London: A year before his assassination in Dallas in 1963, America's former President John F Kennedy predicted that his death would protect his legacy, a leading historian has claimed.
According to Professor Robert Dallek, previously unheard conversations involving Jacqueline Kennedy after her husband JFK's death in 1963 show that he made the assessment after the Cuban missile crisis a year earlier.
Jackie's interviews reveal the President had declared, "If anyone's going to kill me, it should happen now." In fact, Professor Dallek, a Kennedy expert, made the revelation after examining Jacqueline Kennedy's Oral History - conversations the former First Lady had with historian Arthur M Schlesinger Junior in 1964, the 'Daily Mail' reported.
The series of seven undisclosed interviews are to be broadcast in September, as part of events to mark the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy administration.
Professor Dallek said they revealed JFK's remarks had been inspired by one of late historian David Herbert Donald's lectures on Abraham Lincoln. "At that lecture, Kennedy asked Professor Donald, if Lincoln had lived, would his reputation be as great as it currently is in the United States?
"And predictably, Donald said probably not because he would have had to have wrestled with the problems of reconstruction, the post-Civil War era.
Kennedy remembering that, said to Mrs Kennedy after his success in Cuban missile crisis, 'if anyone's going to kill me, it should happen now'." JFK was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas.
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