Hype alert: The remarks aren’t that shocking — catty, perhaps — and the leaks are part of a calculated rollout for the book, “Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy,” which will be released Wednesday.
“If people are looking for revelations about her, they will not find them,” said Carl Anthony, one of the country’s leading experts on first ladies. “What I think they reveal is an unerring, all-observing eye.”
Four months after her husband’s assassination, the 34-year-old widow sat down with author Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who recorded hours of interviews intended as an oral record of her time in the White House. The tapes were sealed until Caroline Kennedy decided to release the transcripts, along with an audio recording, on the 50th anniversary of her father’s presidency.
In her distinctive, girlish voice, the former first lady presents her husband in heroic terms and herself as a devoted wife and mother with no political influence. But she makes some sharp, unsparing observations about leading figures of the day.
John and Jackie Kennedy, 1961. (John Rous/Associated Press) She says JFK didn’t want Johnson to follow him in office: “He said, ‘Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?’” She calls King “a phony,” DeGaulle an “egomaniac” and Indira Gandhi a “bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.”
The tapes aren’t likely to change perceptions about the Kennedy administration: the first lady’s remarks just add to the historical record. But they underscore that Jackie was smarter and more politically astute than she let on.
n the conversations, Kennedy, then 34 years old, also recalls her time in the White House with her husband, John F. Kennedy, as “our happiest years.”
The tapes, which have been kept under seal at the Kennedy Library, were released by Caroline Kennedy, who was editor of the book Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. The book comes out Wednesday as part of an ongoing celebration of the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s first year in office.
Conducted by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the historian and Kennedy friend and aide, the interviews capture both the intimacy and Cold War tensions at the Kennedy White House.
At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which triggered fears of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, Jacqueline Kennedy said she pleaded with her husband not to send her and their two children, Caroline and John Jr., away from the White House.
“Please don’t send me anywhere,” she recalled telling the president. “If anything happens, we’re all going to stay right here with you.”
Even if there wasn’t room in the White House bomb shelter, she said, she and the children wouldn’t leave.
“Please, then I just want to be on the lawn when it happens — you know — but I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do too — than live without you.”
Schlesinger did not ask about President Kennedy’s secret struggle with Addison’s disease or his extramarital affairs. In the book’s foreword, Caroline Kennedy faults Schlesinger for asking so few questions about her mother.
Among the highlights released by ABC for its program about the book, which airs Tuesday night:
On Johnson, Kennedy’s vice president who assumed the presidency after the assassination: He was elected president in 1964, but dropped out of the presidential race in 1968: “Bobby (Kennedy) told me this later, and I know Jack said it to me sometimes. He said, ‘Oh, God can you ever imagine what would happen if Lyndon was president?’
“He didn’t like that idea that Lyndon would go on and be president because he was worried for the country. Bobby told me that he’d had some discussions with him. I forget exactly how they were planning or who they had in mind. It wasn’t Bobby (who would, in fact, mount a presidential campaign until his assassination in 1968) but somebody. Do something to name someone else in ’68.”
♦ On King, who was secretly taped by the FBI during the civil rights movement: “I just can’t see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, that man’s terrible.”
She said the president “told me of a tape that the FBI had of Martin Luther King when he was here for the Freedom March. And he said this with no bitterness or anything, how he was calling up all these girls and arranging for a party of men and women, I mean, sort of an orgy in the hotel, and everything.”
Caroline Kennedy, in an interview with ABC, blames those remarks on “the poisonous activities” of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and says, “If you asked her what she thought of Martin Luther King overall — I mean she admired him tremendously.”
On John Kennedy crying after the failed CIA-backed invasion of Cuba in 1961: “He came back to the White House to his bedroom and he started to cry, just with me. . . . Just put his head in his hands and sort of wept. It was so sad, because all his first 100 days and all his dreams, and then this awful thing to happen. And he cared so much.”
On a White House discussion with Lincoln scholar David Donald: “The president asked, ‘Do you think would Lincoln have been as great a president if he’d lived?’ And Donald, really by going round and round and round, had agreed with him that Lincoln, you know, it was better, better for Lincoln that he died when he did.”
On his back pain: “Jack could never touch his toes. He couldn’t get his hands down any farther than his knees standing up.”
On religion: At night the president would say his prayers kneeling on the edge of the bed. “It was just like a little childish mannerism, I suppose like brushing your teeth or something,” the New York Times quotes her as saying. “But I thought that was so sweet. It used to amuse me so, standing there.”
She describes her husband as church-going but not without doubt: “I mean, he wasn’t quite sure, but if it was that way, he wanted to have that on his side.”
On naps: He would take a 45 minute rest daily, wearing pajamas.
On her marriage: She describes it as “rather terribly Victorian or Asiatic.”
She thought her duty was to create “a climate of affection and comfort and detente” — and keep the children in good moods.
On her image: A February 1962 televised tour of the White House restoration drew 80 million viewers on CBS and was a great PR coup, softening her public image. “Suddenly, everything that’d been a liability before — your hair, that you spoke French, that you didn’t just adore to campaign, and you didn’t bake bread with flour up to your arms — you know, everybody thought I was a snob and hated politics,” she says.
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