And presto! With gratitude in truth to Caroline Kennedy, Americans will stay in tonight to watch as ABC News pushes the play button on tapes of a seven-part conversation the former First Lady had with the historian and former aide to her husband, Arthur Schlesinger, in 1964. It will be a Disney ride aboard a spinning teacup – gilt-edged like the dinner service she introduced to the White House – to a heroic past of glamour, to when the Kennedys were America's royalty.

 

There is a health warning posted before we board. Passengers may experience brief periods of vertigo. The tapes, made four months after JFK's assassination in Dallas, do offer confirmation of a wife unstintingly loyal to the husband she has lost and the father of her children. But they swerve alarmingly – or deliciously – when Mrs Kennedy turns to describing characters she didn't quite approve of.

The trailers for the tapes – The New York Times boasted its own synopsis yesterday, and ABC primed its ratings numbers with a few juicy audio excerpts on its news bulletins – read like those saucy teasers in the tacky tabloids. Which women's rights pioneer did Mrs Kennedy dismiss as a "lesbian"? Which American civil rights movement icon did she consider a womanising "phoney", and which leader of a European nation an "egomaniac"? And what scared her husband most about Lyndon Johnson?

Maybe it was the skill of Mr Schlesinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of American public affairs who died in 2007, that drew Ms Kennedy into becoming, well, a bit bitchy. Just about everyone she dishes dirt on has a legacy, by the way, rather more substantial than hers. Did she really say that about Indira Gandhi?