In this Oct. 5, 1960 file photo, Jacqueline Kennedy poses at her typewriter where she writes her weekly Candidate's Wife column in her Georgetown home in Washington. President John F. Kennedy openly scorned the notion of Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson succeeding him in office, according to a book of newly released interviews with his widow, former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy. (AP/File)
Published: Sunday, September 18, 2011 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 12:55 p.m.
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 80s. But she was also nothing like the soft-spoken fashion icon of the three previous years. She was in her mid-30s, recently widowed, but dry-eyed and determined to set down her thoughts for history.
Kennedy met with historian and former White House aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in her 18th-century Washington house in the spring and early summer of 1964. At home and at ease, as if receiving a guest for afternoon tea, she chatted about her husband and their time in the White House. The young Kennedy children, Caroline and John Jr., occasionally pop in. On the accompanying audio discs, you can hear the shake of ice inside a drinking glass. 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 is coming out Wednesday as part of an ongoing celebration of the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's first year in office. Jacqueline Kennedy died in 1994, and Schlesinger in 2007.
The world, and Jacqueline Kennedy, would change beyond imagination after 1964. But at the time of these conversations blacks were still "Negroes" and feminists were still suspect even in the view of a woman as sophisticated as Kennedy, who a decade later would grant an interview to Gloria Steinem's "Ms." magazine. In the book's foreword, Caroline Kennedy faults Schlesinger for asking so few questions about her mother.
As historian Michael Beschloss notes in the introduction, Jacqueline Kennedy 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 and preferred the more effete Adlai Stevenson.
There are no spectacular revelations in the Schlesinger discussions and virtually nothing about JFK's assassination. Kennedy's health problems and his extra-marital affairs were still years from public knowledge and from the knowledge of aides such as Schlesinger, who would often say he saw no "bimbos" in the White House halls. Jacqueline Kennedy speaks warmly throughout of her husband, remembering him as dynamic and perceptive and free of grudges, an assignment his wife and others took on for him.
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.
She was especially hard on Lyndon Johnson, who had competed bitterly with her husband for the presidency in 1960 and became vice president through the kind of hard calculation that the Kennedys became known for: Johnson was from Texas and the Democrats needed a Southerner to balance the ticket. Once in office, Johnson's imposing personal style and reluctance to speak up during cabinet meetings alienated the Kennedys. They mocked his accent and his manners, while he resented the Kennedys and other "Harvards" he believed looked down on him.
"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 recalled. "And Bobby told me that he'd had some discussions with him ... do something to name someone else in 1968."
Her closest moments with her husband came during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the United States 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 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."