In Tapes, Candid Talk by Young Kennedy Widow
President and Mrs. Kennedy in 1961.
By JANNY SCOTT
Published: September 11, 2011
In the early days of the Cuban missile crisis, before the world knew that the cold war seemed to be sliding toward nuclear conflict, President John F. Kennedy telephoned his wife, Jacqueline, at their weekend house in Virginia. From his voice, she would say later, she could tell that something was wrong. Why don’t you come back to Washington? he asked, without explanation.
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Times Topics: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis | John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Cecil Stoughton/John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library
President and Mrs. Kennedy in 1962.
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“From then on, it seemed there was no waking or sleeping,” Mrs. Kennedy recalls in an oral history scheduled to be released Wednesday, 47 years after the interviews were conducted. When she learned that the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba aimed at American cities, she begged her husband not to send her away. “If anything happens, we’re all going to stay right here with you,” she says she told him in October 1962. “I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children