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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.