Jackie Onassis' Memory Fragments on Tape

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis now believes she should never have asked Lyndon Johnson to rename Cape Canaveral for her slain husband, should not have recruited Author William Manchester to write the story of John Kennedy's assassination (The Death of a President), and should have moved out of the White House the day after his death.

These and other revealing reflections came through the mail just a few days ago to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library. The highly visible but publicly noncommunicative Jackie was interviewed in 1974 by Professor Joe B. Frantz of the University of Texas at Austin for the L.B.J. Library's oral history project. The transcripts were typed and duly sent off to Mrs. Onassis for her review and approval. The months went by. Then, without any fanfare, the edited manuscript showed up in Texas, the first of Jackie's tapes to be released.

This small breach in Jackie's protective fac,ade may be a signal of things to come. In a few weeks it will be ten years since Bobby Kennedy's death. In a few months it will be 15 years since Dallas Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has written a large book on Bobby, having been given the right to mine Bobby's archives by himself. After the book emerges in June, the tapes and papers will be opened to other scholars. This will signal another major step into the era of the recorded recollections of the people who make history. The perils of tape recording seem to plague almost everyone, but the rewards are worth it. Jackie and Professor Frantz, it turns out, produced a 35-minute gap when the machine failed. According to Professor Frantz, Jackie was undaunted and got down on her knees to fix it, then reanswered the questions.

While Schlesinger's book will detail distrust and hostility between L.B.J. and Bobby's partisans, Jackie tells another side of the story. "One thing Prime Minister Macmillan of England had said to Jack about President Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon--that Eisenhower never let Nixon on the place--impressed Jack a lot. Every time there was a state dinner, he wanted the Vice President and Mrs. Johnson to come too ... Once we asked [Luci and Lynda] to a state dinner on their own while their parents were away ... You know, young people at that time in their lives should be included in interesting things."

Had Kennedy ever talked about dropping Johnson from the 1964 ticket? "No, never," answered Jackie. She suggested that such stories annoyed her husband. "I don't think he had any intention of dropping Vice President Johnson."

Kennedy was also annoyed with Texas Governor John Connally the night before the assassination, Jackie relates. "I remember asking [Jack] the night in Houston sort of what the trouble was ... He said that John Connally wanted to show that he was independent and could run on his own and was making friends with a lot of--I think he might have said 'Republican fat cats'--and he wanted to show that he didn't need Lyndon Johnson."

On the tapes Jackie questions her actions during the days following the tragedy. "Now that I look back on it I think I should have gotten out the next--I didn't have any place to go ... It's funny what you do in a state of shock. I remember going over to the Oval Office to ask [Johnson] to name the space center in Florida Cape Kennedy. Now that I think back on it that was so wrong, and if I'd known [Cape Canaveral] was the name from the time of Columbus, it would be the last thing that Jack would have wanted."

When Jackie talked about politics and how Jack won the nomination over Johnson in 1960, there was the wistful refrain of a candidate's neglected wife. "The way Jack got it was all those years he'd been going around the country--it was six years of our marriage, anyway, of every single moment of free time going out..."

Jackie picked up fragments along the way that fascinated her. The meeting with the Johnsons just after the nomination was one. "They came to stay with us in Hyannis. It's a rather small house we have there, and we wanted them to be comfortable so we gave them our bedroom. But we didn't want them to know it was our bedroom ... There was a lot of moving things out of closets so there'd be no trace of anybody's toothbrush anywhere. I remember that evening how impressed I was with Mrs. Johnson. She and my sister and I were sitting in one part of the room, and Jack and Johnson and some men were in the other part of the room. Mrs. Johnson had a little spiral pad, and when she'd hear a name mentioned she'd jot it down ... Or sometimes if Mr. Johnson wanted her, he'd say, 'Bird, do you know so-and-so's number?' and she'd always have it down. Yet she would sit talking with us, looking so calm."

The fight over the Manchester book Jackie said was "the worst thing in my life ... I've never read the book. I did my oral history with him in an evening and alone, and it's rather hard to stop when the floodgates open. I just talked about private things. Then the man went away, and I think he was very upset during the writing of the book ... Now, in hindsight, it seems wrong to have ever done that book at that time."

Jackie did not vote in the 1964 election, and some of the Johnson people wondered then if it was a deliberate affront. Jackie's story is different. "People in my own family told me I should vote. I said, 'I'm not going to vote' ... You see, I'd never voted until I was married to Jack ... and I thought, 'I'm not going to vote for any [other person] because this vote would have been his.' They were all rather cross at me. Not cross, but they'd say, 'Now please, why don't you? It will just make trouble.' Bobby said I should vote, and I said, 'I don't care what you say, I'm not going to vote.'"

Bit by bit such fragments emerge and are fitted to form a larger mosaic. Thanks to the tape recorder the new history will ring of the true human drama.

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