9287: Jackie O On JFK & MLK.

From The New York Daily News…

Martin Luther King was ‘phony’ and ‘tricky,’ Jacqueline Kennedy said in 1964 interview

By Larry McShane, Daily News Staff Writer

Martyred civil rights leader Martin Luther King wasn’t welcome at Camelot.

Former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy described King as “phony” and “tricky” in a 1964 interview just made public in a new book about White House life with her husband.

Kennedy, in one of seven Q&A sessions with former JFK aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., said King had mocked her slain husband’s funeral Mass and its celebrant, Cardinal Richard Cushing.

“He made fun of Cardinal Cushing and said he was drunk at it,” Kennedy recounted. “And things about they almost dropped the coffin. I just can’t see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, ‘That man’s terrible.’”

Kennedy’s negative impression of King was forged in part when she heard about FBI tapes that captured the married activist in a hotel room with another woman.

Her own philandering husband — whose extra-marital romps were yet unexposed — urged the First Lady not to judge King for his indiscretion, she recalled.

The remembrance is part of “Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy,” where she discusses topics from the Bay of Pigs invasion to JFK’s opposition to Lyndon Johnson as his successor.

The book’s publication next week comes a half-century after JFK’s first year in office. It also includes eight audio CDs, which feature snippets of chatter from her children Caroline and John.

At one point, Schlesinger asks 3-year-old John what happened to his father.

“He’s gone to heaven,” the little boy responds.

And what does the child remember about dad?

“I don’t remember anything,” the lad known as John-John replies.

Jacqueline Kennedy also recalled that JFK was appalled by the concept of Vice President Johnson taking over the White House once his term was finished.

“Jack said it to me sometimes,” she said. “He said, ‘Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon were president? And Bobby (Kennedy) told me that he’d had some discussion with him … (to) do something to name someone else in 1968.”

JFK, of course, never finished his first term in office — and Johnson was sworn in as president after Kennedy’s Nov. 22, 1963, assassination in Dallas.