Reckless: Sex, Lies and JFK by Thompson Douglas & Rothmiller Mike

Author:Thompson, Douglas & Rothmiller, Mike
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ad Lib Publishers
Published: 2024-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

Candid Camera

‘Once you were in the sex compartment, you weren’t a person anymore.’

Diana de Vegh, 1997

JFK’s sex life all but spoiled everything. Distraction was always a problem. He believed his brain worked better after he had sex. He often lied to himself as well as to so many others. He was being offered to America like some Hollywood idol and movie stars need to love themselves and need to be needed. The candidate sold as handsome Jack Kennedy was no different. He’d take chances as if he was Teflon-coated. It was decades after one of his most high-risk dalliances, with a teenaged student, before this particular indiscretion was exposed. It was wild and irrational. He was twice her age.

He was on the campaign trail for the Presidency and sleeping with Diana de Vegh, whom he first met in 1958, when she was starting at Radcliffe College, a women’s liberal arts institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He gave a campaign speech in a Boston ballroom while running for re-election to the Senate. He appeared at her table, telling her date, ‘Give me your seat, so a tired old man can sit next to a pretty girl.’ He then invited her to an event the following week and soon their relationship began. ‘I was twenty years old with a full supply of hormones and madly in love with this compelling man,’ she testified in 2021. Yet, years earlier when she spoke anonymously to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh for his myth-busting The Dark Side of Camelot (Little, Brown, 1997) she said she was only nineteen at their first encounter, statutory rape since the age of consent at the time was twenty-one: ‘There would be signs of special attention. Yes, in public. And that was very flattering. Somehow it didn’t register with me at any deep level that what I was doing was absolutely immoral, absolutely atrocious behaviour,’ she told Seymour Hersh.

De Vegh insisted to Hersh that those around JFK and most of the Press knew of the affair. How could they not? But he’d charmed them too. He could do no wrong. A quarter of a century on from the anonymous testimony we know more about what a sex predator he was.

She was picked up from her off-campus home by ‘Dave’, JFK’s discreet driver, and taken to wherever he was campaigning. His political staff would call her ‘sweetheart’ and bring her coffee before he joined her for the drive home. ‘You know I’m working pretty hard for just one vote here,’ he flirted.

On the election trail, Joe Kennedy could not monitor his son, as his overbearing presence would have made for poor public relations. JFK had to be seen to be his own man. His sexual adventures – often, bizarrely, applauded as macho derring-do – were accepted as long as the women involved could not damage him politically. De Vegh said that the routine was easy and emotionally convenient because Jackie Kennedy did not get involved in suburban campaign events. The secret lovers would meet at his Boston apartment and the Carlyle Hotel, New York.

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