Jackie O: lechers, lesbians and JFK’s bathtime habits

CIVIL RIGHTS leader Martin Luther King was a womanising "phoney", Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was "a real prune" and French President Charles De Gaulle was an "egomaniac". These are the thoughts of Jackie Kennedy, taped in early 1964 just four months after her husband, President John F Kennedy, was assassinated, and due to be broadcast on American television tonight.

Jackie O, as she would become known following her marriage to the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, revealed her sharp tongue to the historian Arthur Schlesinger, aide and friend to the president.

She requested the tapes remain sealed for 50 years but her daughter Caroline has allowed them to be aired three years early. A book and accompanying audio discs will be published tomorrow, and tonight ABC TV will play the tapes.

In one moving passage she talks about life at the White House during the drama of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. "That's the time I have been closest to him," she tells Schlesinger. "When he came home, if it was a sleep or a nap, I would sleep with him. I said: 'Please don't send me to Camp David, me and the children, please don't send me anywhere. If anything happens we are all going to stay right here with you.'

"You know I said even if there is no room in the bomb shelter in the White House, which I saw, I said, 'Please... I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do, too – than live without you'."

As David Usburne of the Independent puts it, although she would spend the later years of her life working as a publisher and champion of charitable causes, before dying of cancer in 1994, the tapes suggest that during the White House years she was "content to be a woman and a wife more from the Mad Men era".

But her love for her husband – whose own womanising gets no mention in the tapes - did not extend to the many political figures she encountered in the less-than-three years she and JFK spent in the White House. Here she is on:

Indira Gandhi, the Indian prime minister - "a real prune... bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman".

Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader - a "phoney" having been caught while under FBI surveillance arranging romantic liaisons.

President Sukarno of Indonesia - "he had a sort of lecherous look" and "left a bad taste in your mouth".

Madame Nhu, sister-in-law of the president of South Vietnam, and Clare Boothe Luce, the journalist and congresswoman: "I wouldn't be surprised if they were lesbians."

President Charles De Gaulle of France - an "egomaniac".

And, finally, her husband John F Kennedy, who, she reveals, never grew out of having toys in the bath - "All along his tub were floating animals, dogs and pink pigs and things." ·