Jackie O. Tapes Reveal Her as JFK Murder Conspiracy Theorist?
Remember when Caroline Kennedy convinced media executives to bury the History Channel's The Kennedys mini-series? We may now know what her bargaining chip was: ABC News (which has corporate ties to the History Channel) is preparing to air a series of never-before-heard audio tapes of Jackie Onassis, possibly conversing with historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The tapes are either the juiciest Kennedy dirt imaginable or totally banal, depending who you ask.
Let's do the juicy rumors first. The Daily Mail reports that the tapes reveal Jackie to be a Kennedy murder conspiracy theorist:
The secret tapes will show that the former first lady felt that her husband's successor was at the heart of the plot to murder him.
She became convinced that the then vice president, along with businessmen in the South, had orchestrated the Dallas shooting, with gunman Lee Harvey Oswald—long claimed to have been a lone assassin—merely part of a much larger conspiracy.
According to The Daily Mail, the tapes are also "believed to include the suggestion that Mr. Kennedy was having an affair with a 19-year-old White House intern," Clinton-style. Kennedy's Monica left her "knickers" in a White House bedroom after a tryst.
But! Shortly after the Mail ran its Jackie O. story, ABC officials issued a statement denying the tawdry claims:
The tabloid reports about content of the tapes are total nonsense. ABC isn't releasing any content from those tapes until mid-September, at which time it will be clear how off base these reports are.
The televised special will actually be much more boring than that, you see. [Daily Mail, NYP, image of Jackie in 1979 via Getty]