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Caroline Kennedy releases motherJacqueline’s historic interviews about life with JFK THE KENNEDY

WHEN JOHN F. KENNEDY was running for the Senate in the early 1950s, some of his advisers expressed concern that his new wife, Jackie, might be something of a political liability on the campaign trail due to her refined finishing-school speech and her obvious intellectualism.

By the time Kennedy was contemplating the shape of his presidential reelection campaign, these same advisers were insisting that Jackie play a central role on the campaign trail. The change reflected the fact that, during her years in the White House, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy had achieved a status as a trendset-ter and international celebrity unprecedented for a first lady.

The change also reflected and was part of broader shifts in American culture. Jack and Jackie, the quintessential 1950s couple, like millions of others, were moving into a new era; indeed, the couple was leading America into the New Frontier.

Few couples have had more written about them

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Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy will be available at most Costco locations in late September.

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than the Kennedys. Americans of the baby-boom generation and the generations just before and after have felt they had a pretty good understanding of the personalities of these two larger-than-life participants in the country’s history.

But Jacqueline Kennedy wrote no memoir. After the death of her husband, she famously secluded her two children from the public eye. Although she went on to a career in book publishing, she remained curtained from the public view. In fact, she granted just three significant interviews about her years in the White House—all in the first six months after the assassination.

One of these was to Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a longtime Kennedy friend and adviser, who as part of an oral history project on the life and career of JFK sat down with Mrs. Kennedy for seven taped interviews starting in March 1964, less than four months after her husband’s assassination. The final interview was in June 1964.

Really more a series of conversations, since they include quite a bit of Schlesinger’s own memories and thoughts about the New Frontier days, the interviews were done under the condition that the tape recordings be sealed for 50 years.

Now, in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of JFK’s presidency (and a few years short of the 50-year sequestering), the audio of the interviews is being released, along with a transcript including carefully documented footnotes by historian Michael Beschloss.