Jackie Kennedy in '64: A woman between worlds

NEW YORK - It's a side of Jacqueline Kennedy only friends and family knew. Funny and inquisitive, canny and cutting.

In the book Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, based on tapes made in 1964 with historian and former White House aide Arthur M. Schlesinger, the former first lady is not yet the jet-setting celebrity of the late 1960s or the literary editor of the 1970s and '80s.

She is also nothing like the soft-spoken fashion icon of the three previous years. When she made the tapes, in her 18th-century Washington house in the spring and early summer of 1964, she was in her mid-30s, recently widowed, but dry-eyed and determined to set down her thoughts for history. The book came out Wednesday as part of a celebration of the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's first year in office. Jacqueline Kennedy died in 1994, and Schlesinger in 2007.

At home in her 18th-century Washington house, as if receiving a guest for afternoon tea, she chats about her husband and their time in the White House. The Kennedy children, Caroline and John Jr., occasionally pop in. On the accompanying audio discs, you can hear the clink of ice in a drinking glass.

The world, and Jacqueline Kennedy, would change beyond imagination after 1964. But as of these conversations, blacks were still "Negroes" and feminists still suspect, even in the view of a woman as sophisticated as Kennedy.

As historian Michael Beschloss notes in the introduction, Jacqueline Kennedy once accepted that wives were defined by their husbands' careers and worried about "emotional" women entering politics. She enjoyed having her husband "proud of her," saw no reason to have a policy opinion that wasn't the same as his, and laughed at the thought of "violently liberal women" who disliked JFK and preferred the more effete Adlai Stevenson.

"Jack so obviously demanded from a woman - a relationship between a man and a woman where a man would be the leader and a woman be his wife and look up to him as a man," she said. "With Adlai you could have another relationship where - you know, he'd sort of be sweet and you could talk, but you wouldn't ever . . . I always thought women who were scared of sex loved Adlai."

There are no spectacular revelations and virtually nothing about JFK's assassination. Kennedy's health problems and his extramarital affairs were still years from public knowledge. Jacqueline Kennedy speaks warmly throughout of her husband, remembering him as dynamic, perceptive, and free of grudges, an assignment she and others bore for him.

Like any powerful family, the Kennedys had complicated relationships with other people at the top. They valued loyalty, vision, and ingenuity. They hated dullness, indecision, and self-promotion, even among their own.

Jacqueline Kennedy dismissed the idea that the eldest Kennedy son, Joseph Jr., would have been president had he not been killed in World War II. "He would have been so unimaginative, compared to Jack," she said. She contrasted the integrity of Robert F. Kennedy, the president's brother and attorney general, with the designs of sister-in-law Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Robert had begged JFK not to appoint him, fearing charges of nepotism. Eunice, meanwhile, was anxious to see her husband, Sargent Shriver, named head of the department of Health, Education and Welfare.

"Eunice was pestering Jack to death to make Sargent head of HEW because she wanted to be a cabinet wife," she tells Schlesinger. "You know, it shows you some people are ambitious for themselves, and Bobby wasn't."

Politics means doing business with people you would otherwise avoid, and Jacqueline Kennedy logged in many such hours. She endured dinners with journalists and Congress members critical of her husband. She called Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg "brilliant" but added that "he talks more about himself than any man I've ever met in my life." White House speechwriter Theodore Sorensen had a "big inferiority complex" and was "the last person you would invite at night." She referred to France's Charles de Gaulle, whom she famously charmed on a Paris visit, as "that egomaniac" and "that spiteful man." Indira Gandhi, the future prime minister of India, was a "prune - bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman."

She was especially hard on Lyndon B. Johnson, who had competed with her husband for the presidency in 1960 and became vice president through the kind of hard calculation the Kennedys became known for: Johnson was from Texas and the Democrats needed a Southerner to balance the ticket.

Once in office, Johnson's imposing personal style and reticence during cabinet meetings alienated the Kennedys, who mocked his accent and manners, while he resented the Kennedys and other "Harvards" he believed looked down on him. After Kennedy was assassinated, Robert Kennedy became a critic of Johnson's presidency and challenged him for the nomination in 1968.

"Jack said it to me sometimes. He said, 'Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon were president?' " she recalled. "And Bobby told me that he'd had some discussions with him . . . do something to name someone else in 1968."

Historians have seen President Kennedy as unemotional and undemonstrative. But his widow recalls him lying on the floor with the kids, watching fitness instructor Jack LaLanne on TV. They followed LaLanne's moves, and at times the president's toes touched his son's. JFK "loved those children tumbling around him in this sort of - sensual is the only way I can think of it."

Her closest moments with her husband came during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the United States and the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of nuclear war. She walked with him, the two saying little, on the White House lawn. Some officials sent their wives away, but she resisted. If the bombs fell, she wanted them to be together.

"If anything happens, we're all going to stay right here with you," she remembers telling her husband. "Even if there's not room in the bomb shelter in the White House. . . . I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do, too - than live without you."