Jackie Kennedy: JFK opposed Johnson run

NEW YORK, Sept. 9 (UPI) -- President John F. Kennedy didn't want Lyndon Johnson to succeed him because he thought it wouldn't be good for the country, Jacqueline Kennedy recalled in 1964.

ABC News reports in newly released interviews appearing in a book she said shortly before her husband's assassination he had begun talking to his brother Robert Kennedy about ways to prevent Johnson from becoming the Democratic presidential nominee.

"He didn't like that idea that Lyndon would go on and be president because he was worried for the country," she said. "Bobby told me that he'd had some discussions with him. I forget exactly how they were planning or who they had in mind. It wasn't Bobby, but somebody. 'Do something to name someone else in '68.'"

The interviews appear in the book "Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy" by historian and former Kennedy aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

In the interviews, the former first lady also had harsh words for slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

"I just can't see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, 'You know, that man's terrible,'" she said.

ABC News, which is broadcasting parts of the recorded interviews in a 2-hour special Tuesday, said Robert Kennedy had told her about FBI wiretaps in which King had made negative comments about her husband's November 1963 funeral, including Cardinal Richard Cushing, who celebrated the funeral Mass.

Robert Kennedy, she said, told her King "made fun of Cardinal Cushing and said that he was drunk at (the funeral) and things about they almost dropped the coffin and -- well, I mean Martin Luther King is really a tricky person."

And she said her husband told her King had tried to arrange a sex party in the nation's capital during the March on Washington in August 1963.

"He told me of a tape that the FBI had of Martin Luther King when he was here for the freedom march … how he was calling up all these girls and arranging for a party of men and women, I mean, sort of an orgy in the hotel and everything," she said.