In the early days of the Cuban missile crisis, before the world knew that the Cold War seemed to be sliding toward nuclear conflict, President John F. Kennedy telephoned his wife, Jacqueline, at their weekend house in Virginia. From his voice, she would say later, she could tell that something was wrong. Why don't you come back to Washington? he asked, without explanation.
“From then on, it seemed there was no waking or sleeping,” Jacqueline Kennedy recalls in an oral history scheduled to be released on Wednesday, 47 years after the interviews were conducted. When she learned that the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba aimed at American cities, she begged her husband not to send her away.
The seven-part interview conducted in early 1964 one of only three that Kennedy gave after her husband's assassination is being published as a book titled “Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy” and an audio recording. The book will be published by Hyperion. In it, the young widow speaks with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the historian and Kennedy aide, about her husband's presidency, their marriage, and her role in his political life.
They do not discuss his death. The eight and a half hours of interviews had been kept private at the request of Kennedy, who never spoke publicly about those years again before she died in 1994.
The transcript and recording, obtained by The New York Times , offer an extraordinary immersion in the thoughts and feelings of one of the most enigmatic figures of the second half of the 20th century the woman who, as much as anyone, helped shape a heroic narrative of the Kennedy years. Though the interviews seem unlikely to redraw the contours of President Kennedy, they are packed with intimate observations and insights of the sort that historians treasure.
At just 34, and in what her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, describes in a foreword to the book as “the extreme stages of grief,” Kennedy displays a cool self-possession and a sharp, somewhat unforgiving eye. In her distinctive breathy cadences, an intimate tone and the impeccable diction of women of her era and class, she delivers tart commentary on former Presidents, heads of state, her husband's aides, powerful women, women reporters, even her mother-in-law.
Charles DeGaulle, French President, is “that egomaniac”. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is “a phony” whom electronic eavesdropping has found arranging encounters with women. Indira Gandhi, the future Prime Minister of India, is “a real prune bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman”.
Any shortcomings on the part of her husband are not mentioned. She speaks of his loyalty, sensitivity, courage traits consistent with the Camelot template she had been the first to invoke. She presents herself as adoring, eager for his approval and deeply moved by the man. There is no talk of his extramarital affairs or secret struggle with Addison's disease, though she does speak in detail about his back pain and the 1954 back surgery that almost killed him.
On the subject of her marriage, she presents herself in many ways as a traditional wife one year after the publication of “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan had helped inspire a wave of rethinking of that role.
Her marriage, she remarks, was “rather terribly Victorian or Asiatic”. Her aim was to provide “a climate of affection and comfort and détente” and the children in good moods. She suggests the couple never really had a fight. She insists she got her opinions from her husband. On that last point, at least, Michael Beschloss, the historian, who was enlisted to write an introduction and annotations to the book, said in an interview, “I would take that with a warehouse of salt.”
Recalling a trip to India and Pakistan with her sister, Lee Radziwill, in 1962, Kennedy says she was so appalled by what she considered to be the gaucherie of the newly appointed United States Ambassador to Pakistan, Walter McConaughy, that, before even completing her descent from the Khyber Pass, she wrote a letter to her husband alerting him to “what a hopeless Ambassador McConaughy was for Pakistan, and all the reasons and all the things I thought the Ambassador should be.” — New York Times News Service
