a romance with a besotted former British ambassador David Ormsby-Gore.

But for Warnecke, whose affair with the former first lady lasted for around three years, the high point was that carefree summer in Hawaii.

‘I had another wonderful, romantic afternoon with Jackie on a remote beach in the northeastern part of the Island of Molokai,’ he wrote.

‘I had arranged for a private helicopter to land us on a secluded green pasture near a breathtakingly beautiful beach that was entirely our own as far as the eye could see.’

He described the lovestruck couple ‘lying in the sand, watching the waves and seagulls’ with no one else around for miles.

‘Soon, the power of love prevailed,’ he wrote, ‘and we both forgot where we were.’

They were on another deserted beach the following week when, he said, he was inexplicably tracked down by the Secret Service and given instructions to call Bobby Kennedy immediately.

‘It was before cell phones existed, so I went to the nearest ranch that had a phone.’

Kennedy’s question, related to a job Warnecke was overseeing at Bobby and Ethel’s Hickory Hill estate, seemed spurious.

‘He was enraged and had called me because he was all worked up over the budget,’ wrote Warnecke. ‘Or was he?

‘In retrospect, I often wondered how Bobby could have found me.’

Whether or not Kennedy had hoped to dampen their passion ultimately proved irrelevant.

By the time the loved-up couple returned to the US shortly after, Warnecke discovered he had neglected his business and was now $1 million in debt – the equivalent of nearly $10m today.

He told Jackie, and promised he still loved her, but his priority had to be rebuilding the architecture firm. 

‘My disclosure took her totally by surprise. It came as quite a blow to both of us. I told her of my disappointment in failing to meet her expectations and expressed my frustration at not being able to travel across the country as often until I turned the firm around again.

‘Even worse, I had to admit, I didn’t know how long it would take. Our romance now had a harsh new reality hovering over it.’

The news was the death knell for their affair and, by the time the Greek shipping billionaire Aristotle Onassis had set his sights on the Kennedy widow, Warnecke knew he’d lost her.

But the pair remained friends, and on one occasion when they ran into each other in Paris in the mid-1970s, she confided that marrying Onassis had been the worst mistake of her life.

Warnecke went on to build the biggest architectural firm in the US, responsible for the Hawaii State Capitol and the AT&T building in New York City, among many other significant structures. He married his second wife, Grace Kennan, in 1969, though they later parted ways.

More than a decade after their love affair ended, he joked to Jackie that he was still saving himself for her.  

Warnecke died in April 2010, but his daughter, Margo Warnecke Merck, promised him she would see his memoir published, and has spent the intervening years editing the thousands of pages he wrote about his life, career and secret, passionate love affair. 

‘Why at the time did I decide to keep to myself for so many years certain aspects of the private life we both sought for each other?’ he asked himself in those papers. ‘Because it was ours alone and no one else’s. By cherishing the bond we formed and by keeping it private, we could genuinely be ourselves.

‘If Jackie were still alive, what I have written about our love affair and described about our relationship would never have been written.’

His reason for finally revealing his secrets, he said, was to show Jackie for the woman she really was: a ‘very real, normal human being.’

‘She was very intuitive and had great determination, courage and spirit,’ he wrote. ‘Yet, with that marvelous sense of humor she possessed by this time in her mid-thirties, she enjoyed all that life offered as a person and as a woman.’

Camelot’s Architect: The Untold Story of Jackie Kennedy, Lafayette Square, and a Secret Romance by John Carl Warnecke is published by the Warnecke Architectural Archives.