Jack Kennedy’s preoccupation with sex had been evident since he began confiding his raw thoughts about masturbation and sexual intercourse (“that gal needs a red hot poke”) in letters to Lem Billings as an adolescent. With Billings in tow, Kennedy lost his virginity with a white prostitute in a Harlem brothel at age seventeen, the beginning of his relentless pursuit of women. Kennedy “was a sensuous man,” said Arthur Krock. “He loved sex . . . enjoyed the sexual conquest. He was an amorist.” At a party in the late forties in Manhattan with Bill Walton, Kennedy said, “Look around and see how many women there you have laid.” Recalled Walton, “I gave him a true count, and he said, ‘I envy you.’” Walton told Kennedy, “I was here earlier than you were”—the advantage of being eight years older. “I’m going to catch up,” Kennedy replied.
As Kennedy began his presidency, his attitude about women reflected his generation’s view that men were inherently more important and more interesting. JFK prized a beautiful face and lovely figure, and he saw women as subordinates whose role was to cater to men, although he had little patience for empty-headed ornaments. “Jack wanted more than looks,” said Oleg Cassini. “He wanted courage, accomplishment. He wanted a champion, a star.” He preferred women who were lively, amusing, sophisticated, and clever in conversation—but not engaged in serious issues. These sentiments pervaded his subordinates as well. Even Ted Sorensen, the son of a feminist and a father who supported women’s suffrage, flatly declared to Katie Louchheim, “Most women have no influence whatsoever.”
Kennedy appointed few women to executive positions: longtime labor organizer Esther Peterson as head of the “women’s bureau” in the Labor Department, and Katie Louchheim to the State Department as a special assistant to arrange activities for women visitors from overseas. His unease with women in a professional setting was evident when Lyndon Johnson brought his assistant Liz Carpenter to an early cabinet meeting. “I was the only woman in the room,” recalled Carpenter. “I was seated next to the Vice President, and Kennedy swung his chair around away from me. You could feel the tension, the discomfort in the room.”
Around the same time, in mid-February, Kennedy had lunch with Ken Galbraith, his wife Kitty, and Barbara Ward, the English writer with a voice “compounded of grit and soft soap” who was known for her expertise on Africa. During World War II, Kathleen Kennedy had promoted Ward as “the girl for Jack,” describing her as “pretty,” with “tremendous charm,” and extolling her as “a leading Catholic speaker . . . what a brain.” Kennedy had befriended Ward, but as a woman she was too high powered for his tastes.
At lunch with her in the White House, Kennedy’s manner betrayed his conflicting intellectual and emotional impulses. As Ward spoke eloquently and specifically about problems in Ghana and the Congo, Kennedy listened attentively. “As usual, he was absolutely after the facts,” recalled Ward. Once Kennedy had extracted the information he wanted, he shifted the tone to regale his guests with “one of the rare and unexpected pleasures of his post,” which was reading the FBI reports on his appointees. According to Galbraith, Kennedy revealed that “no one could imagine how many seamy things were reported about even the most saintly of his men.”
Ward had no illusions about her ability to influence Kennedy in those early days, jokingly calling herself a “vivandière.” “On the whole he had little empathy for the trained intelligent woman,” said Ward, who knew Kennedy’s type well in her native land. Writing to JFK about her own fondness for such Englishmen, his sister Kathleen had once observed, “They treat one in quite an offhand manner and aren’t really as nice to their women as Americans, but I suppose it’s just that sort of treatment that women really like. That’s your technique, isn’t it?”
In his guilt-free promiscuity and chauvinistic views, Kennedy did take more of a European approach. JFK “vibrated sympathetically,” in the words of Arthur Schlesinger, to the cosmopolitan hedonism portrayed in David Cecil’s Melbourne. Whig society strove “to make the most of every advantage, intellectual and sensual,” Cecil wrote. “Good living gave them zest, wealth gave them opportunity . . . [they] threw themselves into their pleasures with an animal recklessness. . . . The conventions which bounded their lives were conventions of form only. . . . They took for granted that you spoke your mind and followed your impulses.”
Kennedy could be cavalier in his approach to women, sometimes neglecting to learn even the names of his fleeting sexual partners; he’d often just call them “kiddo” and “sweetie.” “The chase is more fun than the kill,” he told Vivian Crespi. Former lovers remarked on his disregard for preliminaries. According to Judith Campbell and several other women, Kennedy preferred to be supine while making love because of his bad back. George Smathers, the Florida senator who frequently prowled with Kennedy during their time together on Capitol Hill, dismissed JFK as a “lousy lover” because he took too little time. Yet as Smathers was quick to point out, many of Jack’s girls remained fond of him nevertheless. “He was such a warm, lovable guy,” said Smathers, “a sweet fella . . . It was very rare you’d see him get all tough and hard-boiled.”
To Helen Chavchavadze, “Jack was caring. I don’t feel he ever moved away from me, although I tried in every way to get away from him.” Throughout the Kennedy years, she had serious romances with other men that she sought to make permanent. She looked to her infrequent trysts with Kennedy for amusement—the electric charge when Evelyn Lincoln called to say, “The President would like you to come for dinner,” followed by the appearance of Dave Powers or Ted Reardon, another Kennedy factotum, in the White House car. Over dinner, Powers would tell Irish jokes that would have Kennedy “falling out of his chair with laughter,” after which Helen and Jack would retire “to the privacy of his room.”
Chavchavadze’s involvement with Kennedy “was kind of a game,” she recalled. “I was not into Jack in a serious way. To this day I don’t know exactly what I got out of it. It wasn’t for the sex. It was more that he was very charismatic, and I loved to have dinner with him and Dave or Ted because it was so much fun.” Still, she said, “I was capable of being hurt if I didn’t hear from Evelyn Lincoln for months.”
She and Kennedy never talked about their relationship. Unlike Diana de Vegh, Chavchavadze did not consider JFK narcissistic. “He wanted to know about you,” she said. “Jack had a lot of social insecurities. He liked to have women of a certain class. I didn’t feel any disrespect.” Nor did Kennedy ever discuss Jackie. “He was very loyal, very compartmentalized,” Chavchavadze said. At White House dinner parties, she noticed that “he was filled with admiration” when he looked at Jackie. “He prized her artistic and social ability, and her ability to look beautifully coiffed and dressed.” Chavchavadze concluded that his “incorrigible promiscuity” had less to do with sex than “having his own secret life. Maybe it was performance, to keep proving himself, maybe it was that he was rebellious about being locked into a dreary and stressful life. Those little clandestine adventures enabled him to deal with it. He needed a lot of women in his life, and playing with fire was part of his nature.”
Still, the extent of Kennedy’s philandering was remarkable, and many friends blamed his father’s example. Both Charley Bartlett, who took his marriage vows seriously, and Chuck Spalding, who strayed from his wife under Jack’s influence, called Joe Kennedy’s womanizing a “disease.” “It tears at the human fundamentals,” Spalding said.
Despite his fondness for Jackie, Joe appeared indifferent to JFK’s sexual peccadilloes. “I haven’t seen those beautiful girls. . . . Maybe when Jack arrives . . . he’ll find them,” the Ambassador had written to Teddy before JFK arrived for a vacation on the Riviera in 1955. Not even the presidential campaign gave Joe cause for concern, as Arthur Krock discovered. “I think Jack had better watch his step,” Krock told the Ambassador in August 1960. “He keeps taking the young girls to El Morocco and so on and so forth, and I think it might hurt him.” Replied Joe, “The American people don’t care how many t
imes he gets laid.” Reflecting back, Krock said, “He was right. That was his reply, cold as you could imagine, no concern.”
Jack and his siblings had long rationalized stories of their father’s behavior with the defensive jocularity that was a conspicuous Kennedy trait. Commenting on a 1944 article in a London “scandal sheet” when Joe Kennedy was fifty-six, Kathleen had expressed her delight that “there’s a lot of life in the old man of ours if he can start being a playboy at his ripe old age!” But Jack Kennedy was well aware of the truth. “He was totally open about what a wicked old man [Joe] had been,” said Bill Walton. “I thought it was amusing. He didn’t defend him in any sense. . . . It may have rendered [Jack] as being more promiscuous himself as a result of this pattern but . . . none of us has enough evidence to know what caused that.”
With its combination of powerful men and their mostly young female secretaries, the Kennedy administration was known for an “underlying sexual tension that made the West Wing a titillating place to work,” said Barbara Gamarekian. “It was a discreet but sexually charged White House.” Marriages unraveled (Salinger, Sorensen, and Schlesinger most prominently) and illicit liaisons flourished. Among the Kennedy courtiers, there was a division between those who recognized and embraced Kennedy’s behavior and those who either willfully ignored it or chose to suspend judgment.
The clearest example of what Marian Schlesinger called “license in the air” was the love affair of Fred Dutton and his secretary, Nancy Hogan, a graduate of Manhattanville, the Catholic alma mater of Jean, Joan, and Ethel Kennedy. When asked once about rumors of JFK’s extramarital activities, Dutton replied, “There are more votes in virility than fidelity.” Dutton unabashedly admired Kennedy’s behavior, years later telling biographer Richard Reeves that Kennedy was “like a God, fucking anybody he wants to anytime he feels like it.”
The romance between Dutton and Hogan began during the campaign, and she had moved on to work in his West Wing office, even as she was carrying his child. Dutton had a wife and family who came to Washington in March, and Hogan didn’t know about her pregnancy until two months after that. “Fred and I were both wearing blinders,” said Hogan. “We were on dangerous ground.”
As she grew from size ten to fourteen, few people knew about their affair, much less the pregnancy. “She kept getting heavier, and she had always been a little pudgy,” said Barbara Gamarekian. Eventually the press office learned the truth, and White House reporters as well. “No one touched it,” said Gamarekian. “Fred had a lot of friends in the press.” The lid nearly blew when Salinger’s office received an anonymous letter saying that at JFK’s next press conference he would be asked how he could rationalize having on his staff a married man who had impregnated his secretary. Salinger informed JFK, who “was very careful about whom he called on that day,” said Gamarekian. Shortly afterwards, Kennedy transferred Dutton to the Department of State, but the affair continued. Hogan left to have the baby and returned a month later to work in Dutton’s new office. It would be more than a decade before Dutton would divorce his wife and marry Hogan.
Censuring such staff behavior was difficult, given the predilections of the commander in chief. The prevailing view of Jack Kennedy’s infidelities among the White House staff and press corps was that “the rich are different.” As Hugh Sidey observed, Jack and Jackie’s “nomadic lives, their separateness—a phenomenon of great wealth—was not fully understood by the public, which clung to its older ideas of married life.” JFK felt free to operate by his own code and didn’t mind if staffers followed his lead. “While in the White House, on several occasions, President Kennedy encouraged me to take a lover, an obvious sign he also had some himself,” said Pierre Salinger.
The stories about JFK and women spread from Washington and Hollywood to Manhattan and the capitals of Europe. “Kennedy is doing for sex what Eisenhower did for golf,” said the Duke of Devonshire to his sister-in-law Nancy Mitford, who also told a friend early in Kennedy’s tenure that “if the First Lord doesn’t . . . every day he has a headache” and that “Jackie doesn’t like it that often.” Even Joe Alsop couldn’t resist telling Oatsie Leiter (a lively Washington figure who once wore a black fur hat and black-and-white body suit to symbolize “integration” at a costume party), “Magnolia, you’re the only woman in Washington who has not been in bed with the boy!”
New York publishing executive Thomas Guinzburg (who years later would employ Jackie as an editor) was surprised late one night while sleeping with his girlfriend when Kennedy called from the White House. “The President made a request as to whether this lady wouldn’t like to go down to Palm Beach the next day for a weekend,” recalled Guinzburg. The woman—“a marvelous lady”—flew to Florida as requested and “had an extended romance” with Kennedy, according to Guinzburg.
Among White House insiders, Douglas Dillon, like Mac Bundy, had personal knowledge about Kennedy that he chose to disregard. The Treasury secretary knew from his daughter Joan that JFK was intimate with a friend of hers, a “decent person” who kept “very very quiet.” Dillon concluded that Jack and Jackie “had a different kind of relationship than I had with my wife.” Years later the writer Louis Auchincloss asked Robert McNamara, “Didn’t you know all about Jack’s women in the White House?” “Yes,” McNamara replied. “But we didn’t know that there were that many!”
Arthur Schlesinger took the more active role of trying to squelch rumors about his boss. During the campaign he had written to Adlai Stevenson, insisting that “the stories in circulation are greatly exaggerated,” adding that while Kennedy had strayed earlier in his marriage, once he began to “prepare himself for the presidency” he abandoned his hedonistic ways. “Even if such stories were true, I do not see how they bear essentially on Kennedy’s capacity to be President, especially when one considers the alternative.” Stevenson’s sister, Elizabeth Ives, was not mollified by Schlesinger, telling Adlai that fellow Democrat Gay Finletter said Kennedy was “just a bull. He’s after every woman.” Ives told her brother that while he could refer to Kennedy as “a brilliant man . . . don’t call him a good man.”
Schlesinger’s wishful thinking was shared by others close to Kennedy. After his election, Kennedy sat on Charley Bartlett’s terrace and assured his friend, “I’m going to keep the White House white,” a pledge Bartlett stubbornly believed throughout the presidency. Bill Walton clung to deep denial, once writing that “a President is watched too closely to have a secret life.” For all his worldliness, Ben Bradlee also chose to ignore Kennedy’s philandering. “Like everyone else, we had heard reports of presidential infidelity, but we were always able to say we knew of no evidence, none,” recalled Bradlee. Even Lem Billings, who knew more details than anyone else about Kennedy’s sexual conquests over the years, decided to avert his eyes. “Lem didn’t want to know about Jack Kennedy’s infidelity in the White House,” said Peter Kaplan. “He wanted to believe in that marriage. He wouldn’t let Jack discuss it with him. He turned it aside. He heard about it because he hung around with Sinatra and others, but he was never a co-conspirator.”
Kennedy had no lack of choices among insiders willing to collude in his assignations—not only Powers and O’Donnell, but longtime friend Charles Spalding. When JFK saw Gore Vidal’s The Best Man before his inauguration, the playwright observed Kennedy’s flash of self-recognition in the promiscuous politician onstage. Kennedy “looked quite nervous,” Vidal recalled. “He gave a lightning look at Chuck Spalding and sat lower down in his chair.”
Kennedy had first met Chuck Spalding, a six-foot-five beanpole with a bad complexion and engaging personality, during the summer of 1940 on the Cape. One of Kennedy’s neighbors, Nancy Tenney Coleman, said Spalding “wasn’t that attractive, but he had a Cary Grant kind of manner. He was debonair.”
As a young man, Spalding was legendary for his comic gifts. The son of a stockbroker, he came from a wealthy family in Lake Forest, Illinois, and went to the Hill School and Yale, where he wrote
witty satire for the Yale Daily News. During the war he turned out Love at First Flight, a best-selling book lampooning his experiences at navy flight school. Spalding’s wife, the former Betty Coxe, was six feet tall and had a forceful personality that earned her the nickname “Brune” for Brunhilde. She grew up on Philadelphia’s Main Line and graduated from fashionable St. Timothy’s boarding school. A championship golfer and keen sailor, she had been close to both Eunice and Kathleen Kennedy before her marriage to Spalding.
Kennedy appreciated Spalding’s ironic humor, but they also shared intellectual interests, and both were Anglophiles. Spalding was bowled over by Kennedy—“the most engaging person” he had ever met. “He was so determined to wring every last minute that he just set a pace that was abnormal,” Spalding said.
By the time Kennedy entered the White House, Spalding had tried his hand at several professions—screenwriting in Hollywood (including projects for Gary Cooper), advertising at J. Walter Thompson, and finally a small venture capital company in New York. Spalding declined Kennedy’s offer of a job in the Defense Department because he wanted “to keep a totally abnormal situation reasonably normal.” Spalding, then forty-two, and Betty, forty, lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, with their six children, and he would escape to Washington whenever Kennedy called, sometimes with her, more often without her.
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