Jacqueline Kennedy's Astonishing Memoir
Yes. It is.
The lives of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy have been chronicled in countless ways, in facts and gauzy mythology.
If you are old enough to remember where you were on November 22, 1963, then it is probably your middle-aged offspring and grandchildren who are now watching Love Story, the soapy streamer about the short and tragic marriage of John Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.
By the numbers, the most read article in The New Yorker in 2025 was granddaughter Tatiana Kennedy Schlossberg’s account of the leukemia that was about to end her life.
Fascination with the Kennedy family persists long after its time, vexed now by the ignominy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s role in Donald Trump’s cabinet.
JFK himself died long before he would have left a memoir. And Jackie, as she is always called, was considered more ethereal than practical or accessible in the way she was portrayed. As a woman of that era, she recognized that she was mainly examined for style.
That is why the book and audio Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, published in 2011, is so astonishing. The interviews were conducted in 1964 by the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a close friend and presidential aide, only months after the assassination.
With the approval and a foreword by Caroline Kennedy, the book was published by Hyperion, a publisher then owned by the Walt Disney Company. It was briefly a bestseller and, from what I can tell, was largely forgotten. I came upon it in a classically twenty-first-century way, in a clip of a friendly interview that Caroline Kennedy did on David Letterman’s late-night show when the book came out.
I downloaded the audio and the ebook, and I was mesmerized.
The interviews must be the most immersive account of the marriage and JFK’s presidency, as lived by Jackie, that can possibly exist.
Why? Because the conversations are so personal, kept private for decades and candid in so many ways. There is sadness, of course, but little that is maudlin. Kennedy’s image has been blurred over the years by the revelations about his trysts with women even while in the White House, a reflection of prurience in contemporary history.
But in these interviews there is a marital intimacy that cannot be contrived, a loving partnership in which Jackie was a much more significant participant than she was thought to be.
She was in her mid-thirties, soft-spoken with a feminine lilt in her voice. My sense is that she chose in every meaningful way to be JFK’s beloved wife and mother of his children. She was not his mistress, and I suspect (though we’ll never know for sure) that both of them understood the difference.
There are many moments of vivid history. Less than a hundred days into JFK’s presidency came the Bay of Pigs disaster, in which a group of Cuban exiles launched an operation to overthrow Fidel Castro, with CIA support, which was an utter and humiliating failure.
How that happened, and JFK’s response, has been written about extensively, but never so poignantly and with an understanding of the circumstances and politics that surrounded it. The image Jackie paints of JFK in tears over the damage to his presidency so early in his term and his musings on the fate of the hapless Cubans are exceptionally visceral.
That episode was to shape the president’s brilliant handling of the October 1962 crisis in which the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of a nuclear confrontation. The Bay of Pigs experience was the reason that Kennedy overruled the generals and the CIA, who were advocating a military response, and instead imposed a naval embargo.
You can hear Jackie describe JFK’s suspicion of the military brass as only she could describe it, in pillow talk.
One of the significant moments in Kennedy’s pre-presidential life was the controversy over the authorship of Profiles in Courage, the book that won a Pulitzer Prize in biography, which was published after Kennedy had spent months recovering from back surgery.
A widespread belief was that most of the book had been really written by Ted Sorensen, a young aide and speechwriter. In Jackie’s view, that suspicion was fostered by Sorensen himself, for which she never could forgive or really trust him.
In explicit and sometimes cutting detail, Jackie describes how she and her husband felt about the major personalities of the era and how JFK shrewdly navigated political relationships in Washington, where this week’s opponent may of necessity be next week’s ally.
Jackie’s perception of some illustrious figures was very critical, including (and especially) Lyndon Johnson as vice president and Kennedy’s successor; Secretary of State Dean Rusk, whom JFK had decided to replace; Adlai Stevenson, twice defeated in his own presidential campaigns, who was “irritating”; and lesser figures like Mamie Eisenhower, who called the White House “her home” and was reluctant to show the incoming first lady around.
The private Jackie could be acerbic and emotional. In his own memoir, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara tells of the night in 1967 when Jackie pounded on his chest pleading for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Only now can I see that fierceness in her appraisal of the people and events of the period.
Over the years, and having worked on books with Rosalynn Carter and Nancy Reagan and read much about other presidential wives, I take the view that while the husbands had the egos and ambitions that made them presidents, it was their wives who felt the fullest brunt of the political years, especially the lows.
Jacqueline Kennedy cherished her marriage and admired her husband greatly. Through this private account of their lives together, I can see that this was true.
Privileged woman of the people. What she was in reality was someone who considered herself better than those who had actually accomplished something with their talent or hard work. Recall, Jack and Jackie (nice alliteration) like FDR, were the product of an America with deep class distinction. They never merited anything because they merited it by wealth and birth. From Vietnam to Bay of Pigs, this was all about a husband and wife who were barely educated, relied on others to do their writing, and pretended to be American boarding school aristocracy. They were preoccupied with JFK’s, and thus Jackie’s, well groomed legacy. In reality, JFK was well versed in conversation and had Ted Sorensen to do his thinking, … but underneath he lacked the intellectual grit and courage he allegedly profiled.
If you wish to understand Jackie Kennedy’s moral character, think about this. She married an old, fat Greek shipping tycoon who exploited the poor, ran dirty ships that polluted, and made a fortune buying war surplus ships, hiding income from the tax man, and had man “friends.” Their marriage contract required her to sleep with him once a month — there is word for that which escapes me, it begins with “w”. Jackie could have married anyone, she married Onasis. Why? She liked souvlaki?
Kennedy’s entire Bay of Pigs schtick is now studied like it was a brilliant process — in truth, if you read carefully — they were scared to death nuclear war had arrived, vascillating, paranoid of the military, looking for someone to blame (Curtis Lemay played the part of neanderthal), and used a reporter as a back-channel. Seriously, the administration cut a deal using a “reporter” (the Department of State was unavailable) that gave Russia a win and then went on to claim, “Those missiles in Turkey, we don’t need ‘em, we were going to remove them anyway.” That was a shamwow shamboozle of the American public — and they bought it thanks to Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite fed daily by Pierre Salinger in discreet, intimate doses. Such dribble. Cuba was the result of an accurate assessment by Russian intelligence that Kennedy was a feckless frat boy riding on his mean spirited, cut-throat Daddy’s dime. In reality, JFK and Jackie were meringue intellectuals who were lazy, dull, dimwits, of the upper class whose Camelot image was created by Pierre Salinger and the gate-keepers (and I had the opportunity to know Pierre when he visited Paris). America, … please grow up.