A Jackie Exclusive

"And the stares and pointing, and the stories . . . The strangest stories that haven't a word of truth in them, great long analytical pieces written by people you never met, never saw. I guess they have to make a living, but what's left of a person's privacy or a child's right to privacy?" Jacqueline Kennedy's understandable complaint appeared in a rather unprivate place--an article about her, her children and her life since the assassination in the New York World Journal Tribune. The basis of the story was a lengthy interview she gave to W.J.T. Editor Frank Conniff and Columnist Bob Considine. Stretching the interview over three successive days, the paper made the most of what it described as its "dialogue" with the "beauty known as Jacqueline, the sprite called Jackie, widow of a slain President, loving mother of his daughter and son."

Jackie, thinks Conniff, was anxious to combat the barrage of unfavorable publicity caused by William Manchester's book The Death of a President. "She's a fighter for all her frail beauty," he maintains. During the Manchester episode, she called Conniff several times for advice; in turn, he asked for a favor: the interview. An old friend of both Jack and Joe Kennedy, Conniff was hardly likely to be hostile. Jackie imposed no conditions on him, as she had on Manchester, nor did she ask to read the copy ahead of time. "She trusted us not to make it sensational," says Conniff.

Picture of Travail. The interview began in front of the Guggenheim museum (where a beatnik type "swept off his rakish Astrakhan hat and stood transfixed"), then moved on to Schrafft's (where John Jr. had a butterscotch sundae), and ended up at a friend's Fifth Avenue apartment. Conniff and Considine are unabashed admirers of "the young woman who bears such assorted burdens as Gallup's pronouncement that she is the most admired person of her sex in the world ... a woman who has been on the best-dressed lists most of her adult life ... the smile that had launched a thousand magazine covers."

As Conniff is the first to admit, the interview contains no startling revelations or disclosures. But when Considine stops painting his elaborate word pictures and lets Jackie talk, it gives a clear, poignant picture of her present life--along with its travail. Her children, for instance, are sometimes targets of madness or abuse. "I still haven't gotten over that strange woman," recalls Jackie, "who leaped at Caroline as we came out of church on All Saints' Day. She shouted at the poor child, 'Your mother is a wicked woman who has killed three people! and your father is still alive!' It was terrible, prying her loose." On another occasion, a group of children decided to follow Jackie and John home from school. One of them kept shouting at John: "Your father's dead, your father's dead." "You know how children are," says Jackie. "They've even said it to me when I've run into them at school."

Tactful Deletion. Not that Jackie is trying to protect her children from the past. "I want to help John go back and find his father," she told the newsmen. "It can be done. There was that stone his father placed on a mound during his visit to Argentina a long time ago, and then when I took the children there later, John put a stone on top of his father's. He'd like to go back to Argentina and see his stone, and his father's stone--and that will be part of knowing his father."

Conniff and Considine tactfully avoided mentioning Dallas and deleted an exuberant remark Jackie made praising Bobby: "I'd jump out of the window for him." Conniff is so pleased with the interview that he plans to run it again in the Easter Sunday issue.

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