“Not that Jack had a crude side,” Jacqueline Kennedy says, in a phrase in which, as the Times put it, she “clarifies” her comment to Arthur Schlesinger, a moment before, that he did. Their conversation was part of a set of oral histories that will be released, in book and audio form, on Wednesday, and to which the Times had access. In the preface, Caroline Kennedy reportedly describes her mother as being in the “extreme stages of grief,” and while she probably was—this was only a few months after John F. Kennedy’s assassination—Caroline may also have been trying to account for her mother’s tone, which is not always kind or even clever. Did it strike Jackie as droll to call Martin Luther King, Jr., a “phony”? And there are many, many grounds on which to attack Madame Nhu (an awful, fascinating woman whose brother-in-law, the President of South Vietnam, and husband were also assassinated in November, 1963, in a military coup J.F.K. at least tacitly sanctioned) or Clare Boothe Luce (less bad behavior than Nhu, but still plenty). This is the one she chose: “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lesbians.” According to the Times, she says this “in a stage whisper. Perhaps Jackie had a crude side, too.
On the tapes, she is mean about men—de Gaulle (“egomaniac”), Theodore Sorensen (“big inferiority complex”)—and she is terrible about women. (Sometimes she combined those, as in her notes on Adlai Stevenson: “I always thought women who were scared of sex loved Adlai.”) These aren’t private conversations we are eavesdropping on: Kennedy was speaking to Schlesinger as a historian, rather than as a friend, even if she clearly trusted him to be friendly when it came to her image and her husband’s legacy. Caroline Kennedy authorized the release for, she has said, the fiftieth anniversary of her father’s Presidency, and perhaps for other reasons. (She also told ABC News that she blamed J. Edgar Hoover for poisoning her mother’s mind about King; read Larissa MacFarquhar’s piece on Caroline for a sense of the trickiness of her position.) Her mother may have thought her actual words wouldn’t be heard for a longer time, but she would have expected them to resound in the telling of the Kennedy story, which is to say in the received history of a certain time in our country’s history. Mythmaking may not be pretty to watch (or, in the case, listen in on), but it’s better to examine it than to keep repeating fables.
The subject of many of those fables is Jackie herself. Her comments here seem so striking because of the many paper-doll versions of her we’ve played with for so long. How many people have been the object of so much fetishization, of so many kinds—fashion, political, tabloid? That can’t have been easy, of course, but not only for her. One wonders, for example, if it was necessary for Jackie to say that Lady Bird Johnson, who had problems of her own, “was sort of like a trained hunting dog.” Perhaps, if Jackie was being brutally honest out of some sense of obligation to history, it would be—but given that, according to the Times, she does not manage to find fault with her husband about anything, not even his taste in furniture, that seems unlikely. These interviews will surely be most useful to the sort of historian who has an ear for unreliable narration; to be fair, that might be true of most political reminiscences.
Mrs. Kennedy was lovely and a symbol for a stricken nation, and later, after her Jackie O. period, led a fairly productive life in New York. There may, in excerpts of the interviews that haven’t been made public yet, be glimpses of unparalleled generosity. Her life was more complicated than most, and she deserves some forbearance for that, along with the usual recognition of how different the gender politics of the time were. Some days, though, that only gets you to a certain point. So far in these tapes, Jackie doesn’t sound all that nice. She may be quite right about some of the people she disparages, but one suspects she is also often very wrong about her husband and—tellingly or tragically—about herself.
Photograph: Jackie Kennedy at a luncheon with Charles de Gaulle. Paul Schutzer/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
