Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [11]
In the summer of 1964, after finishing her interviews with Arthur Schlesinger, she told a friend that recounting her bygone life had been "excruciating." Plagued by the commotion around her Georgetown home and torturous reminders of a happier time, she moved her family to an apartment high above Fifth Avenue in New York, seeking "a new life in a new city." From her new bedroom windows, she could see, across the street, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, despite her preference for Washington, D.C., the Temple of Dendur was being installed, and at night, the floodlights bothered her. That autumn, on the first anniversary of the assassination, she wrote of JFK for Look magazine, "So now he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man. . . . At least he will never know whatever sadness might have lain ahead." Almost as a resolution to herself, she added, "He is free and we must live."
After writing those words in longhand, Mrs. Kennedy never again mused in public about her husband—not in 1965, when Queen Elizabeth II dedicated a memorial acre to him at the birthplace of the Magna Carta; not in 1979, when she witnessed the opening of the Kennedy Library; not ever.4 When she and her children settled in New York, she asserted her right to be a private citizen and was content to allow the conversations in this book to be her principal contribution to the Kennedy historiography. In the spring of 1965, she read an early version of Arthur Schlesinger's forthcoming A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, and was upset to discover that the author had borrowed a number of items from their sealed conversations to describe the President's relationships with her and their children. She implored him by letter to remove "things I think are too personal. . . .The world has no right to his private life with me—I shared all those rooms with him—not with the Book of the Month readers + I don't want them snooping through those rooms now—even the bathtub—with the children." Schlesinger complied, and by the time A Thousand Days was published, their friendship was restored.
Despite her insistence on privacy, Jacqueline Kennedy never forgot her obligation to posterity. She knew that when this oral history was published after her death, she would have what she expected to be the almost-final word on her life with her husband. It was another of her innovations. With the reminiscences in this book, Jacqueline Kennedy became the first American president's wife to submit to hours of intensive recorded questioning about her public and private life. Now, after decades in which her history has been left to others, listen to what she has to say.
Jackie, when do you think the President first began to think and act seriously about the presidency? When did he begin to see himself, do you suppose, as a possible president?
I think he was probably thinking about it for an awfully long time, long before I even knew, and I say this because I remember the first year we were married, I heard him at the Cape. He was in a room with his father, talking, and I came in and they were talking about something—about the vice presidency. Well, that was just the year after he had been elected a senator.
This was 1953?
Yeah. I said, "Were you talking about being vice president?" or something like that, and he sort of rather laughed. But I think it was always—he never stopped at any plateau, he was always going on to something higher. So, obviously after the vice presidential thing, well, then, he was definitely aiming for the presidency.1 But I think it would have been—I don't know—maybe when he first ran for the Senate. It was certainly before I knew him.