The Dark Side of Camelot

Kennedy, Emerson added, “always seemed to be surrounded by men. And they were always talking about strategy or the moves of other people. And it was rather mysterious and exciting. You, of course, as a young girl were of no importance whatsoever. Jack always called you kid, because he couldn’t remember women’s names. It wasn’t just the looks—it was the sense of mockery and that kind of fierce intelligence. He didn’t like people who babbled. He was very impatient and often very tense. I didn’t realize it then, but I think he must have been in pain a great deal of the time. Not just the stooped shoulders, but the shifting in chairs.”

Emerson was dating one of Kennedy’s classmates from Harvard when she and Jack first met. It was before his marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier. At the inevitable round of weekend parties, she said, “he was totally unselfconscious. He walked around half-naked, with just a towel wrapped around him—all bone, all rib, all shank. You have to have tremendous self-assurance to do that. I’ve never met anyone like that again. It was the audaciousness, the intensity, the impatience, even the brusqueness. Here was a man who wasn’t going to wait; he was going to get what he wanted. He was going to go from the House to the Senate to the White House. And it was quite thrilling.”

Another part of his charm, said Emerson, was young Jack Kennedy’s total indifference “to his own beauty. He didn’t care if a woman said yes or a woman said no. There would be another one. He was so absentminded about the women he was having affairs with. Once I had a roommate in New York and we were both very young. She was having a very pleasant affair with Jack and not taking it too seriously, which seemed very wise to me. But he could never remember her name. ‘Hello, kid. How are you?’ And he couldn’t figure out how to get in touch with her, so he had to call up the doorman of the building and describe the woman, so the doorman could identify her.”

Kennedy’s longtime secret lover described, with some pain, the night before the inauguration in January 1961, when she slept with the president-elect in the Georgetown home he shared with his wife and two children. Her father, a prominent businessman, was then being considered for a high-level post in the new administration. “He [Kennedy] was getting dressed, in white tie, and he looked at me,” the woman said, and he asked, “by any chance,” whether she was related to the potential nominee. She and Kennedy had been lovers for two years by then, the woman said, and he did not know who she was.

Looking back at it, the woman added, she realized that her relationship with Kennedy was based solely on his need for “conquest.” “I was somebody who happened to cross his radar screen, and so he said, ‘Well, you. I’ll take you.’ Charge and send. I was young. I was pretty. I could talk along. I was just thrilled and said, ‘Oh, wow, gosh. Here’s this handsome older man. Here’s this person, he’s interested in me.’ But in retrospect it’s really sad. I was just another girl. There was a compartment for girls, and once you were in the sex compartment, you weren’t a person anymore. I got declassed and depersonalized” by sleeping with Kennedy.

“He did not talk about his marriage to me,” the woman added. “How do you settle within yourself a pattern of behavior that is a betrayal of someone else’s trust? There are ‘arrangements’ and there’s a whole rhetoric and a whole kind of nonsense that people talk, but the basic act is betrayal. It’s hard to be a person who is trustworthy, when in your own family you are not. I think that somehow between his money, his position, his charm, his whatever, he was caught up in feeling that he was buffered. That people would take care of it. There is that feeling that you are not accountable; that the laws of the world do not apply to you. Laws had never been applied to his father and to him.” Aiding in this was the fact that, “among other things, reporters also wanted to be his friends, wanted to have relationships with him, wanted to spend time with him. I don’t know whether they did male bonding things about women, but the fact is a lot of reporters were very keen to spend time with him. And I think that he assumed they would not turn him in. And they didn’t.”

The woman came to understand that Kennedy’s most significant attachments were not to women but to men. Jack Kennedy was a man’s man. Men adored him, just as he adored his ever-demanding father. “He preferred the company of men,” Gloria Emerson recalled. “They admired him and they wanted to be like him. And they wanted, as did women, to win his favor, but even more important, they seemed to love him. People wanted to please Jack.” Schoolmates, navy buddies, political operatives, and those colleagues in the House and Senate with whom he chased women—all were attracted to Kennedy when they first met him, and had been ever since he was a gangly teenager. Charles Spalding vividly remembered his first glimpse of Kennedy at Hyannis Port in the early 1940s. Spalding, a navy aviator, had just published a bestselling memoir on flying entitled Love at First Flight. Kennedy, also in the navy, was lying down with no clothes on, except for a swimsuit casually draped across his loins. “He liked the fact that I’d written a book that had just come out,” Spalding said. Kennedy’s undergraduate thesis at Harvard, Why England Slept, had been published a few years earlier, and Spalding politely asked how it was going. “Going like hotcakes,” replied Kennedy. “Dad’s seeing to that.”

“I never met anybody who felt that the minute was as important as it was [for him],” said Spalding. “He had to live for today. There was this inner pulse, and he could find it anywhere he went.” Kennedy made things happen. “He was fun,” newspaper editor Benjamin Bradlee recalled in an interview. “That’s what you forget. He was fun to be with. He had a great sense of humor and surrounded himself with people with humor. He teased. He liked to be teased. I enjoyed being with him.” But he made people feel that others had to live by his priorities. “He would ask you to go with him someplace a lot of times when it was inconvenient for you,” George Smathers, a contemporary of Kennedy’s in the Senate, told me. “He would say, ‘Come on, go. Come on, go.’ And he and I made several trips together. He was very wonderful, friendly and loyal.”

Kennedy’s impulsiveness was irresistible. Hugh Sidey, the White House correspondent for Time magazine, who drew close to Kennedy, had an Oval Office interview scheduled for what, he concluded, was the wrong time. When he walked in, the president was in a snit over a minor foreign policy dispute, Sidey recalled in an interview, “looking down at his desk and barking orders. And he looked up at me and says, ‘Come on, Sidey. Let’s go swimming.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, that’s the one piece of equipment I have never thought to bring when I come over for an interview.’ He said, ‘Oh, in this pool you don’t need a suit.’” Once at the pool, Sidey said, “I’m confronted with this problem of who removes his trousers first—the president or the guest?” Sidey laughed at the recollection. “Kennedy beat me. Obviously a man of practice. And we dove in.”

Sidey got his clearest insight into Kennedy, he told me, when, while doing an article on the president’s reading habits for Life magazine, he asked him to list his ten favorite books. “Without hesitating he said, ‘Melbourne,’” referring to the much-acclaimed 1939 biography of Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s prime minister and political adviser. Sidey immediately read the book. “It was the story,” he said, “about the young aristocracy of Britain … who gave their lives in military campaigns, who held the ideal of empire and national honor above all else. But on the weekends, when they went to their country estates, it was broken-field running through the bedrooms. I mean they swapped wives, they slept with others. But the code of that period was nobody talked about it. And you didn’t get divorced; otherwise, you were disgraced.

“I saw Kennedy,” Sidey added, “and I said, ‘Listen, now I know you better than anything. [Melbourne] tells me more about you than anything else.’ He just laughed and said, ‘Well, I’m fascinated with it. It was an interesting period in history.’” From then on, Sidey said, he and the president had a shared secret.

Kennedy was particularly energized by the West Coast. Joe Naar, an aspiring television producer, was a friend of the actor Peter Lawford, the president’s brother-in-law, and spent weekends at the Lawfords’ Santa Monica home, which was always crowded with show business celebrities. Naar remains enthralled today when he recalls Kennedy’s vibrance and energy in their chance meetings over lunch in Santa Monica. “He would come in and sit down and go around the room,” Naar recalled in an interview. “He knew everyone’s business. He made you feel like he cared about you and about what you were doing with your life. I was like nobody—the least important person there. He knew I was trying to develop television series and he’d say, ‘I’ve got an idea for a series I want to talk to you about.’ He did that with everyone at the table, some significant and some more like me. He was just the best.” Kennedy also had an unerring ability to put others at ease. Naar’s home burned down in 1961 and the president sent a photograph of Smokey the Bear with a note wondering where the bear had been during the fire. There was a Los Angeles reception soon after, and Naar’s wife was going to meet Kennedy for the first time. She was nervous about it and practiced shaking his hand and thanking him for the photograph. When the moment came, Naar recalled, his wife instead blurted, “Thank you, Mr. Picture.” She was mortified, but Kennedy “just threw his arms all over her and hugged her and laughed. He knew what happened,” Naar told me. “And I can’t forget that.”

Kennedy’s sense of his own importance and his hold over his friends distressed some of their wives, who saw Jack in a far more ambivalent light than did their husbands. Charles Spalding’s former wife, Betty, had met the Kennedys in the mid-1930s on Cape Cod and was especially friendly with Eunice, their third-eldest daughter. Her husband, she said, served one essential function for Jack Kennedy after his high-society wedding to Jacqueline Bouvier, as did all his male friends: escorting women in public who were really meant for Jack. “He bearded for him. That’s what they were doing—even Bobby—cleaning up after or bearding for him.” Like her husband, Betty Spalding found Jack Kennedy “charming and great fun to be with.” But, she added, “you didn’t know whether you were being manipulated.”

Jewel Reed said that she eventually became very disturbed by Kennedy’s “tremendous power over men—more than over women. Jack was more comfortable with men than with women. He didn’t have any value for women, except for a particular purpose.” Reed told me that Kennedy would often ask her husband to join him for a night of “male prowling,” and leave her at home. Kennedy couldn’t understand when his buddy Jim occasionally chose, at his wife’s insistence, not to go. The Reeds’ marriage, as did the Spaldings’, broke up during Kennedy’s days in the White House.

Gloria Emerson came to understand that the wives of Jack’s friends “didn’t like Jack at all because he had such a claim over their husbands.” The women were “completely left out,” Emerson said, “just put aside. It was another cultural climate. And I think they were jealous of JFK, because he could induce people to do things for him, and he was a great actor. He could make them believe that he really needed them to do these things for him—and why not? That’s part of the role of a skillful politician.”

Jack Kennedy’s attitude toward marriage followed the pattern his father set: he and his sons were to get married, stay married, have lots of children, and sleep with any woman they could. Rose Kennedy embraced the Catholic church and ignored what was going on, with her sons as well as her husband, while the Kennedy daughters spent their lives embracing the infidelities of the men in their family, often helping to make it easier for their brothers to cheat on their wives.

Sometimes the daughters would do the same for their dad. The novelist Dominick Dunne, who was working in Hollywood as a television producer for a weekly dramatic series in the 1950s, recalled in an interview for this book that Patricia Lawford, Joe Kennedy’s daughter, who was then married to actor Peter Lawford, routinely telephoned Dunne’s wife when her father was in town to ask, “Who’s on the show?” Lawford was told the names and telephone numbers of the female stars, Dunne said, and then relayed the information to the always eager Joe.*

The man most important to Kennedy, other than his father, was his brother Bobby; yet there were a few times early in the 1950s, Emerson said, when Jack hoodwinked even him. “Jack was having a liaison with one of my roommates in a hotel room and Bobby was at the door suddenly. And he made the woman stand in a closet while he talked to Bobby,” Emerson remembered. “So there were some times he probably concealed, but less and less as time went by. The Kennedys have always felt themselves under siege and were distrustful of the outside world. And that’s why so many men wanted JFK to believe that they could be trusted—it was a test they had to pass.”

Hugh Sidey described the brothers’ relationship as one of “almost total communication. It was almost osmosis. Almost every time I was in talking to Jack the phone would ring, once or twice, it would be Bobby. Muffled conversations back and forth about whatever it was. I don’t think there were secrets of any significance they kept from each other.”

Richard N. Goodwin, who wrote speeches for Kennedy during the 1960 campaign and accompanied him to the White House, described Robert Kennedy as “completely his brother’s man. He was a guy whose basic purpose in life was to advance and protect the career of John Kennedy.” In an interview for this book in 1997, Goodwin recalled one meeting between the president and a group of southern senators on the White House balcony. One of the senators “leaned forward and said, ‘Well, Mr. President, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to attack you on civil rights.’ And Kennedy says, ‘Can’t you attack Bobby instead?’ Bobby played that role,” Goodwin explained. The younger Kennedy “was always reflecting his brother’s feelings.” Goodwin was also present at a White House meeting after the Bay of Pigs when Bobby tore into a senior State Department official who, after the fact, had told a reporter that he was opposed to the invasion. “I watched Bobby just lash into him,” Goodwin recalled. “‘You can’t undermine my brother.’ And John Kennedy just sat there quietly, never said a word throughout. But I have no doubt that Bobby was reflecting conversations that the two of them had.”

Jewel Reed, whose husband had also commanded PT boats in the South Pacific, thought that Bobby was put at a disadvantage by his older sibling. “All Bobby wanted to do was to please his brother,” Mrs. Reed said. “I felt Jack was more ruthless than Bobby.”

After the 1960 election, Kennedy put his longtime lover, who came from a wealthy and socially prominent family, into a make-work White House job dealing with international affairs. She watched from the inside and grew extremely skeptical of the men around the president. “He was not surrounded by peers,” she told me. “He was surrounded by intellectual associates, by show business cronies, by family, by old-time family retainers, by a lot of people who were acquaintances but were not friends of his heart.” The woman recalled a private dinner in the White House with the president and one of his very old friends. “And basically what [the friend] wanted was some help in getting a discount on furniture at the Merchandise Mart,” the huge Chicago wholesale furniture hub that was owned by the Kennedy family. “I was amazed. I mean, I was just staggered. It wasn’t about being a friend. It wasn’t about closeness.”

Kennedy’s male friends, she said, like many of his women friends, were attracted by his glamour. “Everyone kept stroking,” she said. “‘You’re fine, it’s great, everything is going well.’ Real friends,” she said, “wade in with you and say, ‘Boy, this is difficult. This is painful.’ I believe he was abandoned at some deep level by the people who thought they were trying to help by keeping things smooth, by saying it’ll all be okay. ‘How can I serve to make your life smoother?’”

Once in the White House, she said, aides such as McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, and Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense, “picked up from [Kennedy] not a sense of being Harvard eggheads and smart people, but a sense of being tough. There was part of Jack that rejoiced in knowing what you had to know, doing what had to be done,” she said. “Bundy didn’t know from dirty hands or what Jack knew from street fighting. These men were merely picking up the worst aspects of Jack; they felt they had to be more tough, more Catholic than the Pope.”

All of Kennedy’s aides wanted his acceptance, she said. “In some way I think he must have gotten the least [out] of all the brain power around, because of people’s competition—‘How can we get more of Daddy? How can we get more of his attention? How can we get more of his approval?’ A lot of really radical thinking just went right out the window” on the part of the men who were supposedly giving the president their best advice. Men such as Bundy, McNamara, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the Harvard historian who was a special adviser, “could have stretched their minds more if they hadn’t gotten so tangled up in competing for his favor and his time. They wanted to hang out [with Kennedy], as well as to think about public policy. You wanted to be included at dinner, in rides on the boat, in going to movies.”

Gloria Emerson saw the same behavior. The men working for him in the White House, she told me, “loved him too much. They wanted to please more than they wanted to enlighten, and that’s very dangerous, isn’t it? Everyone wanted to see him smile.”

Kennedy, with his glamour and quickness, seemed especially to bring out the insecurity of intellectuals. And no one was more eager to please than Ted Sorensen, Jack Kennedy’s closest aide in the Senate and the White House. Ralph A. Dungan joined the Senate staff as a labor expert in the mid-1950s and was immediately put off by Sorensen, who was his office mate. “He was not the warmest human being that ever walked down the pike,” Dungan told the Kennedy Library in a 1967 oral history. “The one thing that bothered me the most was an incident that was very, very telling. The senator came roaring into that back office, yelling like hell about something, … directing his fire at me. And I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t touched the damned issue. It was Sorensen who had worked on it. He just sat right there and let me take the whole heat without ever saying, ‘It wasn’t him, it was me.’ And I figured at that point whatever happened along the line, if it in any way impaired his relationship with the principal, Sorensen would pitch anybody over.”

Kennedy’s friends lived in terror of his boredom. “We relaxed him.” That’s what Ben Bradlee believed. “We made him laugh. We talked mostly about people and what was going on … [Kennedy] loved gossip about what people are up to and what they’re thinking about.” You had to keep him interested, Bradlee said, but “if he were bored five minutes he’d get up and leave. He wasn’t going to suffer that. I mean, when he was through he was through. He got up and left.” Many others, even those considered to be old friends, had a sense that they, too, were disposable. Charles Bartlett, the journalist, was famed for having introduced Jack to Jackie at a dinner party; Bartlett profited, socially and professionally, from his closeness. But it came at a cost. “He was very spoiled,” Bartlett told me. “One thing you couldn’t do with Jack was bore him. It was one of his least attractive characteristics—how quickly he could turn off.”

Gloria Emerson said that she thought Jack Kennedy became bored “when people talked too much—when they made their case at too great length. He liked movement and results. He had no sort of small talk. He wanted to talk strategy, politics, so one was totally excluded. Things had to have a point for him, and parties were a waste of time unless there was a political advantage to be gained.”

Kennedy’s lover experienced the same sense of impatience and the same anxiety about cutting through it. “It wasn’t just the women going ga-ga,” she said. “It’s everybody trying to be good enough, smart enough, witty enough. I was trying to knock him out—to be terrific. It’s much more criminal in the case of Bundy and McNamara.”

Adding to her anxiety, she said, was Kennedy’s constant “restlessness, a sense that there was something he wanted but it wasn’t quite there. The tapping of the teeth, the tapping of the foot, the drumming of the fingers. A sense that it was hard work. You had to really work to keep his attention unless … he had something that he wanted from you. And then, boy, you were the object of extremely focused attention.”

Her lover’s goal, she said, was to fill his life “with adrenaline. ‘What are we going to do that’s exciting?’ What will he do that will keep his attention from being pulled into darker events or darker feelings? When you want excitement, when you want to be occupied and pulled out of yourself, you’re saying in some way that you don’t have to mull over things that are painful, things that could be very uncomfortable. He was caught in a bind, and the people around him were caught. It was as if he was struggling to come out, but he struggled with people who were in the same dynamic as he was.”

Kennedy ignored any problems in their relationship. When he could not perform sexually, it was simply not discussed, she said. “It was dealing with imperfection by just closing it down. ‘Let’s not think about this anymore.’ But it was clear that he was thinking about it. What do you do? What do you say? I had no idea. Somehow I wasn’t doing it right. I was sexually inexperienced, so I thought it was something I was doing or not doing. I didn’t know what was going on.”

Kennedy understood the extent of his power over men, and he used it. In the late 1950s, Jerry Bruno, who came from Wisconsin, was working in Washington for Senator William Proxmire, the Wisconsin Democrat. Bruno and Kennedy began a conversation in the underground shuttle linking the Senate office buildings to the Capitol. Kennedy invited him to come around his office for a chat. Bruno knew that Kennedy was going to run for president in 1960 and that Wisconsin would be a key primary election state. “I go there and Kennedy stands me up,” Bruno said in a 1995 interview for this book. “I wait one and a half hours and then Evelyn [Lincoln, Kennedy’s secretary] says he wants to see you at his home tomorrow morning at eight o’clock for breakfast. I go there, ring the bell, and the butler comes and puts me in the patio. I sit there and the butler gives me a newspaper.” After a half hour, Kennedy came downstairs, sat at another table on the patio, ate breakfast, and read the newspaper. Caroline, his daughter, climbed on his knee for a moment to get a ride. “He knew I was there, but he didn’t say anything,” Bruno told me. Bruno continued to wait. Asked why he did so, Bruno explained, “Hey, listen, I’m a factory worker who only went to the ninth grade.” He knew his place.

Finally, Kennedy turned to him, Bruno said, and “begins asking me a lot of questions about Wisconsin. He asks me to be his executive director for his campaign in Wisconsin. Later it dawned on me that he didn’t know anything about me, but I had the identity of [having worked for] Bill Proxmire.” Bruno took the job and, after the election, became a political advance man in the White House. He remains loyal to this day.

Kennedy’s treatment of Bruno was that of a master to a servant, just as his father, Joe, would have dealt with the hired help. Kennedy’s former lover talked at length in our interviews about what she termed his “tremendous acceptance of inequality.” Kennedy did articulate the view that “things should be better, yes.” He also “could do acts of personal kindness, yes.” But, she said, deeply ingrained in him was “the acceptance of inequality at every level—that women were not equal with men, that African Americans were not equal with white people, that Jews were not equal to gentiles. That was absolutely acceptable, and that doesn’t mean he was a horrible racist, anti-Semitic, classist, sexist person. He was a person of his time. And that involved a lot of limitations.”