Jackie Kennedy hated Martin Luther King so much she could barely look at photographs of him.
In interviews taped in 1964 but only just released, she said the black civil rights leader was a ‘terrible man’ and a ‘phoney’.
She claimed King bragged of being drunk at her husband John F Kennedy’s funeral and had been caught trying to set up an orgy.
Seven conversations between Mrs Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger, a historian and Kennedy aide, were taped in the months after the president’s assassination on November 22, 1963.
Their release is timed to mark the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy-era administration, where the White House became known as ‘Camelot’.
Mrs Kennedy said her view of King was formed after being told of secret FBI wiretaps which showed him trying to organise a sex party before he attended the March on Washington in August 1963, at which he delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.
She said her brother-in-law Robert told her that King made disparaging remarks about JFK at the funeral and about Cardinal Richard Cushing, who delivered the eulogy. ‘He made fun of Cardinal Cushing and said that he was drunk at it [the funeral] – and things about they almost dropped the coffin. I mean Martin Luther King is really a tricky person.’
‘I just can’t see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, that man’s terrible,’ she said