Sex with Presidents by Eleanor Herman

Author:Eleanor Herman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

9

John F. Kennedy’s Terrible Headaches

On November 29, 1963—a week after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas—his widow, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, sat down with Theodore White, a writer for Life magazine, and invented the myth of Camelot. Her late husband had loved the popular Broadway musical, she said (though many who knew him swore he had not), and loved to sing, “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”

Jackie was correct that the all-too-brief presidency was full of beautiful people. And, as in an early monarchy, there were many ladies-in-waiting, though none of them in the Kennedy White House had to wait very long. The comparison of Camelot was correct, too, in that adultery infected King Arthur’s court like a plague, and his reign ended in bloodshed.

* * *

When Jackie Kennedy slid between her sheets one evening, her hand touched something odd beneath her pillow. She pulled out a pair of women’s panties. While most wives would be perturbed to find such an item wadded up in their bed, the first lady merely dangled them from a finger and asked her husband, “Would you please shop around and see who this belongs to? It’s not my size.”

By the time she moved to the White House, Jackie was used to her husband’s philandering. Given her background, she must have expected a certain amount of infidelity from anyone she married. She was the daughter of a serial adulterer—John “Black Jack” Bouvier—and a member of a privileged society where few saw the need to deny themselves anything. But Jackie had had no idea of Jack Kennedy’s pathological need for sex with prostitutes, society matrons, schoolgirls, babysitters, debutantes, employees, actresses, strippers, and strangers picked up in bars, often with two women at once, or with two women and another man with the men swapping partners, some of those men his own brothers. The sex took place in closets, cars, brothels, hotel rooms, the homes of his friends, bathtubs, showers, swimming pools, yachts, and in Jackie’s own bed. In 1962, during a summit in the Bahamas, Kennedy told British prime minister Harold Macmillan, “You know, I get a migraine headache if I don’t get a strange piece of ass every day.”

JFK’s best friend from high school, Lem Billings, a frequent participant in those orgies, warned Jackie before the wedding that her fiancé could never settle down with one woman. Not for a moment did she consider canceling. Looking back, she said, “I saw it as a challenge.”

Her friend, journalist Charles Bartlett, said that Jackie was not “prepared for the humiliation she would suffer when she found herself stranded at parties while Jack would suddenly disappear with some pretty young girl. Before the marriage, I think she found Jack’s appeal to other women tantalizing—I suspect it reminded her of the magic appeal her handsome, rakish father had had with women, but once she was married and once it was happening to her, it was much harder to accept.

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