The recently released Jacqueline Kennedy oral history interviews reveal she found Justice Arthur Goldberg insufferable and had some of the same frustration with the court’s “isolation” that the court’s critics might express today.

Goldberg, who rose to prominence as a union lawyer, first served as Kennedy’s secretary of labor and the president named him to the U.S. Supreme Court when Felix Frankfurter stepped down.

Jackie told interviewer Arthur M.  Schlesinger Jr.  that Goldberg “never stopped talking about himself.” She called him “the biggest egomaniac of any man I’ve ever seen in my life.”

She said of Goldberg in another part of the interview, “I just think it’s such a shame to be so pleased with yourself.”

Her husband’s treatment by the Dallas Morning News, which ran a full-page ad the day of the assassination saying Kennedy was soft on communism, was still an open wound for Jackie, and she tied that into her feelings about Goldberg. Jackie recalled that Goldberg voted with the court in a case “where you can write anything about people in public office.”

She continued elsewhere in the interview, “And I thought, that’s right after that ad of the day in Dallas—‘Wanted for Treason.’ And there you, his appointee, go and say that everything, even this, is all right? But it’s because the Supreme Court is so isolated. They’re never affected by newspapers, anything.”

She added, “When you think, ads like that in the paper was partly what killed Jack. They get so detached from life up in the Supreme Court.”

She was referring to New York Times v. Sullivan, the 1964 case where a unanimous court established the “actual malice” standard in defamation cases involving public figures.

In addition to the ad in the Dallas Morning News the day of the assassination, a “Wanted for Treason” leaflet with the president’s picture was distributed in Dallas that day.

Schlesinger also asked Jackie about Justice William O. Douglas, whom he suggested was a “great friend” of the president. Jackie corrected him, allowing that Douglas was a friend of the president’s father and his brother, then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. “We never really saw Bill Douglas much, but I think he liked him.”

Unwilling to let go of the line of questioning, Schlesinger asked if Douglas came around the White House. “Never ,” Jackie replied, adding that “none of those people,” came to the White House, presumably referring to the other justices.

As has been reported, Jackie called Martin Luther King a “phony,” and “a tricky person” because of his dalliances outside his marriage.

The remarks should be viewed in the context of what Jackie had been told about King. Not long before the interview,  Jackie was told that King made jokes about the president’s funeral while he was watching it on TV and ridiculed Cardinal Richard Cushing, the archbishop of Boston who married the Kennedys and celebrated his funeral mass.  That information came from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had a well-known vendetta against King. Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, an aide to King, told Fox 5 last week that King admired the president and that Hoover fabricated the information. A footnote in the book refers to an FBI tape of King’s purported remarks.

Jackie and Robert Kennedy later attended King’s funeral in Atlanta and Jackie also said in the interview  that her husband “never really said anything against Martin Luther King.” The president “said what an incredible speaker he was during that freedom march thing,” and didn’t pass judgment on the reports he was receiving from Hoover on King’s personal life.

Caroline Kennedy,  who gave  permission for her mother’s interviews to be  released,  cautions in the forward to the book that her mother gave the interviews—one of only three times she spoke to a journalist about her White House years—when she “was a young widow in the extreme stages of grief. The interviews were conducted just four months after she had lost her husband, her home, and her sense of purpose. She had two young children to raise alone. It isn’t surprising that there are some statements she would later have considered too personal, and others too harsh.”

Though she was often the subject of press reports and gossip rags, Jackie, who died in 1994, guarded her privacy and never wrote a memoir.  She gave these interviews in 1964 on the condition that they be locked in a vault during her lifetime. The book, “Jacqueline Kennedy, Historic conversations on life with John F. Kennedy,” is accompanied by CDs of the entire interview with Schlesinger, a Kennedy aide and one-time Harvard history professor. Schlesinger, who died in 2007, won the Pulitzer Prize for his history of the Kennedy presidency, “A Thousand Days.”

Contributor: Ed Bean in History, Politics, U.S. Supreme Court | subscribe to rss |   share