In the spring of 1964, just four months after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Jacqueline Kennedy sat down with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in her Georgetown home. 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 with a frankness she had never shown publicly and never would again.
She requested that the tapes be sealed indefinitely. She never gave another interview about the Kennedy years for the rest of her life. When the recordings were finally released in 2011, they revealed a private Jacqueline Kennedy unlike anything the public had ever seen.
The public image had been impeccable. She was elegance, poise, and restraint under devastating pressure. She had stood beside her husband’s coffin in a blood-stained pink suit. She had organized a dignified state funeral and walked behind the horse-drawn caisson with a composure that moved world leaders to tears. The world thought it knew her. The tapes showed it did not.
The sessions took place at her home on N Street NW in Washington. Schlesinger was a trusted insider, a Harvard historian and former special assistant in the Kennedy White House. Jackie had agreed to participate in an oral history project intended to capture first-hand accounts of the Kennedy presidency. But she set one condition: the tapes would be sealed for an indefinite period. 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, the decision passed to her daughter, Caroline Kennedy. Caroline chose to release the tapes in September 2011, 50 years after the Kennedy presidency began. The release included a book, an audio recording, and a television special anchored by Diane Sawyer.
What came out startled almost everyone. The woman who had never said an unguarded word in public turned out to have the sharpest tongue in any room she entered. She had opinions about everything, and she described her own marriage in terms no one had anticipated.
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 “a climate of affection and comfort and détente” when he came home. She said she had 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.”
When the tapes were released in 2011, those words landed like a thunderclap. Caroline Kennedy told ABC’s Good Morning America that her daughters, Rose and Tatiana, were “absolutely horrified” when they heard 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.
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 even more shocking: “I think women should never be in politics. We’re just not suited to it.”
The woman who had conducted state visits, championed the arts, redesigned the White House, and hosted millions of television viewers believed women should stay out of politics. As Caroline Kennedy noted, it was a view formed entirely within the world of its time. But hearing it in Jackie’s own voice was jarring.
Jackie also explained what she thought made JFK attractive to women. She compared him to Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic statesman who had twice lost the presidency to Eisenhower. “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 that she always thought women who were scared of sex loved Adlai. This was not the Jacqueline Kennedy the world thought it knew.
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: “Oh God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?”
She also said 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. “He didn’t like the idea that Lyndon would go on and be president because he was worried for the country,” she said.
Jackie 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.”
She also described Lady Bird Johnson in terms that became 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.”
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 that he was the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris. But in the tapes, her opinion of France and its leader 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.
On Indira Gandhi, who would later become India’s prime minister, Jackie was even sharper. She described Gandhi as “a real prune, bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.” The judgement 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. 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 “charlatan,” though she qualified that “charlatan is an unfair word.” She conveyed JFK’s sense that Roosevelt was a bit of a poser, a performer who cultivated a particular image.
The Cuban Missile Crisis section of the tapes produced perhaps the most emotionally powerful 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.
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.”
It was the most intimate portrait of the Kennedy marriage the tapes provided. Whatever the tensions, whatever the complexities, 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 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?”
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.
One thing the tapes notably did not contain was a discussion of 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. That silence was deliberate. It was the one subject Jackie could not give to history.
What the tapes gave the world instead was 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 American feminine grace turned out to have used words like “egomaniac” and “loathe” without hesitation. She had opinions about sex and politics and foreign leaders that no one had ever heard from her.
She described her own marriage with extraordinary self-awareness and without sentimentality. And in the same conversations, she 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 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. 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.