Jacqueline Kennedy: Historical Conversations on Her Life With John F. Kennedy (review)

Jacqueline Kennedy's recently released oral history makes a good case for doing life review interviews. The historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., was intent on recording a life story—just not hers. His seven interviews focused instead on her late husband, John F. Kennedy. So fixed was Schlesinger in his questioning on presidential events, issues, and personalities that when Kennedy's grandchildren read the transcripts they "wished he had asked more questions about her" (xvii-xviii). But the oral history reflected complicity between the interviewer and interviewee, combining his eagerness to gather insights for his planned book on the Kennedy administration, A Thousand Days, with her desire to preserve her husband's memory. The interviews also predated the women's movement and women's history, being conducted at a time when neither one of them could have imagined a scholarly study about a First Lady.

Less than four months after the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy began a series of oral history interviews with Schlesinger for the Kennedy Library. A month later, she conducted separate interviews on the events in Dallas with the writer William Manchester for his book, The Death of a President (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). Afterward, she regretted her candor in both sets of interviews, persuading Schlesinger to delete some of the personal revelations from his book and suing Manchester to strike other items he had gleaned. The Manchester interviews were then closed for a century, but the Schlesinger oral history was sealed without specifying a date for release. As the fiftieth anniversary of John Kennedy's presidency approached, Caroline Kennedy decided that the time had come to publish both the transcripts and the recordings of her mother's oral history.

The oral history offers an intimate glimpse into the Kennedy White House and a fascinating example of early oral history methodology. Jacqueline Kennedy apparently did not review the transcripts, which with minor editing for readability remain faithful to the recordings (included with the book in an eight-CD boxed set). This preserved the casual conversational "yeah," and some occasionally whispered questions over whether it would be appropriate to say something, as well as a plaintive "I'm sort of running out," when an interview on foreign affairs had dragged on too long. The transcripts are appropriately annotated and illustrated, and the recordings include the sounds of footsteps, doors, planes flying overhead, ice cubes clinking in a glass, cigarettes being lit, and impromptu visits from John, Jr. At one point, Schlesinger asked the little boy what he remembered about his father and got an impish response: "I don't remember any-thing!" (99). As his sister Caroline notes in her introduction, even though most of the questions and answers were about their father, the audio pauses and tone, ranging from mirth to disapproval, reveal much about their mother.

The interviews are more conversational than interrogatory. As an interviewer, and former special assistant to the president, Schlesinger knew the material and framed thoughtful questions. Sometimes he bounced ideas off of her with, "isn't-that-right?" questions, to test material for his book. Occasionally, she had to remind him that she was not at some of the events he wanted to talk about, such as the Democratic convention of 1960. Clearly, they also had some preliminary discussions since several times he prompted her to tell stories that had not been recorded on tape.

While the interviews are strikingly candid, giving Jacqueline Kennedy a chance to settle some scores against everyone from Mamie Eisenhower to Ted Sorenson and Indira Gandhi and to bluntly assess cabinet members and prominent foreign officials (perhaps most notably Khrushchev and De Gaulle), the main focus of the interviews was her ten-year marriage to John F. Kennedy. She described him as a restless, bright, clever, caring man with a "high sense of mischief" (215), who was stoic...