Jackie Kennedy Interviews Released After 47 Years

Jaqueline Kennedy is forever enduring in the national memory for her poise, grace, and impeccable style. But little is known about how she really felt about her years in the White House and of her relationship with President John F. Kennedy. Now, the world is privy to rare details of the presidency and private life thanks to an oral history of the president, conducted with the widowed First Lady in early 1964, just months after his assassination.

The 8.5-hour-long series of audio interviews, as well as transcripts, are being released this week as a book entitled “Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy.” The interviews were conducted by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a historian and Kennedy aide who was close to the family.  She agreed to the interviews on condition that they would not be released until long after her death. Previously locked up in the Kennedy Library, the tapes are being released 47 years after they were first conducted. They're chock-full of juicy gossip and surprising details of the iconic couple's life.

The New York Times recounts some of the most scintillating details from the interview, describing Jackie as delivering “tart commentary on former presidents, heads of state, her husband's aides, powerful women, women reporters, even her mother-in-law.” Jackie Kennedy also reserved some sharp criticisms for world leaders 

She recalls her husband's scathing words about his Texan Vice-President, Lyndon Johnson, whom he reluctantly made his number two because of the need for a Southerner to balance the ticket. "Jack said it to me sometimes. He said, 'Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon were president?"' she said.

She also strongly criticised Dr King, recalling how her brother-in-law, US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, told her the civil rights leader had been intoxicated at JFK's funeral and mocked Cardinal Richard Cushing's Mass. She said: "He made fun of Cardinal Cushing and [Robert] said that he was drunk at it. I can't see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, that man's terrible."
During the eight hours of recordings, she also spoke of secret FBI wiretaps of a hotel suite occupied by Dr King the night before his historic speech which revealed he telephoned women to invite them to a sex party. The surveillance tapes, made by FBI chief J Edgar Hoover, remain sealed by court order until 2027.

In another passage, she said her husband’s speech writer Ted Sorensen had a “big inferiority complex” and Clare Booth Luce, the playwright and Republican politician, was quite possibly a “lesbian”.

She reserved sharp criticism for world leaders, too. French President Charles de Gaulle was "that egomaniac" and "that spiteful man", while future Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was a "bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman".

She recalled that her closest moments with her husband came during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the US and Soviet Union seemed on the brink of nuclear war. Some officials had sent their wives away, but the first lady resisted.  "If anything happens, we're all going to stay right here with you," she remembers telling her husband. "Even if there's not room in the bomb shelter in the White House. I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do, too - than live without you."

Jackie Kennedy also recalled how her husband joked darkly about being assassinated after discussing Abraham Lincoln's legacy with a Princeton historian. JFK had asked the academic if Lincoln would have been rated as great a president if he had not been killed. The historian replied that was unlikely since Lincoln's reputation would ultimately have suffered while tackling the problem of post-Civil War reconstruction.

The former first lady said: "And then I remember Jack saying after the Cuban missile crisis, when it all turned [out] so fantastically, he said, 'Well, if anyone's ever going to shoot me, this would be the day they should do it.'"