Jackie's interviews to be released

Seven interviews Jacqueline Kennedy gave just months after her husband was assassinated will be released for the first time in a book to be edited by her daughter, the publisher Hyperion said.

The former first lady talks about topics from President John F Kennedy's plans for a second term to family life in the White House in the 1964 series of interviews given to Arthur Schlesinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning US historian and chronicler of the Kennedy family.

Caroline Kennedy, their only surviving child, decided to release the interviews timed to next year's 50th anniversary of the slain president's inauguration, according to Hyperion, which is owned by The Walt Disney.

She will edit the book to be released in September 2011, with 6-1/2 hours of audio recordings.

Jackie Kennedy, who displayed poise and grace in public after Kennedy's death, had requested that the interviews, conducted in the first half of 1964, be kept sealed for an indefinite amount of time, Hyperion said.

She married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in 1968 and died in 1994. The interviews had been intended at the time for deposit at the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum as part of an oral history project that captured those close to him in the months after he was shot on November 22, 1963.

"My mother's passion for history guided and informed her work in the White House," Caroline Kennedy said in a statement. "She believed in my father, his vision for America, and in the art of politics. She felt it was important to share her knowledge and excitement with future generations."

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