Story highlights Tim Naftali: First ladies have access to classified material

The catch is they're not subject to background checks, he says

Tim Naftali is a CNN presidential historian and clinical associate professor of history and public service at New York University and was the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. A biographer of George H. W. Bush, he is currently working on a new history of the Kennedy presidency. Unless otherwise noted, facts here reflect research from that project. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) In the summer of 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to tell National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy that she didn't need to receive the intelligence community's highly classified "Weekly Intelligence Summary" any longer.

"It just depresses me to look at that White & Green cover," she explained as to why she hadn't been keeping up with it, "and think of all you have to cope with."

She had started receiving classified reports after October 1962 when both the Cuban missile crisis and, because of her interest in India, the Sino-Indian war had caught her attention.

A fan of Harvard professor John Kenneth Galbraith, Kennedy was less interested in reading these reports as Galbraith was leaving his post in the summer of 1963 as US ambassador in New Delhi. Nevertheless, she would continue to request classified material on various subjects -- British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, for example -- until Dallas.

Tim Naftali

With all the attention on former first lady Hillary Clinton's handling of classified information at the State Department and the possibility that Melania Trump might become first lady in 2017, it might be a surprise to some readers that historically, FLOTUS has had access to classified materials without ever having to get a security clearance.