She was the First Lady whose elegance defined a golden age for America. But while Jackie Kennedy might have awed world leaders with her White House dinners, we now know she could stick the knife in.
She described India's future leader Indira Gandhi as a 'pushy, horrible... bitter prune', French president Charles de Gaulle as a 'spiteful egomaniac' and civil rights leader Martin Luther King as a 'terrible' man and a 'phoney', who took part in sex parties.
As for U.S. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, don't get her started. She described him as bitter, hard-drinking and uninspired.
The former Democrat president Franklin D. Roosevelt was written off as 'an insincere show-off'. And as for her husband's idol, Sir Winston Churchill, he was 'really quite ga-ga'.
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| American royalty: Jackie portrays her marriage as blissfully happy, but admits that her husband did have a 'crude' side |
Such jaw-dropping candour, all the more remarkable from a woman who spent her life keeping the world at arm's length, has been revealed in a series of taped interviews she gave 47 years ago to friend and former White House aide Arthur Schlesinger.
Mrs Kennedy, who was 34 and speaking four months after JFK's assassination, left the eight-and-a-half hours of tapes in the care of her daughter, Caroline, ordering they should be sealed for decades.
She never spoke again in public about her three years in the White House or wrote a memoir, so became a legend because of what we didn't know.
A book of the transcripts published on Wednesday as part of the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's election as president has caused outrage.
The fact this purring, Chanel-clad kitten had claws shouldn't have come as a shock. But her choice of who to sink them into has irked her many admirers.
What's more, her private thoughts have offended liberal opinion in America for their petty and small-minded nature -- not to mention their blatantly anti-feminist tone.
'I think women should never be in politics. We're just not suited to it.'
Knowing these tapes would eventually become public, it is not surprising the grieving widow's honesty stops short of discussing her husband's compulsive womanising.
Instead, in a breathy voice (ironically reminiscent of JFK's most famous 'other woman', Marilyn Monroe) -- and with background sounds of matches striking, ice cubes clinking and children playing -- she paints a picture of domestic bliss and unfailing devotion.
'I think women should never be in politics. We're just not suited to it,' she says.
Their marriage, she admitted, might have been 'rather terribly Victorian or Asiatic', but she was determined to provide a 'climate of affection, comfort and detente'.
Their time in the White House were 'our happiest years'.
She fondly remembered how, perhaps copying Churchill, JFK would change into his pyjamas for his 45-minute afternoon nap. At night, he would kneel by their bed, taking just three seconds to say his prayers.
He was a voracious reader in the bath, when he wasn't playing with rubber ducks.
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| First Lady of bitchiness: Jackie's glamour hid a catty side |
There is only one, apparently unguarded, reference to her husband perhaps not being the perfect family man when she admitted there was a 'sort of a crude side' to Jack -- before quickly correcting herself.
During the Bay of Pigs and Cuban missile crisis, she revealed he would cry in their private quarters.
'That's the time I have been closest to him. I said: ''Please don't send me to Camp David, me and the children, please don't send me anywhere."
If there wasn't enough room in the White House bomb shelter, she told him she didn't mind.
'Please, then, I just want to be on the lawn when it happens... I just want to be with you, and the children do, too, than live without you.
'When it all turned [out] so fantastically, he said: ''Well, if anyone's going to shoot me, this would be the day to do it," ' she recalled. It was a tragically prescient remark, but one that didn't surprise his wife.
She recalled how he had told a historian that Abraham Lincoln was remembered as a great president only because he was assassinated immediately after winning the Civil War.
JFK was worried about his legacy, she revealed. He was horrified that Lyndon Johnson might succeed him.
Her own waspish observations of Johnson are in stark contrast to the famous picture of her in a pink Chanel suit spattered with her husband's blood, standing by his side as he took the oath of office after the assassination.
'The poor man's terrified' and appeared 'panic-stricken', she said witheringly.
She was aware many considered her to be a snob and so was delighted to be praised for restyling the White House.
'Suddenly, everything that had been a liability before -- your hair, that you spoke French... that you didn't bake bread with flour up to your arms... had just gone away,' she said.
The unresolved question is how much these tapes reflect her views or her husband's. She claimed she got all her opinions from JFK and the people she scorned tended to be those with whom the Kennedy administration had problems.
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| Tricky: There was another side to civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King's public image, according to the recordings |
Caroline has been quick to insist her mother's remarks about Martin Luther King did not reflect her true feelings, but were the result of the 'poisonous' smear campaign conducted by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover.
Yet Jackie says on the tapes that King had allegedly tried to organise a sex party before he attended the 1963 march on Washington at which he made his I Have A Dream speech.
'[Bobby] said this with no bitterness or anything, how he was calling up all these girls and arranging for a party of men and women, I mean, sort of an orgy.'
She also couldn't forgive King for supposedly making disparaging remarks at her husband's funeral about the cardinal who delivered the eulogy.
'He made fun of Cardinal Cushing and said he was drunk at it [the funeral] and things about they almost dropped the coffin. I mean Martin Luther King is a really tricky person,' she said. Tellingly perhaps, Jackie is at her bitchiest when she is talking about other, less glamorous women.
She claimed 'violently liberal women in politics' preferred Adlai Stevenson, JFK's balding Democratic rival, because they were 'scared of sex'.
Lady Bird Johnson, LBJ's wife, was 'sort of like a trained hunting dog' who would whip out a notebook whenever her husband spoke so she could record everything, no matter how trivial.
As for Madame Nhu, South Vietnam's First Lady, and Clare Boothe Luce, a conservative U.S. congresswoman -- 'I wouldn't be surprised if they were lesbians,' she sneered.
There are occasional flashes of comedy among the criticisms. Jackie asked President Sukarno of Indonesia to show her a book about his collection of paintings. Every picture was a woman 'naked to the waist with a hibiscus in her hair,' she said.
'I caught Jack's eye and we were trying not to laugh at each other.' Still, Mr Sukarno 'had a sort of lecherous look'.
We can only speculate as to whether JFK had a lecherous look, too, because despite her candour about other world leaders, his loyal wife certainly didn't let on.
© Daily Mail, London
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