Jackie Kennedy Tapes: A Sharp-Tongued and Not So Liberal First Lady?

Jackie Kennedy agreed to talk to White House aide Arthur Schlesinger at her Washington home, four months after JFK was killed in Dallas, on the condition the tapes would not be released until long after her death.

Recalling the Cuban missile crisis and fears of a nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, Kennedy proved her devotion to her husband by saying she told JFK, "If anything happens, we're all going to stay right here with you. Even if there's not room in the bomb shelter in the White House, I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you"

While she admitted their marriage was "rather terribly Victorian or Asiatic," she also said she was determined to provide a "climate of affection, comfort and detente" before adding their time in the White House were "our happiest years."

The former first lady was far less kind when it came to other leaders, however, criticising and dismissing most of them, and revealing what JFK really thought of his vice president, Johnson, who became president on his assassination. The rivalry and lack of chemistry between the two men was never a well-guarded secret, with many people at the time already acknowledging Johnson became Kennedy's running mate because the president needed a Southerner.

"Jack said it to me sometimes. He said, 'Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon were president?"' she said.

Martin Luther King is also directly criticised and described as a "a terrible man" and a "phony" who took part in sex parties and was drunk during her husband's funeral.

She says on the tapes that King had allegedly tried to organise a sex party before he attended the 1963 March on Washington at which he made his famous "I Have A Dream" speech.

"[Bobby] 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."

According to Jackie Kennedy, her brother in-law, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, also told her the civil rights leader had been intoxicated at JFK's funeral and mocked Cardinal Richard Cushing's Mass.