by Unknown
Later in the evening, he urged Dave and me to eat the now-cold supper of roast chicken that had been prepared for us. As we began serving ourselves, Bobby Kennedy called to say he was on his way over. When he arrived, I withdrew to the bedroom so he wouldn’t see me. As a result, I wasn’t a firsthand witness to the exchange between Dave and the President, as reported in Richard Reeves’s 1993 biography, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, which perfectly encapsulates Dave’s role as First Friend. Evidently, as they talked, Bobby was painting a gloomy, end-times picture of the crisis, while Dave just kept on eating.
“God, Dave,” the President said, “the way you’re eating up all that chicken and drinking up all my wine, anybody would think it was your last meal.”
“The way Bobby’s been talking, I thought it was my last meal,” Dave said.
When the President and his brother went back downstairs to yet another EX
COMM meeting, Dave filled me in on what was going on. The President was confident—much more than Bobby—that the crisis could be peacefully resolved.
He had just sent a letter to Khrushchev offering an end to the naval quarantine and a promise not to invade Cuba if Khrushchev removed the missiles. Now he was waiting, along with the rest of the world, for the Soviet premier’s reply.
That I was present at all in the residence on that evening strikes me now as surreal. God knows I didn’t belong there. But it was intoxicating. At that moment, I would rather have been there than anywhere else on earth.
But the Cuban Missile Crisis taxed the poise of even the Great Compartmentalizer. Although our get-togethers were always quite sexually charged, it wasn’t to be on this occasion. Dave and I waited up a while longer for the President, but his meeting dragged on past eleven o’clock, so I decided to go to bed. I was asleep by the time he finally came upstairs again. He unwound that night by watching Roman Holiday with Dave.
The next morning I got up early, needing to head back to school. The President was already awake, sitting in bed and working the phones as I waved goodbye just before eight A.M. Thus, he was alone that Sunday morning, October 28, when word came that there would be an important announcement from Moscow at nine A.M. I was sitting on a train, somewhere between Washington and Providence, when President Kennedy was told that the Soviets had accepted his terms and agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba. Like everyone else in America, he heard it via a radio announcer in Moscow reading Khrushchev’s letter.
The relief in the White House must have been extraordinary. This was as close to the brink of “mutually assured destruction” as we had ever come. Many of the President’s advisers, I would read later in Pierre Salinger’s memoir, had slept in their offices, including members of the press office. Pierre himself had moved into a hotel one block from the White House so he could rotate night duty with his deputy press secretaries. Barbara Gamarekian recalled in a 2001
New York Times column that she’d been assigned the first night shift and had slept in a bomb shelter in the basement. What really “got my attention,” she wrote, was being handed a card in a white envelope telling her to report to the North Portico in the event of an evacuation. When she went home the next morning to change clothes, one of her housemates was getting in a car and driving to Florida, trying to escape Washington. The nation’s capital was in terror.
I don’t remember it that way. Here’s how I remember it: As President Kennedy met with the men he had chosen to handle the crisis, including “best and brightest” figures such as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, I was sleeping like a baby, wrapped in soft linens, in a bedroom on the second floor of the White House. At that moment, it felt like the safest place I could be.
Chapter Nine
Even in a college dormitory full of nineteen-year-old women, I can’t remember ever talking to my classmates about sex, let alone sex with the President. Sex was a closed subject back then: There was no nudity in movies, television was chaste and wholesome; advertising was corny and square by today’s coarse standards. Yes, Helen Gurley Brown’s groundbreaking Sex and the Single Girl had been published in 1962—and reportedly sold two million copies in its first three weeks of publication—but the subject of sex was still treated with so much modesty that her chapter on contraception was removed from her book before publication. Not only that, she was often barred from repeating the word sex in her television appearances. I never read the book, anyway. Nor did I read the racy novels of the time, such as Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place or Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything. These were popular novels back then precisely because they dealt with sex. But among my crowd, boy crazy as some of us were, the topic of sex was taboo. There was something of a cult back then about maintaining our virginity as long as possible, hopefully until our wedding night.
I hadn’t even had the Conversation with my mother or older sister. My family, it’s strange to recall now, wasn’t paying that much attention to me. They thought of me as a well-behaved young woman who had a coveted summer job at the White House and spent the rest of the year studying at college. I also didn’t have the kind of open relationship with my mother in which she expected me to tell her everything, or in which I could go to her with intimate problems or questions. There was so much that went unsaid. She still had a teenage boy and girl at home to raise, plus a busy homemaking and social life. It wasn’t that she willfully ignored me; she simply didn’t worry about me. She figured I could take care of myself.
If I had wanted to tell anyone, it probably would have been my sister Buffy, who was four years older and working in Philadelphia at the time. I suppose I could have told her immediately after that first encounter with President Kennedy. It would have been an uncomfortable conversation, but I could have broached the subject with her, maybe highlighting that I had lost my virginity but not revealing to whom specifically. But that was a Pandora’s box, one I sensed that, once opened, could never be shut. If I’d told her, she would have hounded me until I told her whom I had slept with, and then she would have felt compelled to act on that information, which meant she very likely would have told my parents, who would have demanded that I end my internship at White House.
And I didn’t want that.
So I chose to lock it away and not say a word about it.
This is how a secret begins.
If the President had been nothing more than a summer fling, keeping my secret among my Wheaton classmates would have been relatively easy. But this wasn’t a fling. The relationship continued into the fall and winter, requiring many trips to see the President, which made me self-conscious about any mention of him. I was worried about being in a situation where I might let something slip, so I responded by retreating into myself and becoming a bit of a loner. I didn’t participate in college events or make many friends. I didn’t hang around in the “smoker”—the smoking room in the dorm basement—where girls would relax over cigarettes and gossip. I almost never talked about my life. What could I say that wouldn’t feel like a lie? The safest course, I decided, was to remain silent.
Because my overriding goal was to protect the President’s and my reputations, I withdrew even from my roommates, who had also been classmates at Farmington. I doubt they noticed any drastic change in my personality; I didn’t stay in bed all day or pout or sigh dramatically at odd moments. I wasn’t terribly distracted in that lovesick way. I was just withdrawn and on guard, and it was a stance that clouded my relationships with friends for years.
My relationship with the President, however, maintained its intensity through the winter as he continued to beckon me to the White House and request my presence on presidential trips. Not all of these trips were unqualified delights.
One, in particular, sticks out in my mind for its wonderful highs and its devastating lows.
In early December, the President was scheduled to go on a tour of eleven western states. Dave Powers called me to see if I could meet up with the entourage in Albuquerqu
e, New Mexico, at the tail end of the trip. After that, we would go on to Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs for some much-needed R&R. Yet again, I would have to sign out from Wheaton and travel to Washington to catch the backup to Air Force One—with one crucial difference: I was no longer part of the press office. I was on board an official White House plane as a civilian, which, according to oral histories at the Kennedy Library, made at least one unnamed reporter curious about my role. (And, in retrospect, for very good reason: a college sophomore on the President’s plane?) Pierre Salinger, who was as skilled as anyone in the world at deflecting reporters’
suspicions, must have smoothed over any concerns, because nothing ever came of it.
When we got to Albuquerque, I joined Fiddle on a magnificent horseback ride through the high desert. We rode until sunset, after which I returned to the hotel to wait for the President and Dave Powers, and then proceeded to regale them with vivid descriptions of my afternoon as we dined in the President’s suite. It had been a wonderful day, and the President seemed genuinely happy.
The next day, we headed out to Bing Crosby’s house in Palm Springs, where a large festive crowd—many from the entertainment industry—had gathered to greet President Kennedy. I felt like I’d been admitted into some wonderful, secret club.
But then the evening turned into a nightmare.
I’d seen flashes of the President’s darker side, which emerged rarely and only when we were among men he knew. That’s when he felt a need to display his power over me. Although my admiration for him remains steadfast to this day, it is the darker aspect of his nature that I find hard to reconcile with all his admirable qualities. In revealing this side of his personality now, I realize yet another damaging note will be added to the record, but I cannot airbrush or ignore his actions during his darker moments; they remain a stain on my memory.
Crosby’s house was a modern, sprawling single-story ranch in the desert, and the party was raucous. Compared to what I’d seen in Washington, this was another planet. There was a large group of people, a fast Hollywood crowd, hovering around the President, who was, as always, the center of attention. I was sitting next to him in the living room when a handful of yellow capsules—most likely amyl nitrite, commonly known then as poppers—was offered up by one of the guests. The President asked me if I wanted to try the drug, which stimulated the heart but also purportedly enhanced sex. I said no, but he just went ahead and popped the capsule and held it under my nose. (The President, with all his ailments, was accustomed to taking many medications and was reported to rely on amphetamines for energy. But he didn’t use the drug himself that evening: I was the guinea pig.) Within minutes of inhaling the powder, my heart started racing and my hands began to tremble. This was a new sensation, and it frightened me. I panicked and ran crying from the room, praying that it would end soon, that I wasn’t about to have a heart attack. Dave Powers, bless him, ran after me and escorted me to a quiet corner in the back of the house, where he sat with me for more than an hour until the effects of the drug wore off.
I didn’t spend that night with President Kennedy. He was staying in a suite, now known as the Kennedy Wing, with its own private entrance on one side of the Crosby property. Was he alone? I do not know. For the first and only time since I met him, I was relieved not to see him—and fell asleep in one of the guest rooms.
This wasn’t my first dark moment with the President, however. He had been guilty of an even more callous and unforgivable episode at the White House pool during one of our noonday swims at the end of the summer. Dave Powers was sitting poolside while the President and I swam lazy circles around each other, splashing playfully. Dave had removed his jacket and loosened his tie in the warm air of the pool, but he was otherwise fully clothed. He was sitting on a towel, with his pants legs rolled up, and his bare feet dangling in the water.
The President swam over and whispered in my ear. “Mr. Powers looks a little tense,” he said. “Would you take care of it?”
It was a dare, but I knew exactly what he meant. This was a challenge to give Dave Powers oral sex. I don’t think the President thought I’d do it, but I’m ashamed to say that I did. It was a pathetic, sordid scene, and is very hard for me to think about today. Dave was jolly and obedient as I stood in the shallow end of the pool and performed my duties. The President silently watched.
Much as I try, I cannot bring back anything—any emotion or thought—from that episode that would begin to explain why, without hesitation, I obeyed the President’s command. Perhaps I was carried away by the spirit of playfulness I felt around him. Perhaps I was in thrall to his charm and authority. No doubt some of this had to do with my own insecurity and my need for his approval. A part of it also has to be that the three of us felt close to one another—in the way that co-conspirators feel connected to the people they’re conspiring with. Dave Powers and I were umbilically linked to each other in our devotion to President Kennedy, and in the illicit relationship that Dave had played an essential role in fostering. And now the man who engaged our complete loyalty had gone too far.
He had emotionally abused me and debased Dave. For what? To watch me perform for him and to show Dave how much he controlled us?
I was deeply embarrassed afterward, and I climbed out of the pool and went to the dressing room. I could hear Dave speak in as stern a tone as I ever heard him use with his boss.
“You shouldn’t have made her do that,” Dave said.
“I know, I know,” I heard the President say.
Later, a chastened President Kennedy apologized to us both.
I have a deep well of affection for Dave Powers, who died in 1998 at age eighty-five after spending three decades as museum curator of the Kennedy Library in Boston. He was one of the most entertaining men I’ve ever met, and he was nobody’s fool. He deftly blended his jovial personality with a serious, win-at-all-costs commitment to President Kennedy. Richard W. Stevenson, who wrote Dave’s obituary in The New York Times, captured him perfectly with this story.
Asked once about the most difficult moment he had faced in politics, he replied with a story about forgetting to bring black shoes to go with Kennedy’s blue suit in the Democratic National Convention in 1952, forcing Kennedy to make a televised speech in brown shoes.
“And after it was over,” Mr. Powers said later, “to help him relax, I said, ‘Mr. Senator, that was a brown shoe crowd if I ever saw one.’ ” That was the Dave Powers I knew, a man so devoted to JFK that he would be crestfallen when his boss had to wear brown shoes with a blue suit for a black-and-white telecast—but then could save the day, and his dignity, with a witty one-liner. But I also feel sympathy for Dave. I can only imagine some of the distasteful duties he had to carry out at the President’s behest—because I know what he had to do when those duties involved me.
One of the more unsettling assignments Dave performed on my behalf occurred a few weeks after I returned to Wheaton in the fall of 1962. I was becoming increasingly worried that I might be pregnant, and when “Michael Carter” called, I told him so. I was worried, I said. My period was two weeks late. The President took the news in stride, but he shouldn’t have been surprised. I knew nothing about birth control, and he never used protection with me (either because of his Catholicism or recklessness, I could never be sure).
An hour later, Dave Powers called the dorm and put me in touch with a woman who had information about a doctor in Newark, New Jersey. Abortion was illegal then, but if you had cash and a connection to a sympathetic doctor, you could obtain one fairly easily. I called the woman, identified myself, and received the name and number of the doctor. Dave must have had someone—at least once removed from him—alert her to expect my call. Any link between President Kennedy and an abortion doctor would have been explosive. Even the docile White House press corps couldn’t have averted their eyes from that story.
That was pure Dave Powers: He handled the problem immediately, and with brute practicality. There was no talk
about what I wanted, or how I felt, or what the medical risks of an abortion might be. Which was just as well. Whenever I tried to sit down and take a deep breath and run through my options in my mind, my screen went blank. I didn’t have the tools to face my situation rationally—and with no one else to talk to about it, I slipped into a state of high anxiety.
In the end, it was a false alarm. I never contacted the doctor in Newark. My period arrived a few days later, and I let the matter drop. Neither Dave nor the President ever brought it up again.
I hasten to add that for the vast majority of my time with President Kennedy, he was a sweet and thoughtful and generous man. He lifted my spirits whenever I was with him, and I’m fairly sure that nearly everyone in the White House felt the same way. However, he did have his demons, and given the few glimpses I had of his more sinister side, I shudder to think what other cleanup jobs Dave Powers was asked to do for his boss. Dave seemed like he was too nice a person to feel good about any of these assignments, but if he helped ease the President’s mind, I suspect he didn’t lose much sleep over his role. Where the President was involved, I don’t believe Dave Powers’s first impulse was to distinguish right from wrong.
A week before Christmas, I joined the President in the Bahamas, where he was meeting with Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister. This time I did not fly on Air Force One or on the White House backup plane. Someone in the press office, presumably Chris Camp, must have complained to Pierre Salinger or made him aware of the press interest in my presence on the official flights.
