NEW YORK: It’s a side of Jacqueline Kennedy only friends and family knew. Funny and inquisitive, canny and cutting.
In Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F Kennedy, the former first lady was not yet the jet-setting celebrity of the late 1960s, or the literary editor of the 1970s and 1980s. But she was also nothing like the softly-spoken fashion icon of the three previous years. She was in her mid-thirties, recently widowed, but dry-eyed and determined to set down her thoughts for history.
In the conversations she refers to France’s Charles de Gaulle, whom she had famously charmed on a visit to Paris, as “that egomaniac” and “that spiteful man”. Indira Gandhi, the future prime minister of India, was a “prune – bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman”.
She met historian and former White House aide Arthur M Schlesinger jr in her 18th-century Washington house in 1964. She chatted about her husband and their time in the White House. The young Kennedy children, Caroline and John jr, occasionally pop in. The tapes were to be sealed for decades and were among the last documents of her private thoughts. She never wrote a memoir and became a legend in part because of what we didn’t know.
The book comes out on September 14, 2011 as part of an ongoing celebration of the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s first year in office. Jacqueline died in 1994 and Schlesinger in 2007.
The world, and Jacqueline, would change beyond imagination after 1964. But at the time of these conversations, black people were still “Negroes” and feminists were still suspect even in the view of a woman as sophisticated as Jacqueline, who a decade later would grant an interview to Gloria Steinem’s Ms magazine.
As historian Michael Beschloss notes in the introduc-tion, Jacqueline once accepted that wives were defined by their husbands’ careers and worried about “emotional” women entering politics. She enjoyed having her husband “proud of her”, saw no reason to have a policy opinion that wasn’t the same as his and laughed at the thought of “violently liberal women” who disliked JFK.
“Jack so obviously demanded from a woman a relationship… where a man would be the leader and a woman be his wife and look up to him as a man,” she said.
There are no spectacular revelations in the discussions and practically nothing about JFK’s assassination. His health problems and his extramarital affairs were still years from public knowledge and from the knowledge of aides such as Schlesinger. Jacqueline speaks warmly throughout of her husband, remembering him as dynamic and perceptive and free of grudges.
Like any powerful family, the Kennedys had complicated relationships with those who shared their lives at the top. They valued loyalty, vision and ingenuity. They hated dullness, indecision and self-promotion, even among their own.
Jacqueline dismissed the idea that the eldest Kennedy son, Joseph jr, would have been president had he not been killed in World War II. “He would have been so unimaginative, compared to Jack,” she said.
She contrasted the integrity of Robert F Kennedy, the president’s brother and attorney general, with the designs of sister-in-law Eunice Kennedy Shriver.
Robert had begged JFK not to appoint him, fearing charges of nepotism.
Eunice, meanwhile, was anxious to see her husband, Sargent Shriver, named head of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
“Eunice was pestering Jack to death to make Sargent head of HEW because she wanted to be a cabinet wife,” she tells Schlesinger.
“You know, it shows you some people are ambitious for them-selves and Bobby wasn’t.”
Politics means doing business with people you otherwise avoid and Jacqueline logged in many hours. She endured dining with journalists and members of Congress who had all criticised her husband.
Historians have described Kennedy as unemotional and undemonstrative. But his widow recalls him lying on the floor with the kids, watching fitness instructor Jack LaLanne on TV. They would follow LaLanne’s moves and at times the president’s toes would touch with his son’s.
JFK “loved those children tumbling around him in this sort of – sensual is the only way I can think of it”.
Her closest moments with him came during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the US and the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of nuclear war.
She would lie down with him when he took a nap and walk with him, the two saying little, on the White House lawn. Some officials had sent their wives away, but the first lady resisted. Should the bombs fall, she wanted them to be together.
“If anything happens, we’re all going to stay right here with you,” she remembered telling her husband. – Sapa-AP