I wasn’t overly impressed with her interview. I expected some bombshell information. Especially since this interview was sealed for so long.
I didn’t really find anything that shocking. She made a few personal comments about De Gaulle, Martin Luther King and others. Nothing worth sealing the interview for more than 25 years IMHO.
History recorded long ago that De Gaulle was a pompous prat and Martin a horny cocksman. Their less than stellar personal lives does not take away at all their professional legacy. De Gaulle was the symbol that rallied the French Freedom Fighters in the darkest days of WWII. Martin lead the civil rights movement in a way that avoided a violent civil war. What they were like in private doesn’t matter. I’ve always thought the nation owes Martin a huge debt. Segregation and injustices to blacks was a time bomb. The anger in the Black Panthers and White Supremacist groups is a frightening reminder of what could have happened without a peaceful civil rights movement.
I do wonder if there was sensitive information in the interviews that was left out. It bothers me that we aren’t hearing the actual interview. All we are hearing is selected clips.
The first time I ever saw Roma Downey it was in a miniseries about Jackie. I thought she was a terrible actress because she rarely changed expression or raised or lowered her voice in the entire piece; I didn’t realize that her characterization was dead-on. (Gore Vidal, her… step-stepbrother if that’s possible- characterized her as one of the most self absorbed, snobbish, materialistic and vapid people he’d ever known to be as intelligent as she was and this is something I think I’d have believed if I’d never read Vidal.)
I’ll admit I didn’t watch the whole thing but what I did was a ‘meh’. I’ve heard more in-depth interviews on Piers Morgan Tonight and she didn’t really add any new insight into anything. On the MLK issue I’d love for them to have asked her about the rumors the Kennedy Admin used him to control the Civil Rights movement before he later bit the hand that fed him after the assassination- a theory held by more than just fringe historians- but she’d more likely be able to answer a question about his suit label.
The entire interview is being released. I think it’s part of a package with the book. I’m not all that fascinated by the Kennedy mystique, but based on what I’ve read about the book and the interviews in the last couple of days, there’s nothing shocking in here. She wasn’t going to undercut the whole Camelot thing since she did a lot to create it in the first place. And who knows, maybe at the time the interview was done, she thought future generations might regard her comments about world leaders as rude or in poor taste. She had no way of knowing that that these days, people don’t even care about political sex scandals unless the perp has a funny name.
Is this interview from the tapes that were supposed to be sealed for 50 years? Because of course, that was so intriguing it made me frustrated I probably wouldn’t be alive when they were released. Heard it and I am underwhelmed and I, too, wonder what information is NOT being released off those tapes.
What struck me most about her voice (other than the fact that we’ve heard it so little for such an iconic figure) was how much it sounded like Marilyn Monroe’s – that same breathless, babyish timbre.
Which tells us a little something about JFK’s psycho-sexual proclivities, I guess.
Didn’t watch the show, not planning to listen to the tapes.
As an aside, doe Jacky go into her late husband’s activities viv-a-vis MLK and J Edgar Hoover? As I recall, Jack had his brother (the AG) direct Hoover to plant bugs in MLK’s hotel rooms. Recording of King’s sexual escapades were made, and delivered by the FBI, to the White House.
Were these recordings destroyed?
Or are they in some sealed vault somewhere?
Slight hijack here: Yesterday’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution had an article about the show with the headline, “Jackie Kennedy Recalls Time in White House.”
For some reason, I read the headline as “Jackie Kennedy Recalls Time in Waffle House.”
I read the article with great anticipation, then great disappointment!
I picked up on the same thing when NPR played some phone calls LBJ recorded with the widow Kennedy after he had assumed office. I realized I hadn’t really heard her voice, only seen the glamorous photos. She sounded like a vacuous twit, regardless of what her actual intelligence was…it was unnerving after thinking of her as sophisticated in contrast to Marilyn, then realizing they sounded the same…
Is that true though? I had always heard that the worst things the MLK bugging turned up was King and his crew making off-color jokes (especially after the assassination of JFK) and no extra-marital dalliances were found.
Time has NOT been kind to Caroline Kennedy’s looks; Both her and her cousin Maria Shriver appear to have the same propensity to have their facial skin resemble some kind of exotic reptile leather as they age…
With Maria Shriver, I thought it was probably just too much California sunshine, but after seeing Caroline Kennedy, I suppose it must likely be genetic.
No, the affairs are supposed to be thoroughly documented. I looked up King’s Wikipedia entry and apparently all the recordings and transcripts from FBI surveillance of King are sealed in the National Archives until 2027. Maybe when that day comes we’ll find he didn’t like DeGaulle either.
To that end it’s sort of interesting that in the interview Jackie was comfortable discussing some of the contents of that surveillance in a casual way. Of course she’s talking to a friend and not a journalist, but the in the '60s the government spent a shocking amount of time and effort not only monitoring King but interfering with his life and that doesn’t strike her as unusual or horrifying; she only thinks poorly of him because the surveillance revealed he was sleeping around.
Very good point—I STILL think that CK is fairly attractive (and as a young woman, she was actually quite a hottie, in her own unconventional way) but my point was sincere, in that her skin looks like the skin of a MUCH older person, and her cousin Maria has a similar complexion.
