In March 1964, four months after her husband's assassination in Dallas, Jacqueline Kennedy sat down in her Washington home with historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. She was 34 years old, a widow with two small children, and the most recognized woman in the world.
Over seven sessions and more than eight hours of recorded conversation, she spoke more honestly than she ever had in public or ever would again. She requested that the tapes be sealed indefinitely.
They remained locked away for 47 years. When they were finally released in 2011, what Jackie Kennedy said about her marriage was unlike anything the public had ever heard from her.
To understand why the tapes matter, it helps to recall what she had shown the world until that point. Her public image was impeccable. She was elegance itself, poise and restraint and grace under the most devastating pressure any American woman of her generation had faced.
She had stood beside her husband's coffin in a blood-stained pink suit. She had organized the most dignified state funeral the country had ever seen. She had walked behind the horse-drawn caisson with a composure that reduced hardened world leaders to tears.
She had knelt with her small children to say goodbye. She had shaken 300 hands in a single afternoon receiving line without breaking. The world thought it knew Jacqueline Kennedy. The tapes revealed it did not know her at all.
The sessions took place in the spring of 1964 at her home at 3017 N Street NW in Georgetown. Schlesinger was a trusted insider, a Harvard historian who had served as a special assistant in the Kennedy White House and was a friend of the family.
Jackie had approved a planned oral history project that she and Robert Kennedy had agreed to in January 1964, intended to capture first-hand accounts of the Kennedy presidency for future generations. She fulfilled her obligation to that project by sitting for Schlesinger.
But she set one condition. The tapes would be sealed at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library for an indefinite period. She never specified when they should be released, and she never wanted them published in her lifetime.
Jacqueline Kennedy died in May 1994. Her son, John F. Kennedy Jr., died in a plane crash in July 1999. After both were gone, decisions about the tapes passed to her daughter, Caroline Kennedy.
Caroline chose to release them in September 2011, 50 years after the Kennedy presidency began. The release included a book published by Hyperion titled Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, an audio recording of the actual tapes, and a two-hour television special on ABC anchored by Diane Sawyer.
What came out of those tapes startled almost everyone. Not because Jackie was malicious, not because she was bitter, but because the woman who had never said an unguarded word in public turned out in private to have the sharpest tongue in any room she had ever entered.
She had opinions about everything. She expressed them without hesitation, and she described her own marriage in terms that no one had anticipated.
The first shock was how she described the marriage itself. Jackie told Schlesinger that her relationship with Jack had been, in her own words, a rather terribly Victorian or Asiatic relationship.
She explained that she did not expect independence within it. She saw her role as creating, in her words, a climate of affection and comfort and détente when he came home.
She told Schlesinger that she had essentially shaped herself to become the wife she could see Jack wanted. "I think a woman always adapts," she said, "and especially if you're very young when you get married. You know, you really become the kind of wife you can see that your husband wants."
These words, spoken by a woman celebrated as a cultural icon and an emblem of modern femininity, landed like a thunderclap when they were released in 2011. Her own granddaughters were reportedly horrified.
Caroline Kennedy told ABC's Good Morning America that her daughters, Rose and Tatiana, were absolutely horrified when they listened to that portion of the tapes. They asked whether their grandmother had really thought that way. Caroline responded that the tapes were just a snapshot of a world we barely recognize.
But there was more. Jackie went further. She said directly that she got all her opinions from her husband. She described a world view in which JFK's perspective became her own because she absorbed and adapted to him.
Then she said something her granddaughters apparently found even more shocking than the Victorian marriage comment. She said, "I think women should never be in politics. We're just not suited to it."
The woman who had been photographed by every newspaper in the world, who had conducted state visits, who had spoken multiple languages with foreign leaders, who had championed the arts and redesigned the White House as a historical monument, and who had hosted 56 million television viewers on a tour of its rooms, believed women should stay out of politics.
It was, as Caroline Kennedy noted, a view formed entirely within the world of its time. But hearing it in Jackie's own voice was undeniably jarring.
Jackie then explained what she thought made JFK attractive to women and what she thought made his rivals unappealing. She offered a comparison between JFK and Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic statesman who had twice lost the presidency to Eisenhower and remained a favorite of liberal intellectual women.
"Jack so obviously demanded from a woman," she explained, "a relationship between a man and a woman where a man would be the leader and a woman would be his wife and look up to him as a man. With Adlai," she said, "you could have another relationship where he'd sort of be sweet and you could talk."
Then she added, with apparently no inhibitions whatsoever, that she always thought women who were scared of sex loved Adlai. This was not the Jacqueline Kennedy the world thought it knew. This was a woman speaking with complete and unguarded frankness, knowing she would be dead before anyone heard it.
On Lyndon Johnson, the tapes revealed something extraordinary. Jackie recalled what JFK had said to her privately about the man who became president the day he was shot. She quoted her husband directly.
"Bobby told me this later, and I know Jack said it to me sometimes," she told Schlesinger. "He said, 'Oh God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?'"
That quote, documented and verified, was remarkable enough, but she went further. She told Schlesinger that in the months before the assassination, JFK had begun quietly discussing with Robert Kennedy how to prevent Johnson from becoming the Democratic nominee in 1968 at the end of what would have been Kennedy's second term.
"He didn't like the idea that Lyndon would go on and be president because he was worried for the country," she said. "Bobby told me that he'd had some discussions with him. I forget exactly how they were planning or who they had in mind. It wasn't Bobby, but somebody do something to name someone else in '68."
Jackie also noted that JFK believed Johnson could never get an opinion out of Lyndon at any cabinet or National Security meeting. "He just agree with everyone," she said, "or keep quiet. So, Lyndon, as vice president, didn't just do anything."
She described the reaction to Johnson's selection as vice presidential candidate in 1960 with equal bluntness. "Oh well," she said, "I think everyone was disappointed because of all the people they liked Lyndon Johnson the least."
This was not a coded or diplomatic observation. It was a direct statement that JFK's own circle considered Johnson the least desirable option, and everyone knew it.
She also described Lady Bird Johnson in terms that have become among the most quoted lines from the tapes. Jackie recalled a dinner at which Lyndon would talk and Lady Bird would get out a little notebook.
"I've never seen a husband and wife, so," she said, "she was sort of like a trained hunting dog. He'd say something as innocent as, 'Does your sister live in London?' and Lady Bird would write down Lee's name and London."
The image of Lady Bird as a meticulous note-taker following her husband's conversational cues struck Jackie as something between impressive and deeply unsettling.
On world leaders, the tapes were equally unsparing. Jackie had been celebrated in France during the 1961 state visit in ways that overshadowed her husband. JFK himself had joked at a Paris press conference that he was the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.
The French press adored her. Her fluency in the language, her familiarity with French culture and art, her elegance, all of it made her a sensation in Paris. But in the tapes, when Jackie described her actual opinion of France and its leader, she was devastating.
"De Gaulle was my hero when I married Jack," she told Schlesinger, but she described finding him after their first meeting to be so full of spite. Then she said, "I loathe the French. They are not very nice. They are all for themselves." She called De Gaulle an egomaniac.
The woman who had been France's darling, who had been photographed smiling beside De Gaulle in the formal rooms of the Élysée Palace, privately considered him spiteful and egomaniacal.
On Indira Gandhi, who would later become India's prime minister and one of the most significant political leaders of the 20th century, Jackie was even sharper. She described Gandhi as a real prune, bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.
This judgment came from Jackie's 1962 visit to India and Pakistan with her sister, Lee Radziwill. The trip had been considered a triumph of American soft diplomacy, and Jackie's photos from India filled newspapers worldwide. Privately, she found the future prime minister bitter and horrible.
On her husband's view of Franklin Roosevelt, Jackie recalled JFK saying something more nuanced. He often thought Roosevelt was rather a, and she searched for the word, "Charlatan is an unfair word," she qualified.
But she conveyed JFK's sense that Roosevelt was a bit of a poser, a performer who cultivated a particular image. This characterization of one Democratic icon by another, relayed through the private conversations Jackie documented, added a remarkable dimension to understanding how the Kennedys saw their predecessors.
The Cuban Missile Crisis section of the tapes produced perhaps the most emotionally powerful single passage. Jackie described the moment in October 1962 when JFK called her at their weekend house in Virginia without explanation, just asking her to come back to Washington. From his voice, she could tell something was wrong.
From then on, she recalled, "It seemed there was no waking or sleeping." When she learned the full truth about the Soviet missiles, she told Schlesinger that she had begged JFK not to send her and the children away.
"If anything happens," she said she told him, "we're all going to stay right here with you. I just want to be with you and I want to die with you and the children do, too, than live without you."
This was the most intimate portrait of the Kennedy marriage the tapes provided. Whatever the tensions, whatever the complexities of their relationship, in the most frightening days of the Cold War, Jackie's response was absolute. She did not want safety if it meant leaving him.
The statement was unscripted, emotional, and genuine. It cut through everything else on the tapes to reveal something irreducibly real about what their marriage meant to her at its core.
The tapes also contained a remarkable passage about JFK's relationship to his own possible death. Jackie recalled a 1962 White House conversation in which JFK spoke with historian David Donald about Abraham Lincoln's presidency.
JFK turned to Donald and asked, "Do you think Lincoln would have been as great a president if he'd lived?" The question itself was striking. Jackie remembered that it was the one thing on Jack's mind. He was already, in 1962, thinking about presidential greatness, about legacy, about what history does to the men it chooses.
There is one thing the Schlesinger tapes notably did not contain. They did not discuss the assassination directly. Jackie had stipulated that the conversation stay focused on the Kennedy presidency and her life with JFK up to November 22nd, 1963.
The tapes stop at the edge of Dallas. There is nothing about the motorcade, nothing about the hospital, nothing about Air Force One and the swearing in with LBJ. That silence was deliberate. It was the one subject Jackie could not give to history.
Even privately, even sealed for decades, some things were beyond even the most candid recording session. What the tapes gave the world instead was something almost more valuable. They gave a complete portrait of a mind that had always been hidden behind the public performance.
The woman who appeared in photographs as the perfect embodiment of a particular kind of American feminine grace turned out to have been behind closed doors someone who used words like egomaniac and loathe without hesitation. Who had opinions about sex and politics and foreign leaders that no one had ever heard from her.
Who described her own marriage with extraordinary self-awareness and without sentimentality, and who in the same conversations revealed a love for her husband so total that she had been willing to die beside him rather than leave when the world nearly ended.
Caroline Kennedy said when the tapes were released that the goal was to reintroduce her mother, to show a woman that people believed they knew but did not know at all. She said that her mother's intellectual curiosity, her sense of the ridiculous, her sense of adventure, and her unerring sense of what was right were all there in the tapes for people to finally hear.
Jackie had sealed them for a reason. She understood that the unguarded self she was in those recording sessions was not the self she wanted the public to have while she was alive. She had spent her entire public life controlling what the world knew about her, what it saw, what it heard.
The tapes were her one act of complete honesty, placed carefully out of reach until she could no longer be hurt by them. When they finally came out 47 years after she sat down with Schlesinger in Georgetown, they did exactly what she must have known they would do. They made everyone feel they had finally met the real Jacqueline Kennedy, and realized how much of her they had never known.