Jacqueline Kennedy - Caroline Kennedy [7]
Inside the house, passing through sliding doors, Schlesinger joined Jacqueline in the living room, whose bookshelves displayed artifacts from ancient Rome, Egypt, and Greece that President Kennedy had given her over the years. Facing away from the front windows, she liked to sit on a crushed-velvet sofa. Atop a three-tiered table beside her were two framed photographs: the smiling JFK beside his desk, clapping while his children danced, another of him campaigning among a crowd. Placing his tape recorder beside a silver cigarette box on a low black Oriental table, Schlesinger would have sat to Mrs. Kennedy's right on a pale yellow chair he had seen upstairs at the White House. He urged her to speak as though addressing "an historian of the twenty-first century." As he later recalled, "From time to time, she would ask me to turn off the machine so that she could say what she wanted to say, and then ask, Should I say that on the recorder?' . . . In general, what I would say was, Why don't you say it? . . . You have control over the transcript.'" During this and the next six sittings, starting with a quavering voice that grew stronger with time, Jacqueline unburdened herself as the tape machine also picked up the sounds of her lighting cigarettes, of ice cubes in glasses, dogs barking in the distance, trucks rumbling down N Street, and jets roaring overhead.
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY WITH CAROLINE AND JOHN IN THE OVAL OFFICE
Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston
For anyone who doubts Jacqueline Kennedy's emotional self-discipline, note that during these months of her greatest despair, she could will herself to speak in such detail about her vanished former life. And Schlesinger was not even her only interlocutor that spring. In April 1964, she sat for hours at night in that same parlor to be questioned by William Manchester, who was researching his authorized book about the assassination. In order to spare Mrs. Kennedy the agony of twice recounting those events, Schlesinger left the task to Manchester. Nevertheless, on the June day after she completed her final interview with Schlesinger, she was forced to sit in that same room to be questioned by members of the Warren Commission about her husband's final motorcade.
Read after almost a half century, the interviews in this book revise scene after scene of the history of the 1950s and early 1960s that we thought we knew. While no such work ever tells the entire story, this oral history constitutes a fresh internal narrative of John Kennedy's life as senator, candidate, and President, and his wife's experience of those years, providing new detail on what JFK and Jacqueline privately said to each other, her backstage role in his political life, diplomacy, and world crises, and her definite and consistently original views about the changing cast of characters who surrounded them both. The close student of the Kennedy years knows how Jackie expanded her husband's range with her command of French and Spanish, her knowledge about the history of Europe and its colonies, her background in the arts. But even today, many presume that she was relatively indifferent to political life. When Schlesinger met her at Hyannis Port in 1959, like others at the time, he found her "flighty on politics," asking elementary questions with "wide-eyed naivete." This behavior was not surprising, because well-bred