Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House by Robert Dallek Read Free Book Online Page A

successful administration. Like all his White House predecessors, Kennedy faced uncertain events that could bedevil his time in office. But like the most successful of these men, Kennedy understood that presidential effectiveness required a capacity for imaginative thinking or flexibility that could help him master unforeseen challenges. He also appreciated that whether he could rise to that standard in every circumstance was an open question.
    Yet however wise he might prove to be in response to unexpected events, he never fully faced up to personal limits that threatened to jeopardize his presidency. He was a compulsive womanizer. In the context of the times—a privileged young man growing up in the thirties, forties, and fifties—sexual escapades were not uncommon, especially among social lions in the country’s great urban centers, and doubly so for someone as handsome and charming as Kennedy, who had enjoyed standing in Washington for years as perhaps the city’s most desirable bachelor. Moreover, he was mindful of his father’s reputation as a ladies’ man, despite Rose Kennedy’s strict religious belief in the sanctity of marriage vows. As Jack was about to marry Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953, his father told one of Jack’s closest friends, “I am a bit concerned that he may get restless about the prospect of getting married. Most people do and he is more likely to do so than others.”
    Yet marrying Jackie, as she was called, was irresistible. From his first meeting with her in 1951, she impressed him as an ideal mate. She came from a Catholic Social Register family, and she was clearly beautiful, intelligent, delightfully charming, self-confident, and wonderfully poised. At twenty-two, she was thirteen years his junior and somewhat worshipful of the worldly-wise celebrity senator, who could fulfill whatever fantasies she may have had of a glamorous life with a Washington star. Their marriage in September 1953 at the Newport, Rhode Island, estate of Jackie’s stepfather was described in the press as the social event of the year.
    More than love drew Jack to marriage, however. As an ambitious politician who had his eye on higher office, Kennedy believed that he had to marry, however much he enjoyed his bachelorhood and freedom to sleep around. Yet he did not see marriage as a deterrent to multiple partners. It had not ended his father’s womanizing.
    As Joe foresaw, his son’s philandering did not subside. He remained as promiscuous as ever. Lem Billings, Jack’s closest friend, recalled the “humiliation” Jackie “would suffer when she found herself stranded at parties while Jack would suddenly disappear with some pretty young girl.” Priscilla Johnson, an attractive young woman who worked on Kennedy’s Senate staff in the fifties and resisted his overtures, described him as “a very naughty boy.” Her rejection of his advances made him more respectful of her, and moved him to speak openly to her about women in general and his reckless behavior in particular. “I once asked him,” she said, “why he was doing it—why he was acting like his father, why he was avoiding real relationships, why he was taking a chance on getting caught in a scandal at the same time he was trying to make his career take off. He took a while trying to formulate an answer. Finally, he shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know really. I guess I just can’t help it.’ He had this sad expression on his face. He looked like a little boy about to cry.”
    Kennedy’s response speaks loudly about the sources of his actions. His frenetic need for conquests was not the behavior of a sexual athlete. It was not the sex act that seemed to drive his pursuit of so many women, but the constant need for reaffirmation, or a desire for affection and approval, however transitory, from his casual trysts. It is easy to imagine that Jack was principally responding to feelings of childhood emptiness stemming from a detached mother and an absent