Background: From March through June 1964, Arthur M. Schlesinger met on 7 occasions with Jackie Kennedy and recorded her recollections of life with her husband. The tapes were to be sealed for 50 years, though Jackie was the ultimate authority on when they would be released. Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg decided to release them in 2011, just shy of 50 years after the recordings were made. You can get them in written form, or get them on tape and listen to the raw tape, including occasional interruptions by 3 year old John Jr. and 6 year old Caroline. I decided to listen to the tapes and have distilled down a series of what to me were some of the most interesting things said, so now you need not bother.

1. To me the most interesting analytical, prescient comment was Jackie saying that neither she nor Jack thought much of Lyndon Johnson, nor, indeed, did others in the White House. Jackie didn’t like LBJ AT ALL, and she called Ladybird his “trained hunting dog” for the way she would follow his every command. Jackie thought he was terrified of doing anything as Vice President most of the time, so never sought much of a role beyond the symbolic during his tenure in that position. A variety of people said ‘can you just imagine if he became president?’ Jackie wanted to strongly make the point that with tensions rising around the world, in places such as Laos and Vietnam, if a disaster were to happen, she’s concerned that people might say that it was inevitable, but that she knows that it wasn’t inevitable, it was just because Johnson was such a bad and indecisive leader that it would happen. She said this in the spring of 1964.

2. She’s got a lot of achingly dated things to say about women (yet are still said today. Jackie later became a feminist and would likely have repudiated these things). For example, she doesn’t think women should be in politics because they’re too emotional and hold grudges. In fact, she doesn’t know why women who are attractive to men would ever crave power, such as Claire Booth Luce and Madame Nhu. such women represent everything Jackie and Jack find unattractive in a woman, and Jack explained to Jackie that what’s really going on is that such women resent having to get power through their men, and so they therefore HATE men as a result.

3. Funny moment: Jackie said JFK was the most unselfconscious person she ever met, and had no qualms about walking around wearing only a towel, and didn’t feel uncomfortable about if it might fall off. So how many of you think that that was one of his “moves”? Like “Oh, hi, Marilyn, I’m almost ready to go, I just took a quick shower, wait here while I get dressed . . . oops, my towel just fell off, now you have to have sex with me.” It reminded me of an old dating show, where a guy would go out on separate dates with 3 women, and then they’d meet on the show and compare notes. One guy met all three women at the door of his apartment while wearing only a towel, because he was running late.

4. One thing that really boosted the popularity of James Bond books and movies in the US was that in an article, JFK named the Bond books as some of his favorites. But Jackie said he wasn’t really that big a fan, and just named the books in order to fill in the list to the magazine’s satisfaction. Maybe he read 2 or 3 of the books, if he found one in a hotel, but she never saw him reading any novels. He WAS an incredibly fast and prolific reader, but only of non-fiction.

5. Too much was made of the idea that the family had wanted/expected Joseph Kennedy Jr. to be the family politician, with Jack having to take over that role after Joe Jr. was killed in WWII. Jackie disparaged the thought as just something the family said to just say something about Joe. But it’s not clear that Joe had the inclination, and she didn’t think he had the creativity to do it, though he was charming. Schlesinger was in the same class at Harvard as Joe, and he agreed with that assessment–Joe was charming, but not like Jack in his leadership abilities.

6. Jackie called Joe Kennedy Sr. a “tiger mother” –her choice of phrase–to his children, always paying attention to them and pushing them to excel, and that’s why she thinks so many of the kids went on to do great things, in contrast to Roosevelt or Churchill’s children, who never really amounted to all that much and whose fathers are not known to have paid them much attention.

7. JFK thought Teddy Roosevelt was “fatuous.”

8. JFK thought FDR was a “poseur” who did a lot of things for effect.

9. JFK was using crutches more than he wasn’t using crutches, but pictures of that weren’t really shown. He spent much of his time in pain.

10. The life-risking back surgery JFK had in 1955 wasn’t necessary at all. His problem was muscular not skeletal and a different doctor encouraged him to strengthen those muscles rather than keep them immobilized with braces, and that caused a lot of improvement, so he was doing much better during the White House years.

11. JFK read Marlborough (by Winston Churchill) as a young child, and was very impressed by it. JFK was a big fan of Churchill’s prose.

12. Jackie angrily disputes the idea that JFK didn’t write Profiles in Courage, and disparages Ted Sorensen as an untrustworthy and selfish person for claiming he wrote it. Jackie says she saw Jack writing it and there are pages and pages of notes on yellow legal pads by JFK. She said that “because he’s such a gentleman” and “forgives so easily”, he forgave Sorensen for making claims to authorship, even letting Sorensen keep all the royalties because he’d worked so hard on the book. Jackie similarly disparages claims that Jack didn’t write his first book, Why England Slept.

13. I realized early on that Jackie Kennedy sounds shockingly like Woody Allen–they have the same accent for some mysterious reason. But she has a Marilyn Monroe-esque breathy quality to her voice, and intonations like Audrey Hepburn. Plus her voice is very high pitched and she says “um” and “you know” a lot. Her speech started to grate on my nerves after awhile; one reason why you might want to read the book, not listen to the tapes.

14. The summer before JFK and Jackie married, Jackie translated for him the writings of Ho Chi Minh and related works so JFK could get familiar with the Indochina situation.

15. The Kennedys were disappointed with Nehru when he came for a state visit. They met Nehru’s daughter–Indira Gandhi– at the same time, and Jackie had many nasty things to say about her. She said Indira Gandhi was the kind of woman for whom marriage and love didn’t turn out right, so the poison turns inward and she’s a truly bitter woman, the kind who has always hated Jack. But such women love Adlai Stevenson. This is because “Jack so obviously demanded from a woman a relationship between a man and a woman, where a man would be the leader and the woman would be his wife and look up to him as a man. With Adlai you could have another kind of relationship, where he’s sweet but there’s no other level. I always thought women who were scared of sex like Adlai, because there wouldn’t be that challenge. So all these twisted, poor little women who’s lives hadn’t worked out could find a balm in Adlai. And Jack made them nervous.” Then there’s a bit of awkwardness as Jackie realizes that Schlesinger’s wife was a Stevenson supporter, so she laughs, and he hurries to explain that his wife only supported Stevenson out of loyalty but later regretted it and was very much a Kennedy supporter, etc.

16. JFK was going to get rid of J. Edgar Hoover “any minute now” before his death.

17. Jackie worried about what JFK would do after the presidency, since he’d still be a young man. She was thinking Teddy could give up his seat in the Senate and JFK could have it, and Teddy said he’d do it, but Jack said he’d never take that away from Teddy because Teddy couldn’t aspire to more.

18. She makes Mamie Eisenhower sound like a bitch. According to Jackie, the outgoing First Lady usually shows the incoming First Lady around the White House and lets her know about the running of it. But Mamie said she didn’t want “that woman” in “my house”. Finally, she set up a visit for the day Jackie got out of the hospital after her caesarean (from delivering John Jr.), and she showed her all around the house, never stopping for Jackie to sit or rest, despite her exhaustion and pain from the surgery. Later, when Jackie started restoring the White House, Mamie complained a lot about what was being done to “my house”. Jackie looked down on Mamie for things like Mamie saying that after she left the White House, she had to dial a telephone for the first time in her life–she’d had switchboard operators to do that for her all her life, and that she had a phone until then.

19. Harry Truman walked in on Jackie while she was in her nightgown in bed, horrifically embarrassing him, though she and Jack thought it was funny.

20. When asked what Jack thought of Eisenhower, Jackie replied “not much,” and she paraphrased somebody else who said Eisenhower was our worst president with perhaps the exception of Buchanan.

21. Jack and Jackie would give each other presents of old letters written by famous statesmen and poets. One Jack really wanted was a letter written by Jefferson explaining of a search of four new gardeners for Monticello–but they should all also play the violin so he could have chamber music at night.

22. After the Bay of Pigs, JFK cried.

23. Jackie was too exhausted to get up for the inaugural balls–she had only recently had a caesarean, in addition to the move and taking care of the kids. So a doctor came and gave her amphetamines, and that’s how she got through the rest of the day.

24. She had originally wanted her kids to learn French–she felt it was very important because learning French “absolutely doubled my life”. But after visiting South America, she changed her mind to Spanish–she wanted the kids to look to the same hemisphere. Also, she had a miserable time in France, saying she didn’t meet one French person she liked. She hated De Gaulle and thought he was a bitter, angry man who never forgave and dwelt forever on the past. This was in contrast to Jack, who never held grudges and was always looking to find agreement with others.

25. When Indonesian leader Sukarno came to the White House to visit, Jackie prepped for the visit by asking the state department for a book of Sukarno’s art collection–Mao had recently published a book of Sukarno’s art collection, of which he was very proud. She got the book only moments before Sukarno arrived so didn’t have a chance to look through it before they sat down and started looking at it. It turned out it was full of “Vargas Girl” paintings (see: ). As Jackie described it, it was all girls in skirts, naked to the waist and with a hibiscus in their hair. She thought it was pretty hilarious at how cheesy the pictures were and she and Jack exchanged a glance over Sukarno’s head, laughing at the pictures silently.

26. Jackie said she was a liability to Jack throughout his career, until she became First Lady, when suddenly she became popular, but Jack never asked her to change in order to fit an image. People had thought she was a snob, was too French, dressed too fancy and was too good to go on campaign trips with Jack [because she was pregnant].

27. Jackie thinks the Japanese relationship between husband and wife is best.

28. She thinks MLK is “tricky” and a hypocrite; she heard from Jack and from Bobby Kennedy (via FBI surveillance they put MLK under to find dirt on him) that MLK had orgies and “made fun of” JFK’s funeral–that he said that Cardinal Cushing was drunk, and that they almost dropped the coffin. But JFK didn’t condemn MLK for his philandering because, according to Jackie, he wasn’t one to make judgments or be critical over people. Yeah. I’ll bet. But not Jackie–she just couldn’t abide infidelity and promiscuity in a man. FYI: At the point she said this, Jackie was soon thereafter to begin an affair with former brother-in-law Bobby, which would last until his death 4 years later.

29. The Cuban Missile Crisis was awful, no one slept for days. She says had it gone on for a few more days everyone would have cracked from lack of sleep. When the Missile Crisis happened, Jackie had just arrived for vacation in Florida with the kids, and Jack told her to turn around and come back. During the crisis, some men sent their wives away to safe areas, or the wives left, but Jackie begged Jack not to send her away, and she felt that the women who left must not have loved their husbands very much.