NEW YORK It's a side of Jacqueline Kennedy only friends and family knew. Funny and inquisitive, canny and cutting.

In "Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy," the former first lady was not yet the jet-setting celebrity of the late 1960s or the literary editor of the 1970s and 1980s. But she was also nothing like the soft-spoken fashion icon of the three previous years. She was in her mid-30s, recently widowed, but dry-eyed and determined to set down her thoughts for history.

Kennedy met with historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a former White House aide, in 1964. She chatted about her husband and their time in the White House. Her children, Caroline and John Jr., occasionally popped in. The tapes were to be sealed for decades and were among the last documents of her thoughts.

The book came out as part of a celebration of the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's first year in office. Jacqueline Kennedy died in 1994, and Schlesinger in 2007.

The world, and Jacqueline Kennedy, would change beyond imagination after 1964.

In the book's foreword, Caroline Kennedy faults Schlesinger for asking so few questions about her mother.

As historian Michael Beschloss notes in the introduction, Jacqueline Kennedy once accepted that wives were defined by their husbands' careers and worried about "emotional" women entering politics. She enjoyed having her husband "proud of her."

"Jack so obviously demanded from a woman - a relationship between a man and a woman where a man would be the leader and a woman be his wife and look up to him as a man," she said.

No bimbos here

There are no revelations and nothing about JFK's assassination. Kennedy's health problems and his extramarital affairs were still years from public knowledge. Schlesinger would often say he saw no "bimbos" in the White House. Jacqueline Kennedy speaks warmly of her husband, remembering him as dynamic, perceptive and free of grudges, an assignment his wife and others took on for him.

Like any powerful family, the Kennedys had complicated relationships with those who shared their lives at the top.

Jacqueline Kennedy contrasted the integrity of Robert F. Kennedy, the president's brother and attorney general, with the designs of sister-in-law Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

"Eunice was pestering Jack to death to make Sargent head of HEW because she wanted to be a cabinet wife," Jacqueline Kennedy tells Schlesinger. "You know, it shows you some people are ambitious for themselves and Bobby wasn't."

Critical of Johnson

Politics means doing business with people you otherwise avoid and Jacqueline Kennedy logged in many hours. She referred to France's Charles de Gaulle as "that egomaniac" and "that spiteful man." Indira Gandhi, the future prime minister of India, was a "prune - bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman."

She was especially hard on Lyndon Johnson, who had competed bitterly with her husband for the presidency in 1960 and became vice president because he was from Texas and the Democrats needed a Southerner to balance the ticket.

"Jack said it to me sometimes. He said, 'Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon were president?' " she recalled.

Close in crisis

Her closest moments with her husband came during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of nuclear war. She would lie down with him when he took a nap and walk with him, the two saying little, on the White House lawn.

Some officials had sent their wives away, but the first lady resisted.

"If anything happens, we're all going to stay right here with you," she remembers telling her husband. "Even if there's not room in the bomb shelter in the White House. ... I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do, too - than live without you."