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 façade 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."