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1964 Jackie Kennedy interviews to be published


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Guest Robert Morrow

QUESTION: WAS ROBERT KENNEDY CONVINCED THAT LYNDON JOHNSON MURDERED JOHN KENNEDY?

I think RFK most definitely thought that.

1) There is an Arthur Schlesinger quote - which unfortunately I can not locate - where he says that for a while RFK was convinced that LBJ murdered JFK. I am still looking for this source. I think it is in one of Schelesinger's books.

2) Madeleine Brown spoke with the photographer of a famous photo of RFK and LBJ: it is the photo on p. 117 of her book. The photographer told Madeleine, that in the photo RFK hit a column and accused LBJ of killing JFK, saying something like "Why did you have my brother killed?"

3) Here is a third reason. And I apologize for having to keep this secret. A close friend of Jack Valenti made the comment that the reason Valenti and RFK hated each other was because everyone knew that Bobby thought that Lyndon Johnson had killed his brother JFK.

Again, I am sorry that I am not currently able to release the name of the person who said that, but he was a close friend of Jack Valenti. I will try to get this on the record and public one day.

So I think it was almost common knowledge among the RFK - LBJ insiders that RFK in the years post assassination suspected that Lyndon Johnson was behind the JFK assassination.

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Guest Robert Morrow

If Beschloss is the editor and making the notes, that is a bad sign.

As DOn Gibson showed, Beschloss did some real tampering in his two Taking Charge books about Johnson.

Michael Beschloss = CFR and that is a huge red flag in and of itself.

After that ABC press release, I am coming around to the belief that even in 2011, there is no way that ABC is going to put on national TV Jackie Kennedy talking about her adulterous love affairs AND her belief that LBJ killed JFK.

I have little doubt that Jackie indeed thought LBJ killed JFK.

But I severely doubt that ABC will put that stuff on the air, even if it is true and even if it is in the tapes.

Caroline Kennedy should post online the entire raw, uneditited tapes of Jackie's interviews.

Was it ABC or CBS who pulled the segment that Geraldo Rivera was going to show that something strange happened to Marilyn Monroe. And that Geraldo was going to suggest that Bobby Kenedy had something to do with her death. It was Roone Arledge, friend of Ethel Kennedy, who pulled the plug on it. Geraldo got mad and quit.

When 9/11 happened, Geraldo went on the air on CNBC and said, "Oswald killed President Kennedy from behind. There was no conspiracy." This was apropos to nothing brought up that night. He said this at the end of the show. The next week he announced that he was going to a different station as Foreign Correspondent. He was traveling to Afghanistan. In other words, he went to the other side. He's a phony and a member of Operation Mongoose. He's a CIA Media Asset.

I'll never forget Bianca Jagger. A man in Texas was being executed for rape/murder. Dozens of people were there. Geraldo asked Bianca Jagger about the case. She turned right around and answered to the camera about the prisoner being retarded and Texas should not execute this man. I just loved Bianca snubbing Geraldo Rivera.

Kathy C

Kathy, that quote of Geraldo Rivera is one a would love to see. Does anyone have a transcript of Geralda Rivera accepting the LHO lone nutter theory either on TV or in print or at any place or time?

I am not questioning this. I just want to see exactly what came out of Geraldo Rivera's mouth.

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I just read this on the website, and was going to make a comment.

This is real explosive material to hear that Jackie believes in a conspiracy with LBJ involved in that conspiracy.

I am looking forward to the documentary.

I do hope the interviews will be available unedited. I pre-ordered the serie on amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Jacqueline-Kennedy-Historic-Conversations-Life/dp/1401324258/ref=sr_1_39?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1312722793&sr=1-39

Unfortunately, with ABC involved, we can be pretty sure that no references to Jackie's believing in a conspiracy, much less one involving LBJ, will be allowed to remain in what is published and/or aired in the ABC special. We have learned from their ill-fated program on the JFK assassination that they firmly redux the WCR.

However, Jackie's refusal to change her clothes prior to being forced to be photographed with LBJ at his swearing in aboard AF1 speaks volumes. And of course, when asked why she refused to change to a nice clean white dress, she replied, "I want them to see what they have done."

We have.

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If Beschloss is the editor and making the notes, that is a bad sign.

As DOn Gibson showed, Beschloss did some real tampering in his two Taking Charge books about Johnson.

Michael Beschloss = CFR and that is a huge red flag in and of itself.

After that ABC press release, I am coming around to the belief that even in 2011, there is no way that ABC is going to put on national TV Jackie Kennedy talking about her adulterous love affairs AND her belief that LBJ killed JFK.

I have little doubt that Jackie indeed thought LBJ killed JFK.

But I severely doubt that ABC will put that stuff on the air, even if it is true and even if it is in the tapes.

Caroline Kennedy should post online the entire raw, uneditited tapes of Jackie's interviews.

Was it ABC or CBS who pulled the segment that Geraldo Rivera was going to show that something strange happened to Marilyn Monroe. And that Geraldo was going to suggest that Bobby Kenedy had something to do with her death. It was Roone Arledge, friend of Ethel Kennedy, who pulled the plug on it. Geraldo got mad and quit.

When 9/11 happened, Geraldo went on the air on CNBC and said, "Oswald killed President Kennedy from behind. There was no conspiracy." This was apropos to nothing brought up that night. He said this at the end of the show. The next week he announced that he was going to a different station as Foreign Correspondent. He was traveling to Afghanistan. In other words, he went to the other side. He's a phony and a member of Operation Mongoose. He's a CIA Media Asset.

I'll never forget Bianca Jagger. A man in Texas was being executed for rape/murder. Dozens of people were there. Geraldo asked Bianca Jagger about the case. She turned right around and answered to the camera about the prisoner being retarded and Texas should not execute this man. I just loved Bianca snubbing Geraldo Rivera.

Kathy C

Kathy, that quote of Geraldo Rivera is one a would love to see. Does anyone have a transcript of Geralda Rivera accepting the LHO lone nutter theory either on TV or in print or at any place or time?

I am not questioning this. I just want to see exactly what came out of Geraldo Rivera's mouth.

The show was called "Rivera Live." It went on at 9 pm on CNBC. It must have been late 2001. It was at the very end of the show. He had a man sitting to his right. I don't know who the man was, but it was here that Geraldo shook his head and said, "Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy from behind and killed him. There was no conspiracy." And he was shaking his head like the viewers were all a bunch of idiots. And then the next week he came in with the news that he was going to Afghanistan because he was "a reporter. I have to be where the action is."

Also he was on the news recently in NY where people were picketing about our country's complicity in 9/11. He went over and said to them, "Get a life."

CNBC is (or was) located in Fort Lee, NJ. Morton Downey Jr's show came from there for a time and so did Charles Grodin's. Geraldo lived down the shore and would take his boat up the Hudson River to go to work. Otherwise, CNBC carried business news.

Kathy C

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In Tapes, Candid Talk by Young Kennedy Widow

The New York Times

By JANNY SCOTT

September 12, 2011

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,” Mrs. Kennedy recalls in an oral history scheduled to be released 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. “If anything happens, we’re all going to stay right here with you,” she says she told him in October 1962. “I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do, too — than live without you.”

The seven-part interview conducted in early 1964 — one of only three that Mrs. Kennedy gave after Mr. Kennedy’s assassination — is being published as a book and an audio recording. 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 Mrs. 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 Mr. Kennedy or his presidency, 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,” Mrs. 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, the 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.”

The White House social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, Mrs. Kennedy tells Mr. Schlesinger, loved to pick up the phone and say things like “Send all the White House china on the plane to Costa Rica” or tell them they had to fly string beans in to a state dinner. She quotes Mr. Kennedy saying of Lyndon B. Johnson, his vice president, “Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?” And Mr. Kennedy on Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Charlatan is an unfair word,” but “he did an awful lot for effect.”

She suggests that “violently liberal women in politics” preferred Adlai Stevenson, the former Democratic presidential nominee, to Mr. Kennedy because they “were scared of sex.” Of Madame Nhu, the sister-in-law of the president of South Vietnam, and Clare Boothe Luce, a former member of Congress, she tells Mr. Schlesinger, in a stage whisper, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lesbians.”

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.

He was, she says, kind, conciliatory, forgiving, a gentleman, a man of taste in people, furniture, books. Fondly, she recalls him ever reading — while walking, dining, bathing, doing his tie. She remembers with amusement how he would change into pajamas for his 45-minute afternoon nap in the White House. She lets slip a reference to a “civilized side of Jack” and “sort of a crude side,” but she clarifies: “Not that Jack had the crude side.”

He wept in her presence a handful of times. Mrs. Kennedy describes how he cried in his bedroom, head in hands, over the debacle of the attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 by Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro and trained by the Central Intelligence Agency.

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.”

In fact, he said, he found “a very high correlation” between the people Mrs. Kennedy runs down in the interviews and those known to have had difficulty in the Kennedy administration. In some cases, they were in danger of being fired. Those she praises, Mr. Beschloss said, tend to have flourished. To what extent that correlation reflects Mrs. Kennedy’s influence on her husband, or vice versa, is open to interpretation and is likely to vary from case to case.

Recalling a trip to India and Pakistan with her sister, Lee Radziwill, in 1962, Mrs. 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.”

She even named possible replacements.

“And Jack was so impressed by that letter,” she tells Mr. Schlesinger, that he showed it to Dean Rusk, the secretary of state (whom Mrs. Kennedy disparages as apathetic and indecisive). According to her account, Mr. Kennedy said to Mr. Rusk, “This is the kind of letter I should be getting from the inspectors of embassies.”

Even so, Mr. McConaughy, a career diplomat, remained ambassador to Pakistan until 1966.

There are men she praises, too, in the book, which is titled “Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy” and published by Hyperion. She credits Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., the president’s father, as the dominant influence in inculcating a sense of discipline in his children. Among the administration figures she admires are Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother; Robert S. McNamara, the defense secretary; and McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser. She calls André Malraux, the French novelist, “the most fascinating man I’ve ever talked to.” She says she was impressed above all by the Colombian president, Alberto Lleras Camargo, whom she finds “Nordic in his sadness.”

In many of her accounts of her marriage, the grieving widow in her early 30s appears to bear little resemblance to the woman who married Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate, four years later, or who, after his death, embarked upon a career as a book editor in New York and later told a friend she had come to realize she could not expect to live primarily through a husband. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian and wife of Richard Goodwin, a Kennedy aide, said in an interview on Friday, “It’s certainly not the Jackie that we knew later on.”

But, she added, “By then, she’s a different woman.”

Mrs. Kennedy might have been intentionally projecting the image expected of women at the time. She also knew that she was speaking for the historical record, since the conversations were part of a larger oral history of the Kennedy presidency. But her self-confidence seems to have grown in the White House. For the first time, she became one of her husband’s most visible assets. Her televised tour of the White House restoration that she had initiated was watched by 56 million viewers.

“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 tells Mr. Schlesinger. All of that changed. “I was so happy for Jack, especially now that it was only three years together that he could be proud of me then,” she says. “Because it made him so happy — it made me so happy. So those were our happiest years.”

She humorously recounts a visit from Sukarno, the president of Indonesia, to the Kennedys’ private sitting room. The briefing papers she had read in preparation had mentioned that Sukarno had been flattered by Mao’s decision to publish his art collection. To impress Sukarno, Mrs. Kennedy asked the State Department for the volume, positioned it prominently on the table and invited him to sit on the sofa between her and Mr. Kennedy and admire the paintings.

Every single one turned out to be of a woman — “naked to the waist with a hibiscus in her hair,” Mrs. Kennedy tells Mr. Schlesinger, who bursts out laughing. She says she could not believe what she was seeing. “I caught Jack’s eye, and we were trying not to laugh at each other.” Sukarno was “so terribly happy, and he’d say, ‘This is my second wife, and this was.’...” Mrs. Kennedy says. “He had a sort of lecherous look” and “left a bad taste in your mouth.”

Describing the night of the inauguration, she recalls that she was both recovering from a Caesarean section and exhausted. She skips dinner and takes a nap. But she finds herself unable to get out of bed to attend the inaugural balls until Dr. Janet Travell, who would become the White House physician, materializes and hands her an orange pill.

“And then she told me it was Dexadrine,” Mrs. Kennedy says

Asked if Mr. Kennedy was religious, she tells Mr. Schlesinger, “Oh, yes,” then appends a revealing qualification: “Well, I mean, he never missed church one Sunday that we were married or all that, but you could see partly — I often used to think whether it was superstition or not — I mean, he wasn’t quite sure, but if it was that way, he wanted to have that on his side.”

He would say his prayers kneeling on the edge of the bed, taking about three seconds and crossing himself. “It was just like a little childish mannerism, I suppose like brushing your teeth or something,” she says. Then she adds: “But I thought that was so sweet. It used to amuse me so, standing there.”

In her foreword to the book, Caroline Kennedy says her decision to publish was prompted by the 50th anniversary of her father’s presidency. It would be a disservice, she said, to allow her mother’s perspective to be absent from the public and scholarly debate.

People have certain impressions of her mother, Ms. Kennedy suggests in a video accompanying the electronic version of the book, but "they really don’t know her at all." In her printed foreword, she says, “they don’t always appreciate her intellectual curiosity, her sense of the ridiculous, her sense of adventure, or her unerring sense of what was right.”

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In Tapes, Candid Talk by Young Kennedy Widow

The New York Times

By JANNY SCOTT

September 12, 2011

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,” Mrs. Kennedy recalls in an oral history scheduled to be released 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. “If anything happens, we’re all going to stay right here with you,” she says she told him in October 1962. “I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do, too — than live without you.”

The seven-part interview conducted in early 1964 — one of only three that Mrs. Kennedy gave after Mr. Kennedy’s assassination — is being published as a book and an audio recording. 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 Mrs. 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 Mr. Kennedy or his presidency, 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,” Mrs. 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, the 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.”

The White House social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, Mrs. Kennedy tells Mr. Schlesinger, loved to pick up the phone and say things like “Send all the White House china on the plane to Costa Rica” or tell them they had to fly string beans in to a state dinner. She quotes Mr. Kennedy saying of Lyndon B. Johnson, his vice president, “Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?” And Mr. Kennedy on Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Charlatan is an unfair word,” but “he did an awful lot for effect.”

She suggests that “violently liberal women in politics” preferred Adlai Stevenson, the former Democratic presidential nominee, to Mr. Kennedy because they “were scared of sex.” Of Madame Nhu, the sister-in-law of the president of South Vietnam, and Clare Boothe Luce, a former member of Congress, she tells Mr. Schlesinger, in a stage whisper, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lesbians.”

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.

He was, she says, kind, conciliatory, forgiving, a gentleman, a man of taste in people, furniture, books. Fondly, she recalls him ever reading — while walking, dining, bathing, doing his tie. She remembers with amusement how he would change into pajamas for his 45-minute afternoon nap in the White House. She lets slip a reference to a “civilized side of Jack” and “sort of a crude side,” but she clarifies: “Not that Jack had the crude side.”

He wept in her presence a handful of times. Mrs. Kennedy describes how he cried in his bedroom, head in hands, over the debacle of the attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 by Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro and trained by the Central Intelligence Agency.

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.”

In fact, he said, he found “a very high correlation” between the people Mrs. Kennedy runs down in the interviews and those known to have had difficulty in the Kennedy administration. In some cases, they were in danger of being fired. Those she praises, Mr. Beschloss said, tend to have flourished. To what extent that correlation reflects Mrs. Kennedy’s influence on her husband, or vice versa, is open to interpretation and is likely to vary from case to case.

Recalling a trip to India and Pakistan with her sister, Lee Radziwill, in 1962, Mrs. 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.”

She even named possible replacements.

“And Jack was so impressed by that letter,” she tells Mr. Schlesinger, that he showed it to Dean Rusk, the secretary of state (whom Mrs. Kennedy disparages as apathetic and indecisive). According to her account, Mr. Kennedy said to Mr. Rusk, “This is the kind of letter I should be getting from the inspectors of embassies.”

Even so, Mr. McConaughy, a career diplomat, remained ambassador to Pakistan until 1966.

There are men she praises, too, in the book, which is titled “Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy” and published by Hyperion. She credits Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., the president’s father, as the dominant influence in inculcating a sense of discipline in his children. Among the administration figures she admires are Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother; Robert S. McNamara, the defense secretary; and McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser. She calls André Malraux, the French novelist, “the most fascinating man I’ve ever talked to.” She says she was impressed above all by the Colombian president, Alberto Lleras Camargo, whom she finds “Nordic in his sadness.”

In many of her accounts of her marriage, the grieving widow in her early 30s appears to bear little resemblance to the woman who married Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate, four years later, or who, after his death, embarked upon a career as a book editor in New York and later told a friend she had come to realize she could not expect to live primarily through a husband. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian and wife of Richard Goodwin, a Kennedy aide, said in an interview on Friday, “It’s certainly not the Jackie that we knew later on.”

But, she added, “By then, she’s a different woman.”

Mrs. Kennedy might have been intentionally projecting the image expected of women at the time. She also knew that she was speaking for the historical record, since the conversations were part of a larger oral history of the Kennedy presidency. But her self-confidence seems to have grown in the White House. For the first time, she became one of her husband’s most visible assets. Her televised tour of the White House restoration that she had initiated was watched by 56 million viewers.

“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 tells Mr. Schlesinger. All of that changed. “I was so happy for Jack, especially now that it was only three years together that he could be proud of me then,” she says. “Because it made him so happy — it made me so happy. So those were our happiest years.”

She humorously recounts a visit from Sukarno, the president of Indonesia, to the Kennedys’ private sitting room. The briefing papers she had read in preparation had mentioned that Sukarno had been flattered by Mao’s decision to publish his art collection. To impress Sukarno, Mrs. Kennedy asked the State Department for the volume, positioned it prominently on the table and invited him to sit on the sofa between her and Mr. Kennedy and admire the paintings.

Every single one turned out to be of a woman — “naked to the waist with a hibiscus in her hair,” Mrs. Kennedy tells Mr. Schlesinger, who bursts out laughing. She says she could not believe what she was seeing. “I caught Jack’s eye, and we were trying not to laugh at each other.” Sukarno was “so terribly happy, and he’d say, ‘This is my second wife, and this was.’...” Mrs. Kennedy says. “He had a sort of lecherous look” and “left a bad taste in your mouth.”

Describing the night of the inauguration, she recalls that she was both recovering from a Caesarean section and exhausted. She skips dinner and takes a nap. But she finds herself unable to get out of bed to attend the inaugural balls until Dr. Janet Travell, who would become the White House physician, materializes and hands her an orange pill.

“And then she told me it was Dexadrine,” Mrs. Kennedy says

Asked if Mr. Kennedy was religious, she tells Mr. Schlesinger, “Oh, yes,” then appends a revealing qualification: “Well, I mean, he never missed church one Sunday that we were married or all that, but you could see partly — I often used to think whether it was superstition or not — I mean, he wasn’t quite sure, but if it was that way, he wanted to have that on his side.”

He would say his prayers kneeling on the edge of the bed, taking about three seconds and crossing himself. “It was just like a little childish mannerism, I suppose like brushing your teeth or something,” she says. Then she adds: “But I thought that was so sweet. It used to amuse me so, standing there.”

In her foreword to the book, Caroline Kennedy says her decision to publish was prompted by the 50th anniversary of her father’s presidency. It would be a disservice, she said, to allow her mother’s perspective to be absent from the public and scholarly debate.

People have certain impressions of her mother, Ms. Kennedy suggests in a video accompanying the electronic version of the book, but "they really don’t know her at all." In her printed foreword, she says, “they don’t always appreciate her intellectual curiosity, her sense of the ridiculous, her sense of adventure, or her unerring sense of what was right.”

My favorite part of the NYT article: "She quotes Mr. Kennedy saying of Lyndon B. Johnson, his vice president, “Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?"

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And Mr. Kennedy on Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Charlatan is an unfair word,” but “he did an awful lot for effect.”

I would love to hear Kennedy elaborate on this, now that FDR's "effects" are being dismantled since 1980.

Then again, I would have loved to hear Kennedy elaborate on anything after 1963.

Edited by David Andrews
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And Mr. Kennedy on Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Charlatan is an unfair word,” but “he did an awful lot for effect.”

I would love to hear Kennedy elaborate on this, now that FDR's "effects" have being dismantled since 1980.

Then again, I would have loved to hear Kennedy elaborate on anything after 1963.

Could anyone explain what "to do a lot for effect" means? Never heard that phrase.

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Guest Robert Morrow

Andric says: "My favorite part of the NYT article: "She quotes Mr. Kennedy saying of Lyndon B. Johnson, his vice president, Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?""

Actually John Kennedy said that about Lyndon Johnson over and over and over again while he was president and before Lyndon Johnson had him murdered.

I just saw Chris Matthews TV Hardball say how much John Kennedy *liked* Lyndon Johnson. What a fantasy. JFK despised Johnson for many reasons.

God, Chris Mattews is such a moron. It is just a disservice to have this idiot with such a platform to talk about anything related to the JFK assassination.

Edited by Robert Morrow
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And Mr. Kennedy on Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Charlatan is an unfair word,” but “he did an awful lot for effect.”

I would love to hear Kennedy elaborate on this, now that FDR's "effects" have being dismantled since 1980.

Then again, I would have loved to hear Kennedy elaborate on anything after 1963.

Could anyone explain what "to do a lot for effect" means? Never heard that phrase.

I'm thinking Kennedy meant the New Deal and Second New Deal.

Edited by David Andrews
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Jackie: In her own words

Jacqueline Kennedy was the consummate presidential consort – clever, stylish, loyal. But tapes of her candid thoughts about political figures, about to be heard for the first time, make for illuminating, unsettling listening, says David Usborne

The Independent

Tuesday, 13 September 2011

It is a country worn down by present dangers (the economy) and exhausted by commemorations of grief (9/11). Around the corner is an election where retrenchment and lost ambition will trump hope. Oh, for the days of... what or who? Oh, for the bright beacon days – of course – of Camelot.

Tonight a wish will be granted by the fairy godmother of the nation. Imagine she has dropped in and asked: "Which figure in your recent history, taken too young, should I restore to you, at least in voice, to give you distraction?" So some might answer Elvis or Tupac Shakur, but it's a decent bet that many will have looked up and said Jackie. Give us Jackie again.

And presto! With gratitude in truth to Caroline Kennedy, Americans will stay in tonight to watch as ABC News pushes the play button on tapes of a seven-part conversation the former First Lady had with the historian and former aide to her husband, Arthur Schlesinger, in 1964. It will be a Disney ride aboard a spinning teacup – gilt-edged like the dinner service she introduced to the White House – to a heroic past of glamour, to when the Kennedys were America's royalty.

There is a health warning posted before we board. Passengers may experience brief periods of vertigo. The tapes, made four months after JFK's assassination in Dallas, do offer confirmation of a wife unstintingly loyal to the husband she has lost and the father of her children. But they swerve alarmingly – or deliciously – when Mrs Kennedy turns to describing characters she didn't quite approve of.

The trailers for the tapes – The New York Times boasted its own synopsis yesterday, and ABC primed its ratings numbers with a few juicy audio excerpts on its news bulletins – read like those saucy teasers in the tacky tabloids. Which women's rights pioneer did Mrs Kennedy dismiss as a "lesbian"? Which American civil rights movement icon did she consider a womanising "phoney", and which leader of a European nation an "egomaniac"? And what scared her husband most about Lyndon Johnson?

Maybe it was the skill of Mr Schlesinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of American public affairs who died in 2007, that drew Ms Kennedy into becoming, well, a bit bitchy. Just about everyone she dishes dirt on has a legacy, by the way, rather more substantial than hers. Did she really say that about Indira Gandhi?

Theoretically, we should be hearing none of this quite yet. When Jacqueline Kennedy agreed to give what is, all the juicy bits aside, a unique oral history, she demanded that they be kept under lock and key until 50 years after her death. The guardian of the tapes was Caroline. And she, it seems, is the one who concluded that they deserved unveiling before then. The deal that was struck was simple: a book and accompanying audio discs would be released on 14 September 2011, which is tomorrow. And ABC would be tied in to give it maximum exposure.

That this was coming has been known for some time. Different news organisations in recent months have unleashed nuggets of speculation of the "explosive" revelations. We would hear, they said, of how she struck back at her husband for his serial infidelities by revealing details of her own love affairs. That does not seem to be the case. Nor do we hear much of what some expected from Mrs Kennedy on her alleged distrust of the conclusions of the investigation into her husband's assassination. Indeed, it appears that JFK's death is not discussed at all.

History, meanwhile, is not likely to undergo much rewriting because of what she is heard saying, although scholars will linger over her description of Johnson and the concerns JFK and his brother, Bobby, had about him possibly becoming President, which of course he did through circumstances neither could have predicted. They were thinking of 1968, when JFK would have finished his second term.

"Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?" she quotes her husband saying of his then Vice-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 he'd had some discussions with him. I forget exactly how they were planning or who they had in mind. It wasn't Bobby, but somebody. Do something to name someone else in '68."

Perhaps not surprisingly, the most difficult moments of her husband's truncated presidency – the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and then the Cuban missile crisis – elicited some of the most touching passages. The former prompted Kennedy to cry in the private quarters of the White House. The long missiles drama was the time when the wife knew that her place was nowhere but beside her husband.

"That's the time I have been closest to him," she is heard saying, in her breathy tones. "And I never left the house or saw the children, and when he came home, if it was a sleep or a nap I would sleep with him. I said: 'Please don't send me to Camp David, me and the children, please don't send me anywhere. If anything happens we are all going to stay right here with you.' You know I said even if there is no room in the bomb shelter in the White House, which I saw, I said, 'Please... I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do, too – than live without you'."

The context is important, of course. Though in later years she was to marry her shipping tycoon and would eventually live a private life in Manhattan as a publisher and champion of charitable causes before dying of lymphoma in 1994, Mrs Kennedy appears content to be a woman and a wife more from the Mad Men era.

At one point she describes her marriage as "rather terribly Victorian or Asiatic", dedicated to preserving "a climate of affection and comfort and détente" in the White House. At the time of the making of the tapes she was still in "the extreme stages of grief," as Caroline points out in an introduction to the book. Moreover, she knew she was making an oral history and saying ill of her husband would never have done.

Of others, she was entirely less circumspect to a degree that she must have looked back at with a certain flushing of cheeks. Thus Mrs Gandhi was in her books "a real prune – bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman". It was the French President Charles De Gaulle whom she considered an "egomaniac". She is heard attributing to her husband doubts about the sincerity at times of Franklin D Roosevelt: "Charlatan is an unfair word," he allegedly said of the former wartime President, but "he did an awful lot for effect". Better perhaps she had kept her opinion of Martin Luther King Jr to herself. He is the "phoney" whom, she suggested, had been caught while under electronic surveillance – he was not an FBI favourite either – arranging romantic liaisons.

Those women she dismissed almost childishly as sexually suspect were Madame Nhu, sister-in-law of the president of South Vietnam, and Clare Boothe Luce, a former member of Congress. "I wouldn't be surprised if they were lesbians," she is heard whispering in conspiratorial manner.

But there is mirth in the tapes too. She is heard recalling trying to impress President Sukarno of Indonesia by having a copy of a new book about his personal art collection open on a table in the White House so he would notice during a meeting with her and her husband. Only too late did she see that his taste ran mostly to a kind of portrait of a woman "naked to the waist with a hibiscus in her hair". She added: "I caught Jack's eye, and we were trying not to laugh at each other." Of Sukarno, she concluded, "he had a sort of lecherous look" and "left a bad taste in your mouth".

And if Ms Kennedy steers clear of her husband's own weaknesses toward the fairer sex, she does offer other insights, like the fact that generally he rose at 7.45am to be read his daily briefs, put on pyjamas for his afternoon naps, went through the most perfunctory rituals of prayer at night, kneeling on the mattress of their bed, and never grew out of having toys in the bath, something that greatly amused officials visiting the private quarters. "All along his tub were floating animals, dogs and pink pigs and things. And you'd hear this roar," of laughter from behind the locked door, she says. Every First Lady evokes curiosity in most Americans. What influences did they have? How did they tolerate the pomp, even the boredom? Nancy was a possibly dark force behind Ronny's Oval Office desk, even offering him guidance from readers of the stars. That she was unutterably devoted to her husband has never been in doubt. One modern First Lady had troubles with drink, another with an intern who got altogether too close to her husband. Anyone watching Michelle Obama in the gallery of Congress last Tuesday as her husband unveiled his American Jobs Act to a joint session of Congress may have been struck by how stern she appeared. Is someone making tapes of her true feelings?

In talking to her historian friend, Mrs Kennedy pauses to note that when her husband was seeking election, some in the electorate had particular doubts about her, but that much of the popular scepticism had evaporated when she found her feet and most notably after she had taken television viewers into the White House to see the style she had introduced to it.

"Suddenly, everything that had 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," had just gone away, she said. "I was so happy for Jack, especially now that it was only three years together, that he could be proud of me then. Because it made him so happy – it made me so happy. So those were our happiest years."

The television audience for her White House tour was 56 million, by the way. She may not do quite so well today, so many generations later. But the number will be high for the ABC channel in a nation tired of bad news and ready from some Camelot relief.

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