Posted on 05/18/2003 6:53:16 AM PDT by kattracks
They say a woman always knows - and Jacqueline Kennedy was no exception.The queen of Camelot was heart-wrenchingly aware of the sexual affairs President John Kennedy engaged in during his years in the White House, a new book reveals.
In "An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963," author Robert Dallek details how the President tried to satisfy a voracious appetite for sex by bedding a string of party girls and staffers.
In "An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963," author Robert Dallek details how the President tried to satisfy a voracious appetite for sex by bedding a string of party girls and staffers.
The bio also unveiled John Kennedy's long-secret affair with a teenage intern, unmasked by the Daily News last week as Marion (Mimi) Beardsley Fahnestock, now a Manhattan divorcee.
John Kennedy's glamorous young wife was pained by his flagrant philandering, to the point where she made snide or angry remarks about it in dangerously public settings, the book says.
"Isn't it bad enough that you solicit this woman for my husband, but then you insult me by asking me to shake her hand!" she sniped at two aides after spotting one of her husband's sex partners on a receiving line.
Another day, during a tour of the White House, she told a shocked French journalist, "This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband."
No secret
Edward Klein, author of the 1996 book "All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy," agrees that JFK's extracurricular activities were no secret to his wife.
"It wasn't a mystery to her that all the young, attractive women in the White House were fair game as far as her husband was concerned.
"Jackie was completely aware her husband was a hopeless philanderer, and when he did it privately and without her knowledge, it bothered her far less than when he would fail to hide it in public."
Before he was elected President, John Kennedy could be cruelly blatant about his skirt-chasing.
"At a dinner party, he would often disappear with a woman who was sitting at the table with them," Klein said.
"It caused a lot of heartache and tension, but she [Jackie Kennedy] was accustomed to men who behaved like that," Klein said, referring to her father, Jack Bouvier, a notorious womanizer.
"Jackie came from an upper class where this kind of behavior, though not applauded by women, was widely expected by them," he said. "Nonetheless, it wasn't easy to live with."
Jackie Kennedy's own alleged love affairs may have salved her wounds. Klein says she carried on with Fiat heir Gianni Agnelli; other accounts say she had a revenge romance with movie star William Holden.
In researching his book - a scholarly tome that for the first time reports how ill John Kennedy was in office and how much medication he took - Dallek hoped to see a 500-page oral history recorded by Jackie Kennedy.
Her daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, blocked access to the papers, which are locked up at the Kennedy Library in Boston. She did not return a call from the Daily News.
Dallek did, however, see reams of letters written by a young JFK to his close friend Lemoyne Billings.
He was 17 years old when he boasted in one letter about his success with girls - decades before his rumored romance with Marilyn Monroe.
"I can't help it. It can't be my good looks because I'm not much handsomer than anybody else," he wrote. "It must be my personality."
Dad's dalliances
Dallek suggests Kennedy's Casanova complex was rooted in the infamous infidelities of his own father, Joseph Kennedy, and a rivalry with his older brother, Navy pilot Joseph Kennedy Jr., who died at age 29 when his plane exploded over the English Channel during World War II.
John Kennedy's constant illnesses, and predictions that he would die young, also may have spurred him on - though his frail health didn't interfere with his sex life.
"The nurses here are the dirtiest bunch of females I've ever seen," he wrote to Billings during a 1934 hospital stay. "One of them wanted to know if I would give her a workout last night. ... I said yes, but she was put off duty early."
During another illness, he whined about being in Boston.
"Millions of beautiful misses arrived in Palm Beach daily so I am getting rather fed up with the meat up here, if you know what I mean," he wrote.
He bragged about having sex with one woman in a bathtub, and told how an aide to his father lined up willing dates for him and his football buddies on Cape Cod, Mass.
By the time he was at Harvard University in 1937, he was known as "Play-boy," and had too many girlfriends to remember their names.
As an unmarried congressman, he had a "smorgasbord of women" - mostly one-night stands with flight attendants and secretaries, the book reports.
Election to the Senate, his marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier and even the spotlight on the Oval Office didn't deter him. If anything, the presidency whetted his thirst.
"Kennedy's womanizing had, of course, always been a form of amusement, but now it also gave him a release from unprecedented daily tensions," Dallek writes.
During a 1961 meeting with British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, he confided that he got headaches if he went three days without sex.
His mistresses included Pamela Turnure, Jackie's press secretary; Mary Pinchot Meyer, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee's sister-in-law; two secretaries nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle, and mob moll Judith Campbell Exner.
JFK & intern
Then there was a 19-year-old "tall, slender, beautiful" White House intern.
Her identity remained a secret until last week, but JFK came close to having several other "other women" publicly named during his time in office - including Ellen Rometsch, a suspected East German spy who romped naked in the White House pool. While Kennedy's tomcatting has long been a source of fascination, Dallek doesn't believe it altered history.
"As far as I can tell," he wrote, "Kennedy's dalliances were no impediment to his being an effective President."
Originally published on May 17, 2003
Aren't you the dreamer.
PS: has anyone noticed the similarity in behavior, i.e., young girls, of jfk, bjc and saddam. and it's also interesting that the baath party was helped into power in '63 by the kennedy administration.
Where do I find this kind of upper class and can I get information on membership?
She stayed for the money --- "doing it" for the money makes you a whore. Jackie knew he didn't love her ---the marriage was for mutual financial/political gain. Just like the Clinton's ---it's a sham but Hillary is in it for what she hopes to get from it.
Because you had to be able to tell the Kennedys apart and Johnson was often referred to by all three of his names.
I would be one of the last persons on this board to defend the Kennedy family but there's nothing sinister in this. I'd expect GWB will get the same shorthand to tell him from his father.
What could she do ? Apparently she had the scruples of Hillary Clinton. They were both whores for power and Jackie for fame and money. She relished the spotlight, and now looking back, I feel no sympathy for this woman who the pee-ons were weeping for..." POOR JACKIE !! " She put up with it because she wanted to !
She probably knew it when she married him and did it anyhow to gain the fame. What a bottom of the barrel we scraped, and oh how they fooled an entire nation. (Well, some at least.)
Heck, with that crowd I wouldn't put it past them to drive off a bridge with a little plaything , and let her drown....and grow up rewarded to serve FOREVER as Senator !!
2. Miss Lilian was Joe Kennedy's secretary
Nice story, but fiction. Ms. Lillian was in training to be a nurse in Plains, GA and met Earl Carter before she finished. They married in Sept. 1923 and had Jimmah a year later.
Check out:
http://www.sowega.net/~plainsed/research/profiles/LillianCarter.htm
She was a Republican before she married Jack Kennedy. Her father gave money to lots of Republicans.
Here was a young woman who was clearly in over her head. Viewing the presentation as an adult, I realized that her persona had also been manufactured by the media. I had been given the impression that she was a stately erudite aristrocrat, the product of breeding and society's finest underpinnings. In the footage I watched she was a nervous young woman trying to look stately but missing the mark by a mile.
The thought of this woman being the first lady left me thinking more Roseline Carter than Eleanore Rosevelt.
For all the talk of Democrats being cognizant and sensitive of women's issues, I am amazed to view some of their 'icons' interactions with them.
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