I stayed up last night to watch “Jacqueline Kennedy: In Her Own Words,” a special program, narrated by Diane Sawyer, on the eight and a half hours of private taped interviews made by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis four months after her husband’s assassination. I got to listen to that famous wispy, childlike Jackie voice (following Warhol’s lead, I always refer to the woman as “Jackie”) talking softly to her interviewer, Arthur Schlesinger, about what she thought of her husband and the people who surrounded him. In the background, you hear the sounds of an occasional clink of ice cubes (what was she drinking?), her children, and a match being lit (Jackie was a smoker).
Jackie had requested the tapes not be released until 50 years after her death. But her daughter Caroline Kennedy, in an apparent deal with ABC to drop its plans for a miniseries based on the Kennedys, released them early. A book version of the interview, by Caroline Kennedy and the historian Michael Beschloss, has been released as well.
When I was a young girl, I was infatuated with Jackie Kennedy. It had nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with growing up in the bland suburbs of New Jersey, where women wore frumpy clothes that hid their sexuality and exercised their minds by playing bridge. Certainly none of them spoke French. As an adult, my Jackie adoration evolved into mild admiration, which caused me to be the object of jokes by friends and family who saw Jackie as nothing but a famous Stepford wife who put up with a rake of a husband. My response was that Jackie should not be tried by the standards of today; moreover, she grew more “liberated” as she aged.
Instead of watching last night’s program with me, my husband sulked off to read his book in another room. “She didn’t do anything,” he complained. But that’s not the point, I responded, asking him to shush so I could catch every word of Jackie’s whisper. Besides, I resented his comment. Jackie did do something: She raised funds from private donors to restore the shabby White House, and she brought culture to it (in the form of classical music and jazz quartets). And later on, long after Kennedy was gone, she became a book editor (that was for real).
The snippets of the interview on ABC revealed a shrewd observer of the political leaders whom she encountered in her role as First Lady. She used her wryly wicked wit to lightly rip them apart. Martin Luther King was “tricky,” Indonesian President Sukarno had “a slightly lecherous look,” and de Gaulle was “full of spite.”
Is this enough to make for a significant contribution to the oral history of the period? Does it flesh out our picture of the Kennedy presidency in any important way? There were snippets that seemed new to me. For example, I had never heard that Kennedy wept after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. But historians are the ones to answer whether there’s anything in these interviews that’s really new or necessary in furthering our understanding of the Kennedy Presidency.
I agree that Jackie didn’t do anything in the way women now do things. Yet it was no small feat that she introduced to Americans, and the world, the idea that an American could be cultured—could behave with decorum in public, speak foreign languages, love books (in particular, Jackie loved reading history), and love and promote art and music. At the time, who woulda thunk it? (Who would think it today?)
Second, Jackie became a powerful leader in the days immediately following the horror of the Kennedy assassination. Like a Roman widow, she bore her grief with public grace and dignity, almost as a badge of honor. We were in awe of her courage.
Jacqueline Kennedy was no radical. She left the White House right before the massive general cultural upheaval of the 60s began—one whose effect we’re still feeling today. Nothing she did lives up to what we expect of educated women today. Everything she did, however, was beautiful in her own time.
