A rare interview reported by the Sydney Morning Herald reveals the former US first lady’s thoughts about others.
Tapes also reveal how a free-speaking Mrs Kennedy thought little of foreign dignitaries Charles de Gaulle, whom she called an “egomaniac”, and Indira Gandhi, who was labelled a “prune”.
In the early days of the Cuban missile crisis President John F Kennedy telephoned his wife, Jacqueline, at their weekend house in Virginia. From his voice, she would say later, she could tell 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 to be released this week , 47 years after the interviews were conducted.
When she learnt that the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba aimed at US 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.”
According to the report, the seven-part interview conducted in early 1964 – one of only three that Mrs Kennedy gave after her husband’s assassination – is being published as a book ‘Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy’ and an audio recording. The widow, 34, speaks with Arthur Schlesinger jnr, 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 8½ 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 are packed with intimate observations and insights of the sort that historians treasure. She delivers tart commentary on former presidents, heads of state, her husband’s aides, powerful women, women reporters, even her mother-in-law. Charles de Gaulle, the French president, is “that egomaniac”. Martin Luther King jnr is “a phony” whom electronic eavesdropping had found arranging encounters with women. Indira Gandhi, the future prime minister of India, is “a real prune – [a] bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman”. She quotes her husband saying of Lyndon Johnson, his vice-president: “Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?” Of Madame Nhu, sister-in-law of the South Vietnam president, and Clare Boothe Luce, a former member of Congress, she tells Schlesinger, in a stage whisper: “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lesbians”.
She humorously recounts a visit from Indonesian president Sukarno to the Kennedys’ private sitting room. The briefing papers she had read in preparation had mentioned that Sukarno had been flattered by Mao Zedong’s decision to publish his art collection. To impress president Sukarno, a volume was positioned prominently on the table and the visitor was invited to sit between the Kennedys and admire the paintings. Every one was of a woman “naked to the waist with a hibiscus in her hair”, Mrs Kennedy tells Mr Schlesinger. She says she could not believe what she was seeing – “He had a sort of lecherous look’’ and ‘’left a bad taste in your mouth”.
