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In 1964, the recently bereaved Jacqueline Kennedy sat down with the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Kennedy intimate Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., for a series of seven wide-ranging conversations as part of an oral-history project on the life of her late husband. On the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, the transcripts and the more than eight hours of audio itself, touching on subjects that include the Cuban missile crisis and civil rights, as well as Mrs. Kennedy’s private and public life at the White House, have been published by Hyperion (Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy) for the first time, reflecting **Caroline Kennedy’**s belief that “no one speaks better for my mother than she does herself.”
A decade ago I was the guest curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the exhibition “Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years,” which subsequently traveled to three further American cities before its final unveiling at the Musée de la Mode at the Louvre. Immured in the depths of the Costume Institute for months on end—with occasional forays to the ocean-lapped site of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, and illuminating visits with the supremely elegant and engaging women in Jacqueline Kennedy’s inner circle of tastemakers and advisers—I immersed myself in the presidential history of that period, and the minutiae of life in Camelot. I soon discovered that Jacqueline Kennedy, evidently fired by her own passion for history, had kept seemingly every memo and note generated during this period, and those that I had access to revealed the acuity of Schlesinger’s observation (in his essay for the exhibition catalog) that “her social graces masked tremendous awareness, an all-seeing eye, ruthless judgment, and a steely purpose.” These documents brought Mrs. Kennedy’s unique “voice” vividly to life.
So it was with more than special interest that I read the transcripts and listened to an extract of the audio (which is included in its entirety in the boxed set with the book) that illumines so many aspects of Jacqueline Kennedy’s life and work during this period—as well as her razor-sharp memory, and her fascinating and occasionally acerbic perspectives on historic events and the characters that shaped them. Relaxing off-camera and away from the public gaze and ear in her Georgetown living room with an old friend, cigarettes being lit and smoked and ice cubes jangling in drinks glasses, Jacqueline Kennedy evokes—in her breathy, patrician voice with its idiosyncratic cadences and syntax—a Mad Men era when the threat of nuclear Armageddon was so real that she worried how family members would be accommodated in the White House bunker, and reveals her heroic image of her husband and his achievements. To hear her in her own unscripted and candid words in this context is electrifying.
Jacqueline Bouvier was brought up in the sequestered Newport world of her stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss, where, as Schlesinger later noted, “young ladies were taught to conceal their brains lest they frighten young men away.” To the modern ear, the violently prefeminist persona of the First Lady who brought the Twist and Pablo Casals to the White House and symbolized the Youthquake decade comes as a surprise for those who frame her in her later life as an independent and successful literary editor (by which time, of course, many of her youthful views had evolved).
“I always thought of him as this enormously glamorous figure whom I married when he was 36,” she explains of John F. Kennedy, and in the manner of her caste, she determined to make herself a useful helpmeet to him; in the year before they married, for instance, she recalls that she translated endless books relating to France’s soon-to-become-explosive colonies of Algeria and Indochina, to help her fiancé formulate his ideas on foreign policy in those areas.
“How could I have any political opinions, you know?” she asks at one point. “His were going to be the best. And I could never conceive of not voting for whoever my husband was for . . . I mean, it was really a rather terribly Victorian or Asiatic relationship which we had, which I had . . . which I think’s the best.” Jacqueline Kennedy similarly bemoans her “terribly emotional” responses, rather than her husband’s objective ones; one reason she felt women “should never be in politics. We’re just not suited to it.” Unusual vitriol is reserved for such forcefully independent women as Indira Gandhi and Clare Boothe Luce.
Jacqueline Kennedy acknowledges that she was in some ways a political liability during her husband’s presidential campaign—although he never criticized her for it. In August 1960, she wrote to _Harper’s Bazaar’_s fashion editor Diana Vreeland for advice on American designers, during which she playfully lamented the criticism “about me wearing Paris clothes, and Mrs. Nixon running up hers on the sewing machine. . . .”
“I was never any different once I was in the White House than I was before,” she avers, acknowledging, however, that “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— . . . suddenly became wonderful because anything the First Lady does that’s different, everyone seizes on—and I was so happy for Jack.”
The historicist Jacqueline Kennedy had known from the moment a surprisingly graceless and proprietorial Mamie Eisenhower showed her around the Executive Mansion that its transformation into the nation’s historic showplace would be a primary cause. There were drinking fountains in the shabby staterooms, and the decoration of the private rooms was woefully banal. The Kennedys were even concerned that the house had termites until they realized that the suspect marks were actually left by the cleats of President Eisenhower’s golf shoes.
As First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy determined to create a home environment in this now gracious setting that would distract her husband from the unimaginable pressures of his working life, pressures that she had a vivid sense of as she read the weekly CIA reports that were prepared for him; they depressed her so much she finally stopped reading them, reassuring herself that with her husband at the helm, “I won’t have to be afraid when I go to sleep at night or wake up.”
Cognizant of the fact that she could go to New York restaurants or dance the Twist at nightclubs but that the president couldn’t, she worked to bring that vivacity to the White House for him “and make it happy nights,” screening movies (such as Last Year at Marienbad) and inviting dynamic guests, including the preeminent cultural figures of the day. The same spirit of youthful glamour and high culture informed the legendary Kennedy state dinners. Jacqueline Kennedy also practiced soft diplomacy abroad with such difficult customers as Nehru and de Gaulle, and even the combative Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev. At dinner during the especially tense talks in Vienna in 1961, she discussed Lesley Blanch’s The Sabres of Paradise, about nineteenth-century Ukraine. Khrushchev began spewing facts about Ukraine’s teachers and wheat production. “Oh, Mr. Chairman President, don’t bore me with that,” she told him; he later noted, “Don’t mix it up with her; she’ll cut you down to size.”
Although she initially dreaded the “goldfish bowl” quality of life at the White House for her young family, she hadn’t factored in the physical proximity of her husband, from whom she had been separated through long months of campaigning, and so, in her poignant words, “it was really the happiest time of my life.”