Interviews with the Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Our present assignment in English 241 is to write four letters between two famous people, whether they are historically famous or current celebrities.  In preparation to write these, we have to locate 4-6 reputable sources to help give us the background information from which to write the letters from.  Though the letters we write cannot at all be taken seriously, it is important to find the most credible of sources to make their material as factual and even believable as possible.

I will be writing my letters between former President John F. Kennedy and his wife, the former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.  The fact that the "Kennedy" name is a household name with several links, I think people would find this interesting since the president and his wife especially have been in the midst of various scandals, mostly involving President Kennedy's suspected infidelity.

To find my first source, I went to library.tamu.edu and clicked on Databases, then typed in Academic Search Complete, which led me to EBSCO.  Before searching for articles that contained both John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, I made sure to set the settings to only allow articles with full texts present as well as only ones that were peer-edited.  I found the introduction to 368 pages and 8 CDs long of interviews of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis by Arthur M. Schlesinger.  This set of recorded interviews is called Jacqueline Kennedy:  Historical Conversations On Her Life With John F. Kennedy, and the part that is printed online is the introduction, which gives great insight into what was found in those interviews.

As background information, it is said that Schlesinger's purpose for interviewing the late Mrs. Kennedy was not primarily for her life story, but really for her husband's- and she also agreed to do them mostly to preserve her husband's legacy. The interviews were also started when the women's movement had not begun yet and the idea of doing a scholarly study of the First Lady was not yet in peoples' minds. The interviews began four months after the assassination of her husband, and Kennedy-Onassis did feel as if she had been too candid at times, calling back some of her personal revelations from being published. When Kennedy-Onassis passed away, however, her daughter Caroline deemed it appropriate to pull it all out for publication.

The interviews Schlesinger had gotten published were not reviewed by Onassis and were in turn pretty much unedited, including background noises and the brief pauses that were present.  Schlesinger was able to get the first lady's personal insight on several of the famous people that been linked at some point to her and her husband. Most of all, he got to hear of how Kennedy's presidency affected their marriage. Kennedy Onassis revealed that the most peaceful time of their marriage was really the three  years that they lived in the White House because they were finally always living under the same roof and no longer worrying about campaigning. She talks of how she did not believe she changed from living there, but was surprised people saw her as a snob for not enjoying politics and that she knew how to speak French.

Interestingly enough, the interviewer and interviewee completely ignore all of the aspects of John Kennedy that were involved in the assertions that he had cheated on her over the years. Jacqueline expressed disapproval for the vice president that succeeded Kennedy after his assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson, and went on to say he was "crude, insecure and self-absorbed." She also expressed her protectiveness for her children's privacy and her objection to the Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan, probably a large part being because she had been victimized by the press before especially with them publicizing the details of her husband's affairs.

This article's main purpose is obviously to give preview to the interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis. It begins to what kind of things she reveals and what is conveniently kept quiet, which tells a lot about the life both her and her husband lived together and separately.  The rhetorical message is just that there is so much interest in the life of the president, and at the time it was kind of unheard of for the First Lady to be analyzed, but she can be learned about so much just by reading the precise transcripts of her many interviews.  The article addresses a fairly large audience, as quite frankly many Americans appear to be interested in the Kennedy's personal lives from the tragedy of the assassination to the personal lives before Kennedy was unfairly murdered.

JACQUELINE KENNEDY: HISTORICAL CONVERSATIONS ON HER LIFE WITH JOHN F. KENNEDY. Interviews with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., 1964. Introduction and Annotations by Michael Beschloss. New York: Hyperion, 2011.