I had a quick look on the American Vogue website this evening and to my delight I saw two things that made me really happy. An article written by Hamish Bowles (he is so witty and such a delightful writer) and his topic, a new book about the Kennedy White House years,  ’Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy’ .

To whet your appetite please read on …….

‘In 1964, the recently bereaved Jacqueline Kennedy sat down with the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Kennedy intimate Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., for a series of seven wide-ranging conversations as part of an oral-history project on the life of her late husband.’

‘…. it was with more than special interest that I read the transcripts and listened to an extract of the audio (which is included in its entirety in the boxed set with the book) that illumines so many aspects of Jacqueline Kennedy’s life and work during this period—as well as her razor-sharp memory, and her fascinating and occasionally acerbic perspectives on historic events and the characters that shaped them. Relaxing off-camera and away from the public gaze and ear in her Georgetown living room with an old friend, cigarettes being lit and smoked and ice cubes jangling in drinks glasses, Jacqueline Kennedy evokes—in her breathy, patrician voice with its idiosyncratic cadences and syntax—a Mad Men era when the threat of nuclear Armageddon was so real that she worried how family members would be accommodated in the White House bunker, and reveals her heroic image of her husband and his achievements. To hear her in her own unscripted and candid words in this context is electrifying.’

I think I shall visiting my local book store post haste!

Jackie and John Kennedy as photographed by Avedon