First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy speaks to reporters as she leaves the museum of Jeu de Paume in Paris on June 2, 1961. UPI |
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NEW YORK, Sept. 13 (UPI) -- Jackie Kennedy said on tape she told her husband, President John F. Kennedy, during the Cuban missile crisis she and their children were ready to die with him.
The former first lady made the disclosure on tapes she made just four months after her husband was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963. Portions of her oral history were to be aired Tuesday night on ABC and will be included in an upcoming book edited by her daughter Caroline, "Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy."
Jackie Kennedy said that during the 13-day confrontation with the Soviet Union in October 1962, the issue dominated everything.
"It was just Cuba, Cuba, all the time in one way or another," she said. "There was no day or night."
With the very real possibility of nuclear war breaking out, some administration officials were evacuating their families out of Washington, but the first lady was determined her family would not be separated.
"Please don't send me anywhere," she said she exhorted the president. "If anything is going to happen, we're going to stay right here with you."
When he suggested the bomb shelter might not hold everyone, she remembered responding: "Please, then I just want to be on the lawn when it happens … but I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do too, than live without you."
In the end, they stayed together.
Jackie Kennedy also said after the crisis had abated, JFK referred to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theater not long after the Civil War ended.
"And then I remember Jack saying after the Cuban missile crisis, when it all turned [out] so fantastically, he said, 'Well, if anyone's ever going to shoot me, this would be the day they should do it,'" she said.
"I mean it's so strange, these things that come back. Because he saw then that he would be -- you know, he said, it will never top this. Strange those things come back now."
Thirteen months later, Kennedy was shot to death.
