Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F.
Kennedy: Interviews with Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr.
By Caroline Kennedy & Michael
Beschloss
(Hyperion, 400 pages, 8 CDs,
$60)
THIS BOOK CONSISTS of the transcripts of seven rather extensive
tape-recorded conversations that Jacqueline Kennedy, widow of our
35th president, made in 1964 with court historian Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr. Their free-wheeling style and sometimes indiscreet
content underscores the fact that they were intended for
generations yet unborn, to be sealed for 50 years or more. The
decision of the Kennedy family to allow their publication now
responds not—as Caroline Kennedy disingenuously insists in the
introduction to this volume—to commemorate the 50th anniversary of
her father’s inauguration, but rather as part of a bargain with one
of the major television networks, which was otherwise planning to
release a docudrama on the Kennedy dynasty not wholly to the taste
of our self-styled reigning family.
The hold that the Kennedy legend has on a large (though happily
steadily diminishing) sector of the American media and public is
highlighted by the fact that this book is accompanied by eight
compact discs that reproduce the conversations as recorded. Quite
why one needs to hear the back-and-forth between Mrs.
Kennedy (as she then was) and Professor Schlesinger is not clear.
In the interest of full disclosure, this reviewer has not bothered
to listen to them. The printed text is more than enough.
For those too young to recall the Kennedy years, it perhaps is
worth noting that the arrival of a young president and his even
younger spouse to the White House in early 1961 was not so much a
political as a style event. Never before—at least never
before in the experience of those alive to witness it—had the
presidency and the presidential family been surrounded by the aura
of such film-star glamour. The Roosevelts were aristocratic, but in
an understated and unstudied way; the Trumans were unapologetically
dowdy; the Eisenhowers were plain people who had lived in a series
of government-issued military dwellings. None made the slightest
effort to differentiate themselves from ordinary Americans. As Mrs.
Kennedy snidely comments in an aside, “before [JFK] politics was
just left to corny old people who shouted on the 4th of July.” The
Kennedys brought something entirely new to the White House—the
celebrity presidency, full of glitz and flash. As both the Clintons
and Obamas have since learned, it is a tough act to follow, which
of course doesn’t stop them from trying.
While these conversations do not break much historiographical
ground—why should they?—they are not lacking in historical
interest. Mrs. Kennedy had the opportunity to know a great many
important people, and some of her impressions of them are quite
interesting. She quotes the daughter of Soviet Premier Nikita
Khrushchev as saying, “If only I could get a decent cook!” She
describes Indira Gandhi (Nehru’s daughter, soon to be prime
minister of India in her own right) as “a real prune—kind of
pushy, horrible woman….It always looks like she’s sucking lemon.”
Both Mme. Nhu of Vietnam and Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce are
bracketed as “hating men [because] they resent getting their power
through men.” Then she leans forward and whispers to Schlesinger,
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lesbians”—a judgment that
would astound any man who had ever met either woman.
There are slightly nasty comments on the major American
political figures of the day—particularly Chester Bowles and Adlai
Stevenson, both of whom were full-dress Liberal Bores for whom the
president and his hard-scrabble Boston Irish gang understandably
had little time. Schlesinger, who had defected from Stevenson in
1960 to join the Kennedy bandwagon, does not protest when his
interlocutor describes his former idol thus: “I always thought that
women who were scared of sex loved Adlai.” And then there is poor
Pat Nixon. “I used to see her at bandage rolling,” Mrs. Kennedy
recalls. “You know, the Senate wives have to go roll bandages every
Tuesday and the vice president’s wife is always the chairman of
it.” To which Schlesinger snidely interjects, “I think she’d be
perfect at bandage—bandage rolling.” The other references to Mrs.
Nixon are too painful to cite; they all emphasize her deplorable
dress sense and hair style. Poor thing—her mother died young and
she had to go to work almost immediately; she didn’t get to go to a
finishing school in Paris and become elegant like Jacqueline
Bouvier.
THE MOST SENSATIONAL revelation, of course, has to do with Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., whom Mrs. Kennedy did not precisely
admire, and about whom she seems to have known quite a bit, thanks
to the fact that her brother-in-law, Robert Kennedy, was attorney
general at the time and in close communion with J. Edgar Hoover’s
FBI. As is now known, the latter were eavesdropping on Dr. King’s
telephone conversations. When the latter came to Washington for a
freedom march, so the president told his wife, “he said this with
no bitterness or anything, how he [King] was calling up all these
girls and arranging for a party of men and women, I mean, sort of
an orgy in the hotel, and everything….Since then Bobby’s told me of
the tapes of these orgies they have and how Martin Luther King made
fun of Jack’s funeral.” For Mrs. Kennedy, Dr. King was “a tricky
person….I just can’t see a picture of [him] without thinking, you
know, that man’s terrible.” Of course, this was four years before
his assassination.
The critical comments on Dr. King, and also on Fidel Castro,
Nehru, Sukarno, and Nkrumah, former Brazilian president João
Goulart, not to mention certain remarks about effeminate (gay?) men
in the Foreign Service—none of which Mrs. Kennedy would make
publicly if she were alive today—show how far to the left our
political culture has moved since these tapes were made. Nor would
she express unhappiness with the Sullivan decision of the
Supreme Court (which enables some of the mischief-making of today’s
drive-by media). The frequent references to wealthy friends like
Earl E. T. Smith or Charles Wrightsman (both Republicans) or the
Duke and Duchess of Devonshire (former in-laws of the president)
underscore the fact that the Kennedys preferred the company of the
Palm Beach-cum-English country house set and also the degree to
which the Democratic Party now depends far more on new money rather
than on old. The chumminess with writers and owners of the elite
media is another change; today no president (or journalist, for
that matter) would admit to such intimacy, whatever the facts.
Michael Beschloss, who provided the (sometimes inaccurate,
sometimes incomplete) notes to this volume, introduces us to Mrs.
Kennedy by praising her work in restoring the White House. No doubt
this was a worthy endeavor, but if one did not know otherwise, one
might have thought that no other first lady had ever done anything
worthwhile or significant. Actually many of our first ladies have
been women of considerable substance—more, indeed, if I may say
so, than Jacqueline Kennedy. Florence Harding successfully ran her
husband’s newspaper in Ohio and was the first to welcome
African-American women socially to the White House. Lou Henry
Hoover co-translated an important Latin text on metallurgy,
traveled all over China with her husband in his capacity as a
mining engineer, and learned to speak perfect Mandarin. Grace
Coolidge taught lip-reading at a school for the deaf. And everybody
knows about Eleanor Roosevelt. These first ladies were, of course,
products of the pre-television age. But even if today’s media had
existed a hundred years ago, it is difficult to imagine that their
recollections, however worthy or interesting, would justify such a
costly format as this.
