Sept. 13, 2011
Noted Bancroft Press Author Believes There’s Nothing New in Jackie Kennedy Interviews
BALTIMORE–(BUSINESS WIRE)– The following is an op-ed piece by Dr. Alma H. Bond, a longtime New York City psychoanalyst and noted author of Jackie O: On the Couch, which was released by Bancroft Press earlier this summer. She can be reached at almahb@aol.com.
In advance of the release of Caroline Kennedy and Michael Beschloss’s new book, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, which contains eight and a half hours of new interviews by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. of Jacqueline Kennedy, print, television, and internet media have been buzzing about new and surprising revelations. The idea of learning something genuinely different about the twentieth century’s most famous and enigmatic woman has electrified the press, evidently to the point at which they all collectively ignore the fact that virtually everything Jackie says in these interviews has been public knowledge for decades.
The Associated Press is the only news organization that seems to understand this, writing in its article, “New book shows another side to Jackie Kennedy,” that “there are no spectacular revelations in the Schlesinger discussions.” Yet even the AP emphasizes Jackie’s assertion that her husband, President John F. Kennedy, “openly scorned the notion of Vice-President Lyndon B Johnson succeeding him in office,” though the conflict between the Kennedys and the Johnsons was open, notorious, and well-known, and has already been the subject of many, many books, all of which I read while researching my own recently released book on Jackie, Jackie O: On the Couch: Inside the Mind and Life of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. In the Schlesinger interviews, Jackie refers to John F. Kennedy’s emotional reaction to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion, her admiration for Robert F. Kennedy, and her own traditional attitudes toward marriage—all subjects explored in tremendous depth in many books, simply because the information is not new.
Perhaps what is most striking about these interviews—which, according to the Historic Conversations product description, reveals “her candor”—is what Jackie does not say. In eight and a half hours of conversation, Jackie does not discuss her husband’s assassination. She doesn’t discuss anything less than pleasant about the Kennedy family, although in reality, she experienced quite a bit that was less than pleasant. Particularly interesting in Janny Scott’s New York Times article—headlined “Tapes, Candid Talk by Young Kennedy Widow” —is the observation, “She [Jackie] lets slip a reference to a ‘civilized side of Jack’ and ‘sort of a crude side,’ but she clarifies: ‘Not that Jack had the crude side.’”
But he did indeed have the crude side, and it frustrated Jackie, a woman raised to be upper-class and well-mannered. As I myself discuss at length in my own book, the president could be outright vulgar, and a pig at the dinner table.
As the AP article points out, there is nothing in the tapes about Kennedy’s health problems or extramarital affairs, which, though not public knowledge at the time of the interviews, were certainly known to Jackie. And as The New York Times article says, “She suggests the couple never really had a fight.” That’s as untrue as the subsequent assertion that “she got her opinions from her husband,” which even Beschloss, the book’s co-author, admits should be taken “with a warehouse of salt.”
Can we blame Jackie for this? Of course not. A year after her husband’s death, she wouldn’t discuss his infidelities or the horror of the assassination. For the historical record especially, she focused solely on the positive, inasmuch as she was one of the chief architects of her slain husband’s reputation in history. And even beyond that, Jackie, for all her international fame, was an intensely private woman. She was never comfortable in the spotlight, and spent much of her life trying to escape it. Yes, she was opinionated, funny, critical, and clever in all the ways the articles on the interviews suggest—and in all the ways we already knew—but she was absolutely not fully forthcoming.
Historians and fans of the former first lady have spent decades hoping to learn something new about her, but something new is what no interviews with Jackie will ever provide, especially none conducted in 1964, during such a confusing and profoundly sad time in her life, when she was often bedridden.
That’s why I wrote Jackie O: On the Couch: Inside the Mind and Life of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. As both a psychoanalyst and a Jackie scholar for many decades, I wanted to provide a way for the many still fascinated by this woman to learn who she really was—and what she would have said had she been in my office. Jackie O: On the Couch is what candid revelations from Jackie would truly sound like. My book includes what she really thought and felt about the assassination, which many consider one of my book’s best chapters, and also puts into proper perspective her husband’s serial affairs and their marriage, the latter of which was a mere fraction of her life. But, most importantly, it views her entire life before and after JFK. I’ve written the book in the first person to provide precisely the sort of intimate insights the Schlesinger interviews cannot.
So before we celebrate the supposed revelations and shocking truths of Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, let us take a step back and realize that Jackie Kennedy herself will never reveal the truth about Jackie Kennedy. That is the only revelation to be found in these interviews. Readers who want to know the real truth, the sort of truth Jackie would never admit in her lifetime, will have to look elsewhere.