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
His was a made for Hollywood Presidency. JFK himself followed the entertainment tabloids voraciously. The Oval Office was his casting couch. He had a "trophy" wife, but he was a ba-boy on the side. Lawford, Sinatra, Monroe -- you name it, he hung at the soire's with all the beautiful people, and had some marry into the family
The media made him into a movie star and the media have been star-struck with him ever since. He raised their prominence like no other President had. He made media and news readers "supporting actors." For what it's worth Clinton tried to cop Kennedy's "script." and personna -- with some success, but not with Kennedy's staying power, or with as naive a public. Clinton came to America in a different era.
People chose Bush. We now have a dark and light; we have a direct contrast. We don't want the Kennedy-Clinton style made for Hollywood Presidency. We wearied of our soiled condition. We elected Bush. More truth about Kennedy now surfaces. I suspect it will about Clinton too.
Kennedy's behavior was little different from the typical Hollywood movie star. His "competance" shamed us at the Bay of Pigs and, stemming from it, he almost got the world blown up in 1962. A year later, the B-movie hero was blown away and his tragic acting legacy sealed until someone tried to upstage him...the guy who just won't leave the stage...Clinton.
Consider why the Dems hated Reagan so much: a real Hollywood movie star, who knew their script, and could out do Kennedy's performance with a better one, and at the same time, collapse the threat that Kennedy's foolishness almost had US impailed on --- the USSR.
Not Sherman's march through the South?
The mystery seat companion "had my attention immediately" with this story, but on the other hand, the author can not recall the name of the newspaper? Give me a break.
Not to mention that the reference web site, 100777.com, is one of the biggest Tinfoil Hat sites I have ever seen... LOL
Believe me, as one who lived within 5 miles of the Kennedy compound for a number of years, as one who talked with one of the Kennedy "gofers", as one who heard the stories of many of the Kennedy neighbors, as one who's ex-wife worked at the Hyannis hotel nearest the compound and who saw some of the "do you know who I am" crap, as one who discussed the Kennedy situation with the manager of that hotel, we don't need to rely on unfounded rumors. All that we need is for Big Media to come out with the truth.
By the way, the only Kennedy or Kennedy relative who ever bothered to pay that hotel for the services provided was Arnold Schwarzenegger - a Republican.
Boo-effin'-Hoo.
Now *that* is clever :)
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