Book of the week: Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy

(Hyperion, $60)

“It may be 50-year-old gossip, but Jackie Kennedy’s candid recordings about her White House days still have people buzzing,” said Helen Kennedy in the New York Daily News. Four months after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the former First Lady sat down with historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and let her opinions fly about the major political figures and events of the day. Sealed for 47 years, the recordings and transcripts of those “remarkably relaxed” seven interviews have been assembled in audio and book format by Jackie’s daughter, Caroline. The collected conversations present a Jackie quite different from the delicate flower of myth. “For one thing, she was pretty snarky.” In her telling, FDR was “a bit of a poseur,” French President Charles de Gaulle was an “egomaniac,” and Martin Luther King Jr. was not just a “phony” but a “terrible” man.

“The remarks aren’t that shocking,” said Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger in WashingtonPost.com. Jackie’s comments about King, for instance, were made in the context of recalling how FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had shared surveillance tapes indicating that King was cheating on his wife and that he’d joked about President Kennedy’s funeral while watching it on TV. But her “catty, caustic” tone does tell us something new about the Kennedy White House, said Vincent P. Bzdek, also in WashingtonPost.com. Despite her insistence that she left all thoughts of governing and policy to her husband, she appears to have been “an almost clandestine” political partner to JFK. The people who fell out of favor with the president, intriguingly, were often “the people who fell out of favor with Jackie.”

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Let’s not be overly polite in discussing these tapes, said Amy Davidson in NewYorker.com. It may be that Jackie’s comments here are jarring mostly thanks to “the many paper-doll versions of her we’ve played with for so long.” But while she may have been looser with her tongue because she knew her words wouldn’t be made public for decades, that almost makes the harshness of her commentary worse. She shares not the least complaint about her deceased husband, which suggests that while sitting with Schlesinger she was less interested in truth telling than in quietly shaping the Camelot myth. We want her to have been a role model, but instead we encounter a Machiavellian operator. On a profound level, “Jackie doesn’t sound all that nice.”