President Kennedy’s daughter reveals Jackie’s tapes

 

Recorded tapes of an interview that Jackie Kennedy gave to a White House official a few months after her husband’s death have now been released by her daughter, Caroline. The president’s wife agreed to the interview only if it would be released long after her death. Caroline, daughter of the assassinated president, decided to release the tapes exactly 50 years after John F. Kennedy became president.

In the recordings Jackie says that President Kennedy didn’t like Lyndon Johnson as his vice president, but he needed him because he brought Kennedy votes from Texas and other southern states.  She also criticized civil rights leader Martin Luther King for taking part in sex parties and being drunken at the president’s funeral.

According to Jackie Kennedy, John F. Kennedy did not like many of the world’s leaders of that time. He called French President Charles de Gaulle an egoistic fellow and and Indira Gandhi , who later became Indian Prime Minister, a horrible woman.

 


Marrying a member of the Kennedy clan had not been easy, according to Jackie. Everyone thought she was a snob and a French woman who knew nothing about politics. But after the Kennedy family moved into the White House everything became better. They were the happiest years of her life.
When America came close to war during the Cuban missile crisis Jackie refused to leave Washington, like other politicians’ wives did. She wanted to be with President Kennedy during the crisis. In the tapes Jackie Kennedy remarked that John F. Kennedy sometimes made jokes about being killed.

Caroline Kennedy said that her daughters were shocked by the way their grandmother talked about the role of women in society. Jackie said that women were not supposed to be in politics and that the role of a woman was to make a man stronger.

On the other side she Jackie did not mention anything about the President’s affairs during their marriage. Instead she stresses how she had loved and admired him.
A few years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jackie married the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. She died in 1994.

 

 

 

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Words:

  • according  to = as said by …
  • admire = respect, think  highly of
  • agree = to say yes
  • assassinate = kill a famous person out of political reasons
  • civil rights = the rights that every person should have, like the right to vote
  • clan = large family
  • criticize = to say that something is wrong
  • decide = to make a choice about something
  • egoistic = selfish; here: he only thought about himself and France
  • fellow = person
  • funeral = a ceremony in which you bury a dead person
  • horrible = awful, terrible
  • instead = in something’s place
  • marriage = the relationship between two people who are married
  • mention = say
  • missile = rocket
  • official = an important person in the government
  • politician = a person who works in politics or in the government
  • politics = ideas and activities about leading and government
  • record = to save sound so that you can listen to it again
  • recording = tape
  • refuse = to say no
  • release = to make public; to show to all the people
  • remark = say
  • snob = someone who thinks that they are better than other from a lower class
  • society = people in general
  • stress =to make an idea or statement stronger
  • supposed = should not
  • tape = plastic material covered with a magnetic substance on which you can record pictures and sound
  • tycoon = a very successful businessman who has a lot of money
  • vote = to elect someone for a high position