They’ve been vaulted since their recording a few months after her husband’s death, but now the secret confessions of Jackie Kennedy Onassis will be released. The shocking tapes reveal that the former first lady believed that Lyndon Johnson and Texas businessmen were behind the assassination of her husband on Nov. 22, 1963. She also confesses to an affair with actor William Holden, an act of retaliation for her husband’s own romps with a 19-year-old White House intern and other women. Jackie recorded the tapes with the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., but asked that they not be released until 50 years after her death, fearing the confessions would have made her family targets for revenge. Although she died only 17 years ago, her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, has agreed to release them early and have them aired on a special program on ABC. It is believed she agreed to the release in exchange for the network dropping its $10 million series about the family.
August 2011
60 posts
I loved him most
when he came home from work,
his fingers still curled from fitting pipe,
his denim shirt ringed with sweat
and smelling of salt, the drying weeds
of the ocean. I’d go to where he sat
on the edge of the bed, his forehead
anointed with grease, his cracked hands
jammed between his thighs, and unlace
the steel-toed boots, stroke his ankles
and calves, the pads and bones of his feet.
Then I’d open his clothes and take
the whole day inside me — the ship’s
gray sides, the miles of copper pipe,
the voice of the foreman clanging
off the hull’s silver ribs. Spark of lead
kissing metal. The clamp, the winch,
the white fire of the torch, the whistle,
and the long drive home.
Dorianne Laux
I tried to explain this poem to sublimate a few months back, and failed miserably. “It’s about a woman… smelling her husband when he comes home from work?” is I think what I said. But here it is, in its awesome fullness.
I live in Texas now. It’s real hot here.
July 2011
68 posts
jesuisperdu | greg enemy - top 10
LISTEN TO THIS NOW.
Samples the pinball number song from sesame street.
THIS IS THE BEST.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Tender is the Night” —Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (via pinpricks)
