Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents

by Cormac O'Brien

  JACK IN THE BOX

  If there really is life after death, one of the great mysteries that will probably be revealed to our immortal souls is the number of women Jack Kennedy actually slept with. No doubt it’s a staggering figure. Jack learned from the best: His father, Joe, was rumored to have had numerous affairs. But Jack certainly outdid his old man—indeed, he may well have been a sex addict. As the president allegedly told Bobby Baker, secretary to the Senate Democrats, “I get a migraine headache if I don’t get a strange piece of ass every day.” JFK sure did get his share of ass—and most of it was strange indeed. That he had a long affair with Marilyn Monroe during his presidency is hardly a secret. That the drug-addled, neurotic Monroe could’ve ruined his reputation is also no secret. Among the White House emissaries sent to make sure she kept her mouth shut was Bobby Kennedy—who (rumors suggest) proceeded to boink Marilyn himself. But she was only the most infamous of Jack’s women. Kennedy devoted much of his time and energy to getting the opposite sex in the sack, and his wife, Jackie, knew it. In An Unfinished Life, historian Robert Dallek recounts how JFK was caught on tape at his brother Ted’s 1958 wedding mentioning that faithfulness wasn’t required in marriage. And Jack practiced what he preached. He frolicked with naked women in the White House pool, relied on his Hollywood connections to get eager young starlets to pay him conjugal visits, and went through an army of young secretaries and prostitutes. As Dallek and other historians have pointed out, most of them were procured for Kennedy by confidants and political aides such as Dave Powers and Kenneth P. O’Donnell.

  What follows is just a tiny sampling of Kennedy’s profligate sex life, much of which came to light long after he’d been assassinated and, to be fair, will probably never be proven conclusively. Needless to say, they are all episodes that could have buried the glamorous president in a shitstorm of career-ruining controversy.

  In 1959, Kennedy allegedly began seeing a young woman named Pamela Turnure, whose landlady—Florence Kater—snapped photos of Kennedy leaving his mistress’s apartment. Kater began a crusade to discredit Senator Kennedy as a womanizing hypocrite, but to no avail. Though the Kennedys tried (unsuccessfully) to buy Kater off during the 1960 presidential election, it was the widespread public belief that she was a crazy eccentric that put the matter to rest. As for Pamela Turnure, she later became Jackie Kennedy’s press secretary (and, again, JFK’s sometime bedmate).

  Kennedy had a long and torrid affair with a divorcée named Judith Campbell Exner—who also happened to be the girlfriend of Sam Giancana, head of the Chicago mafia. JFK stopped seeing her only after the FBI informed the president of her mob connections.

  During the spring and summer of 1962, President Kennedy began seeing Ellen Rometsch, the wife of a military attaché at the West German embassy in Washington. Rometsch had two extraordinary professions: She made a great deal of money as a prostitute for exclusive D.C. clients, and—according to J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI—she was a spy for the East Germans. When a Senate committee began investigating her activities, it could’ve spelled the end of JFK’s presidency. But the investigation ran into a snag when the State Department deported Rometsch back to Europe, where she remained conveniently out of reach for questioning. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy allegedly did the rest by pulling strings and burying evidence. The issue died quietly.

  On several occasions during the Kennedy presidency, Secret Service agents were supposedly called upon to visit the Mickelson Gallery in Washington to have photographs framed for the White House. Not your ordinary photographs, mind you, but explicit photographs of the president in various sexual positions with naked women. The agents were always careful to stay during the framing process and make sure that no copies of the prints were made, and almost nothing of the whole sordid business was known until Sidney Mickelson himself spoke up for Seymour Hersh’s book, The Dark Side of Camelot. Interestingly, the photos were always of the highest quality, as if they’d been shot by a professional.

  Spreading the Joy

  In the end, JFK may have carried the most tragic consequence of his sex life in his pants—specifically, in his genitalia. Throughout much of his adult life, according to doctors interviewed by Seymour Hersh, Kennedy was regularly treated for chlamydia. Indeed, while the Bay of Pigs invasion was getting under way, the commander in chief who would take responsibility for its failure was getting a giant shot of penicillin for his venereal disease. With all his womanizing, Jack kept reinfecting himself and probably took the chlamydia with him to the grave. Worst of all, he must have passed it to literally countless sexual partners.

  Untreated chlamydia, incidentally, is a major cause of infertility among women.

  36 LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

  August 27, 1908–January 22, 1973

  ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Virgo

  TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1963–1969

  PARTY: Democratic

  AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 55

  VICE PRESIDENT: None (after Kennedy assassination); Hubert Humphrey (elected term)

  RAN AGAINST: Barry Goldwater

  HEIGHT: 6′3″

  NICKNAMES: “LBJ,” “Big Daddy”

  SOUND BITE: “If you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

  When John Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Lyndon Baines Johnson became the first American president to be present at his predecessor’s assassination. He also became the first to be sworn in with his wife holding the Bible and the first to take his oath of office on an airplane. His first order after assuming command was “Let’s get airborne.” Air Force One lifted off the tarmac, and the Johnson administration took flight.

  At his ranch in Texas, Johnson often terrified his guests by driving ninety miles an hour—while sipping Scotch from a paper cup.

  Flying came naturally to LBJ. He was one of the most energetic politicians in American history, a man whose ceaseless efforts to get things done always kept him on the move. The business of government had been his profession since the early ’30s, when he was a congressional secretary. Franklin Roosevelt made him the Texas director of the New Deal’s National Youth Administration, which launched Johnson into Congress in 1937. He was a senator from 1949 to 1961 and the second youngest Senate majority leader in history.

  But all that energy had nowhere to go when Johnson served as vice president under Kennedy. It wasn’t just that veeps have little to do; the Kennedys never really liked Johnson very much. JFK’s administration was chockablock with Ivy League–educated eggheads, and the vice president was everything they weren’t: an unsophisticated, foul-mouthed, backcountry bullyboy who’d gone to school at Southwest Texas State Teacher’s College—as far away from Harvard and Yale as the dark side of the moon. For all their glaring differences, however, Johnson and Kennedy shared a passionate desire to better the lot of disenfranchised Americans through the power of government. And Johnson, even more than Kennedy, achieved much toward that end.

  Johnson pledged to carry through his predecessor’s civil rights agenda, and he made good on that pledge with a vengeance. His “Great Society” program, interestingly enough, came through with the help of the same eastern sophisticates who’d derided their old vice president as a hillbilly—Johnson kept much of JFK’s cabinet and staff. But nobody on LBJ’s team worked harder than LBJ. As an ingenious legislator who spent decades on Capitol Hill, Johnson knew better than anyone how to handle—or, more accurately, man-handle—congressmen. When he wasn’t schmoozing them at White House parties or charming them with his earthy Texas folk wisdom, he was threatening them in the privacy of restrooms and phoning them at all hours of the day and night. While some weren’t taken in by the “Johnson treatment,” enough succumbed to his efforts to pass one of the most impressive legislative programs in history. Johnson kept the momentum going after he beat the bejesus out of right-wing Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964. By 1968, the president had pushed through the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, creation of the Department of Ho
using and Urban Development, Medicare and Medicaid, and a slew of other laws aimed at helping minorities and the poor. Not since FDR had a liberal president achieved so much.

  Halfway around the world, things weren’t quite so rosy. Johnson may have inherited the Vietnam conflict from his predecessor, but he definitely made it worse by committing the United States to a giant war effort. Convinced that victory against the Communists there was only a matter of time, Johnson kept sending more and more troops until, by 1968, some half a million American soldiers were fighting for their lives in the rice paddies. That same year, Communist forces launched the Tet Offensive, decisively proving that they were anything but close to defeat. It was a catastrophe. Convinced that events had gotten away from him, LBJ declared to the nation that he would not seek reelection. Many Democrats put their hopes in Bobby Kennedy, only to see them dashed by his assassination. It was turning out to be a really bad year for the Democratic party—a fact violently driven home at the organization’s national convention in Chicago, where mobs of peace activists clashed with Mayor Richard Daley’s legions of club-wielding police. Vietnam had destroyed Lyndon Johnson, divided his party, torn the nation to pieces, and—perhaps worst of all—paved the way for Richard Nixon’s return from political obscurity. Oh, the humanity.

  In the end, LBJ is a study in extremes. Though his legislative accomplishments continue to impress, his colossal misunderstanding of the Vietnam conflict was as unforgivable as it was fundamental to his own political destruction. And while he may have been an imperious, power-hungry ruffian, few megalomaniacs ever devoted themselves so sincerely or effectively to the cause of helping the needy. After years of eighteen-hour days, hard-driving leadership, and shameless womanizing, Johnson’s health began to fail. He died on January 22, 1973—just days before the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, which marked the beginning of America’s pull-out from the Vietnam War.

  CRASS ACT

  “Why do you come and ask me, the leader of the western world, a chicken-shit question like that?” replied President Johnson to a stupefied reporter. LBJ didn’t exactly pay much attention to decorum during press conferences. He even exposed his appendectomy scar to impress one gathering of journalists and photographers. But his insulting language and habits weren’t limited to moments with the media. Johnson was gruff and obscene virtually all of the time. He belched, swore, and scratched his privates regularly, and even invited staffers to continue conversations with him in the bathroom while he relieved himself. At his ranch in Texas, he was fond of terrifying guests by taking them on car rides down remote country roads at ninety miles an hour while he drank Scotch from a paper cup. His talent for indelicate phrases was legendary. “I never trust a man unless I’ve got his pecker in my pocket” summed up his political philosophy. “He doesn’t have sense enough to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel” is what he had to say about one Kennedy officeholder. And LBJ’s thoughts on renewing J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure at the FBI were just as colorful: “Well, it’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.”

  KEEPING THE MONOGRAMMING CHARGES DOWN

  Every member of Johnson’s family had the same initials: LBJ. With his wife, Lady Bird, Lyndon Baines had two daughters: Lynda Bird and Luci Baines. (Gag, retch.)

  TECHNO-TEXAN

  Johnson was fascinated by gadgets and gizmos that could make his life easier (or more fun). He owned a wristwatch with an alarm, which he was fond of setting off in the middle of meetings or speeches that irritated him. Obsessed with efficiency, he had televisions and phones installed in all the executive bathrooms so that he could be informed and in touch at all times. But Johnson’s bizarre bathroom décor didn’t stop there: He also insisted that the White House shower be installed with nozzles that sprayed water from every direction, including up from the bottom. After he found out just how incredible the new shower was, he had a similar one fashioned for his Texas ranch. The ranch also had a fire engine that Johnson received as a gift. He often impressed visitors by firing up the siren. But the ranch’s featured attraction was an amphibious car—he loved to take unsuspecting guests for a ride and then head for the nearby lake while feigning panic and shouting that the brakes were shot. While the passengers freaked out and tried to open the doors, the car would plunge straight into the water—and Johnson would plunge into hysterics.

  DELUGES OF GRANDEUR

  Few presidents have ever reveled in the power of their office as much as Lyndon Johnson did. He was almost power-mad, and he never lost an opportunity to remind people who the leader of the Free World was—especially all those Kennedy-loving Ivy Leaguers who thought Johnson was nothing but a scrub-grass-chewing pig-mounter with poor breeding. In fact, his feelings of inferiority to the men who helped define JFK’s brief, glamorous administration go a long way toward explaining why he felt obliged to act more like an emperor than a president. While flying aboard Air Force One, he was fond of conversing with reporters while his valet bathed his feet, trimmed his nails, and changed his socks. But the account of one Secret Service agent sums it up best: After being asked to shield the president while he urinated outdoors, the agent claims to have felt the moist warmth of presidential piss on his leg. When the Secret Serviceman voiced his disgust, Johnson replied, “That’s all right, son. It’s my prerogative.”

  Johnson’s Johnson

  Lady Bird Johnson was an intelligent and insightful first lady, and the president rarely went over a speech or considered a piece of legislation without her advice. But the couple’s close working relationship was just that—a working relationship. They had separate bedrooms in the White House, and for good reason: LBJ seems to have cheated regularly on his wife. The women he slept with were known fondly by Johnson as his “harem.” They included Madeleine Brown, a woman with whom LBJ had a twenty-one-year affair and whose services were rewarded with numerous cars and a house; and Alice Glass, a fellow devoted liberal who saw Johnson regularly for some thirty years. But these two women (and, for that matter, Lady Bird) had to share their beloved Lyndon with a whole host of sexual playthings. According to Secret Servicemen interviewed by Ronald Kessler for his book Inside the White House, Johnson couldn’t resist a pretty face and often brought voluptuous women from Texas back to Washington with him. He’d insist they be given some staff job, despite the fact that many of them couldn’t even type. They’d hang around the executive offices until their physical services were no longer wanted and then were shunted off somewhere else. As for where those services were rendered, Johnson wasn’t too choosy—he had a buzzer system installed that rang inside the Oval Office so that Secret Service agents could warn him that his wife was coming.

  37 RICHARD M. NIXON

  January 9, 1913–April 22, 1994

  ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Capricorn

  TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1969–1974

  PARTY: Republican

  AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 56

  VICE PRESIDENT: Spiro Agnew (first term and part of second term); Gerald Ford (after Spiro Agnew resigned)

  RAN AGAINST: Hubert Humphrey (first term); George McGovern (second term)

  HEIGHT: 5′11″

  NICKNAME: “Tricky Dick”

  SOUND BITE: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

  In the fall of 1968, Richard Milhous Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey in an election very nearly as close as the one he’d lost in 1960 to Kennedy. It was a ruthless, filthy campaign in which dirty tricks were common on both sides. And it thrust into the White House a man who would do more to sully the office of the president than any other man in American history.

  Nixon’s Southern California upbringing was shaped by harsh Quaker standards. His mother, whom Nixon would forever refer to as a saint, was loving but strict, and his father was angry and abusive. By the time young Dick attended Whittier College, he had earned a reputation as an uncanny debater, a klutz, and a nerd. He scored high grades at Duke Universit
y Law School and went on to serve as a naval officer in the Pacific during World War II.

  His plunge into politics was defined by personal qualities that would forever dog him: rage, paranoia, and an obsession with intrigue. In 1946, he beat Jerry Voorhis out of a seat in the House of Representatives largely by decrying his opponent’s ties to communism, which were unfounded. His 1950 campaign for the Senate pitted him against Helen Gahagan Douglas, and his attempts to label her a “commie”—again, preposterously—worked. (Douglas was “pink down to her panties,” Nixon charged, and it was this fight that earned him the epithet “Tricky Dick.”) As his career advanced, Nixon won the support of both big business and organized crime, which filled his campaign coffers and aided him in his smear tactics.

  Nixon achieved nationwide recognition during the Red Scare of the ’40s and ’50s, when fears of Communist infiltration swept the nation like a malarial fever. After ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers claimed that Alger Hiss, a former State Department employee, had engaged in Communist espionage, everyone’s fears seemed confirmed. Nixon, then a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, went after Hiss like a rabid dog. The performance landed him the vice presidency under Eisenhower.

  Few veeps, however, have ever enjoyed less support from their bosses. And Ike wasn’t alone—most people were wary of a man whose impersonal style, shadowy connections, and mean-spiritedness had become rather infamous. Though Ike sent his second-in-command on a globe-trotting itinerary that would help him become a savvy international relations expert, the trip never dispelled the belief that Tricky Dick was corrupt. In 1952, he even had to make a TV appearance before the country to kill fears that he’d received illegal contributions—it quickly became famous as the “Checkers Speech,” named for a dog given to his daughters by a supporter in Texas.