Jackie Kennedy tapes show mistrust at heart of 1960s American dream

Jacqueline Kennedy called US civil rights hero Martin Luther King Jr “tricky” and a “phony” after hearing of FBI reports that he had been caught with a woman in his hotel room, and that he allegedly mocked her husband President John F Kennedy’s funeral.

“I just can’t see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, that man’s terrible,” the former first lady said, in a newly-published series of interviews she gave shortly after Mr Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

She spoke of her shock at hearing that Dr King, the champion of race equality in America, organised “a kind of orgy” in his hotel room during the famous March on Washington, before her own husband’s infidelities came to light.

Mrs Kennedy also told how her husband scorned the notion of vice-president Lyndon Johnson succeeding him in office.

She said the president and his brother, then-attorney general Robert F Kennedy, even discussed ways to prevent Mr Johnson from winning the Democratic Party nomination in an election contest.

The book, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F Kennedy, includes a series of interviews the former first lady gave to historian and former Kennedy aide Arthur M Schlesinger Jr soon after her husband was assassinated on 22 November 1963.

Over seven sessions, she recalled conversations on topics ranging from her husband’s reading habits to the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba.

The book is published by New York-based Hyperion Books on 14 September, on the 50th anniversary of Mr Kennedy’s first year in office.

Jacqueline Kennedy’s view of Dr King was shaped by the powerful FBI director J Edgar Hoover, who told her husband and his brother about surveillance of Dr King and what he had discovered.

According to the book, with details published by ABC News, she said that the president himself told her about wire tap evidence that Dr King had tried to organise a sex party in his hotel in Washington in August 1963.

“He told me of a tape that the FBI had of Martin Luther King when he was here for the freedom march. And he 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 in the hotel, and everything,” she said.

Later Robert Kennedy told her he had heard FBI wiretaps of remarks Dr King made about Cardinal Richard Cushing, who gave President Kennedy’s eulogy at his November 1963 funeral.

“He made fun of Cardinal Cushing and said that he was drunk at it. And things about they almost dropped the coffin and – well, I mean Martin Luther King is really a tricky person,” Mrs Kennedy said.

One friend of Dr King’s yesterday described the reports as more evidence of Mr Hoover’s obsession with trying to destroy the African-American rights leader, who was assassinated in 1968.

Mr Kennedy chose Mr Johnson, a powerful Texas senator, as his running mate in 1960. But Mrs Kennedy said he often fretted about the prospect of a Johnson presidency.

“Jack said it to me sometimes. He said, ‘Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon were president?”’

Mr Johnson was sworn in as president after Mr Kennedy’s assassination and was elected to a full term in 1964 before declining to run again in 1968.

Mrs Kennedy also indicated that her husband was sceptical about victory in Vietnam, the conflict that brought down Mr Johnson’s presidency. She said the Democrat president named Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican, as US ambassador to Vietnam because Mr Kennedy was so doubtful of military success there.

“I think he probably did it … rather thinking it might be such a brilliant thing to do because Vietnam was rather hopeless anyway, and put a Republican there,” she said.

The book barely mentions the president’s assassination.

In a foreword, Caroline Kennedy notes her mother had discussed his murder at length with historian William Manchester, but later sued to keep much of the material from being published until 2067. Manchester’s book on Mr Kennedy, the Death of a President, came out in 1967.

Jacqueline Kennedy, who later married the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, and died in 1994, sounded at times like an old friend sharing gossip with Mr Schlesinger, ridiculing Richard Nixon’s wife, Pat, and Mr Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, as so obedient she was like a “trained hunting dog”.

She marvels at the suspicious nature of her mother-in-law, Rose Kennedy, always wanting to know whether someone was Catholic.

“There seems to be [something] about all these Irish – they always seem to have a sort of persecution thing about them, don’t they?” she asked.

She accused sister-in-law Eunice Kennedy Shriver of undue personal ambition and says she did not trust the White House aide and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, believing that he encouraged the perception that he had ghostwritten her husband’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage.

“You know, Jack forgave so quickly, but I never forgave Ted Sorensen,” she said.