Kraus confirmed Burkley’s worst concerns. A brusque Austrian émigré, Kraus told Kennedy that if he continued the injections and did not begin regular exercise therapy to strengthen his back and abdominal muscles, he would become a cripple. Fearful that Kraus’s visits to the White House might trigger press inquiries and unwanted speculation about his health, Kennedy was reluctant to accept his recommendation. The lost medical kit and apparent attempts to steal his medical records during the 1960 campaign had put Kennedy on edge about the potential political harm from opponents armed with information about his health problems.
Kennedy’s ailments were not life threatening, unlike those faced by several earlier presidents, principally Cleveland, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. But because ignoring Kraus’s advice might have eventually confined him to a wheelchair, Kennedy accepted that something had to be done. He and Kraus agreed to describe the therapy as exercises improving the president’s condition from very good to excellent. He began a regimen of three exercise sessions a week in a small White House gymnasium next to the basement swimming pool. Barring Travell from treating Kennedy, Burkley and Kraus used exercises, massages, and heat therapy to ease his back spasms. A telephone in Kraus’s car gave the president immediate access to him. Becoming part of Kennedy’s daily routine, the exercises reduced his pain and increased his mobility. Performed against a backdrop of his favorite country-and-western and show tunes, the exercise therapy became a pleasant respite from the pressures of daily meetings and demands that crowded Kennedy’s schedule. By January 1962, Burkley and Kraus saw him having a better month than at any time in 1961. At the end of February, they described the past four weeks, “medically speaking,” as the “most uneventful month since the inauguration; since the 1960 campaign, for that matter.” And in April they pronounced his “general condition excellent.” Nevertheless, Kennedy remained so concerned to hide the truth about his health that on April 10 O’Donnell ordered Travell and Burkley to “have all medical records, including all notes relating to the health of the President . . . stored in the vault maintained by Mrs. Lincoln.”
Jacqueline Kennedy both eased and added to her husband’s burdens. Her distaste for politics and the obligations of being First Lady irritated Kennedy. During the presidential campaign, she told Johnson’s secretary that she felt “so totally inadequate, so totally at a loss, and I’m pregnant; and I don’t know how to do anything.” Early in the presidency, Kennedy asked Angier Biddle Duke, White House chief of protocol, to discuss the First Lady’s role with Jackie. When Duke explained the usual ceremonial duties of the job and asked her what else she might like to do, she replied, “As little as possible. I’m a mother. I’m a wife. I’m not a public official.” Cass Canfield, the editor of Harper’s, recalled a visit with Jackie at the White House: “I don’t think she enjoyed political life much, although she forced herself to become accustomed to it. . . . It was perfectly evident to me that Jackie K was looking forward to a long weekend in Middleburg [Virginia, at the Kennedy’s Glen Ora estate] and was more interested in what she was doing there than in the White House.” A Secret Service agent, who spoke to journalist Seymour Hersh about his two-year assignment at the Kennedy White House, recalled feeling “sorry for Jackie. She was real lonesome. She seemed sad—just a sad lady.”
There is testimony from Jackie’s own hand of her initial unhappiness as First Lady. In a June 1962 eleven-page letter to Bill Walton, she asked him to become head of her Fine Arts Commission. She acknowledged that “it would be cruel to put all the ritual and paperwork into your life—Like me—you hate it and 9/10 of it is unnecessary. . . . Before you cringe completely from what looks like a big headache—just let me tell you what I did—I was tired—and I wanted to see my children—so I just told Tish [Baldrige, the White House social secretary]—who nearly died from the shock—that I would NEVER go out—lunches, teas, degrees, speeches, etc. For 2 months it was a flap. Now it is a precedent established. . . . I have learned one thing—and now my life here which I dreaded—and which at first overwhelmed me—is now all under control and the happiest time I have ever known—not for the position—but for the closeness of one’s family—the last thing I expected to find in the W. House. . . . And now my life is the way I want it—though deadly little details always do crop up.”
One of those “little details” that incensed JFK was Jackie’s extravagance. She spent without regard for cost, and Kennedy complained that she was reducing his capital. The official White House entertainment budget could not begin to cover her outlays, which Kennedy then had to pay himself. The overruns bothered him so much that he asked a prominent accountant to help rein in Jackie’s spending on ceremonial functions. According to one historian, Jackie’s personal expenses in 1961 and 1962 exceeded her husband’s annual $100,000 salary; nearly half went for clothing. One day, when a congressman entered the Oval Office for a meeting, an agitated Kennedy showed him $40,000 worth of bills for Jackie’s clothes. ”What would you do if your wife did that?” JFK asked. That evening Kennedy confronted Jackie in front of Ben Bradlee and his wife. “What about this?” he asked. Jackie lamely countered that she knew nothing about it. After all, she said, it was not as if she had bought a sable coat or anything like it.
Far more distressing, in December 1961 Joe Kennedy suffered a stroke. Although urged by doctors to counter warning signs of such an event by taking anticoagulants, Joe, who disliked being out of control and refused to acknowledge any vulnerability, had rejected the advice. While playing golf at his Palm Beach club during Christmas week 1961, he became ill and was rushed to a local hospital, where a priest administered last rites. When informed that a life-threatening stroke had felled his father, Kennedy flew to his bedside. Although conscious, Joe could not recognize his son for two days. The stroke left Joe paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak clearly. For the remaining eight years of his life, he struggled to talk and walk. His immobility was complicated by two later heart attacks. One can only imagine how much Joe’s impaired, barely coherent speech and loss of physical vigor upset his son. A family premium on athleticism, physical beauty, and self-control must have made Joe’s dependency on others for his most basic human needs a painful reminder to JFK of his own vulnerability.
One response to all the difficulties crowding in on Kennedy was a more frenetic pace of womanizing than ever. The sources of his pre-presidential affinity for philandering—the examples set by the English aristocrats he admired, like Lord Melbourne, and his father, together with his sense of mortality engendered by health problems and the premature deaths of his brother and sister—still shaped his behavior. His knowledge of how close the world might be to a nuclear war only heightened Kennedy’s impulse to live life to the fullest—or with as much private self-indulgence as possible. Truman and Eisenhower, of course, shouldered the same burden without this sort of behavior. But with Kennedy’s womanizing an already well-developed habit, the doomsday prospect may have added to his rationalization for what he probably would have been doing anyway.
Kennedy’s womanizing had, of course, always been a form of amusement, but it now also gave him a release from unprecedented daily tensions. Kennedy had affairs with several women, including Pamela Turnure, Jackie’s press secretary; Mary Pinchot Meyer, Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law; two White House secretaries playfully dubbed Fiddle and Faddle; Judith Campbell Exner, whose connections to mob figures like Sam Giancana made her the object of FBI scrutiny; and a “tall, slender, beautiful” nineteen-year-old college sophomore and White House intern, who worked in the press office during two summers. (She “had no skills,” a member of the press staff recalled. “She couldn’t type.”) There were also Hollywood stars and starlets and call girls paid by Dave Powers, the court jester and facilitator of Kennedy’s indulgences, who arranged trysts in hotels and swimming pools in California, Florida, and at the White House.
There was something almost madcap about Kennedy’s behavior. He told Harold Macmillan during their Ber
muda meeting in December 1961 that if he did not have a woman every three days, he would have a terrible headache. But sometimes his trysts involved more than sex. Tensions in his marriage and his public position, which barred a divorce, may have made his affair with Mary Meyer understandable. Meyer was a beautiful, intelligent, and sophisticated woman from the politically prominent Pinchot family. More important, she was a source of comfort to him. “He could enjoy life with her,” JFK biographer Herbert Parmet has written. “He could talk in ways she understood, and their trust was mutual. . . . She was an important support. She understood all about the pompous asses he had to put up with. When he was with her, the rest of the world could go to hell. He could laugh with her at the absurdity of the things he saw all around his center of power.” Meyer believed that Kennedy loved her and that were it not for uncontrollable circumstances they would have been permanently together. Kennedy apparently thought otherwise, saying more than once to Ben Bradlee, “Mary would be rough to live with.” But there was no doubt that Meyer meant something more to him than many of the other women did.
Kennedy also must have taken comfort from the fact that he was able to hide his affair with Mary Meyer from Ben Bradlee. Bradlee said that he had “heard stories about how he had slept around in his bachelor days. . . . I heard people described as ‘one of Jack’s girlfriends’ from time to time. It was never topic A among my reporter friends, while he was a candidate. . . . In those days reporters did not feel compelled to conduct full FBI field investigations about a politician friend. My friends have always had trouble believing my innocence of his activities, especially after it was revealed that . . . Mary Meyer had been one of Kennedy’s girlfriends. So be it. I can only repeat my ignorance of Kennedy’s sex life, and state that I am appalled by the details that have emerged, appalled by the recklessness, by the subterfuge that must have been involved.”
If Kennedy had concerns about Jackie’s feelings, she helped him minimize them by discreetly avoiding a head-on clash with him over his womanizing. But she had no illusions about her husband’s behavior. At the end of their visit to Canada in 1961, while the president and Jackie were saying good-bye to people in a receiving line that included a “blonde bimbo,” as JFK’s military aide General Godfrey McHugh described her, Jackie “wheeled around in fury” and said in French to McHugh and Dave Powers standing behind her, “Isn’t it bad enough that you solicit this woman for my husband, but then you insult me by asking me to shake her hand!” One day, as she escorted a Paris journalist around the White House, she said to him in French, as they walked past “Fiddle,” “This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband.” Jackie seemed to have assumed that her remark would not shock a sophisticated Frenchman, but he said to one of Salinger’s aides, “What is going on here?”
Jackie’s pattern was similar to Rose’s denial of Joe’s affairs and her refusal to confront him. Jackie made a point of keeping Kennedy’s staff informed about her absences from and returns to the White House so that, as one naval aide put it, the president could get his “friends” out of the way. This is not to say that Jackie approved of her husband’s infidelity. It obviously made her angry and unhappy, but she chose to live with it.
Did potential whistle-blowers in the press put Kennedy in political jeopardy? He did not think so. In 1962, he continued to assume that while fringe newspapers and magazines might pick up on gossip about his sex life, the mainstream press would hold to traditional limits when discussing a president’s private behavior. He received some reassurance from a case involving one of his principal aides, a married man whose girlfriend had become pregnant. The press office received word that a reporter was going to ask Kennedy about the affair at a news conference. Kennedy took special care that day to call on only journalists he trusted, and the threat never materialized. Besides, as Salinger aide Barbara Gamarekian concluded, so many people in the press were sleeping around that for them to have gone after Kennedy would have been an act of embarrassing hypocrisy.
Kennedy also sent signals that the press should be careful. In February 1962 Time did an article that referred to a Gentlemen’s Quarterly coverstory about the president. Kennedy called Time correspondent Hugh Sidey to the White House. “I never posed for any picture,” he berated Sidey. “Any President who would pose for GQ [a magazine allegedly with special appeal to homosexuals] would be out of his mind. . . . I’m not kidding,” Kennedy said menacingly. “I’m goddamn sick and tired of it. This is all a lie. . . . What are you trying to do to me? What do you think you’re doing?” Kennedy intimidated Sidey into promising a retraction.
Similarly, in May 1962, after a well-publicized forty-fifth-birthday party for JFK at Madison Square Garden, during which movie actress Marilyn Monroe entertained the president in a skin-tight, silver-sequined dress with a breathless rendering of “Happy Birthday,” rumors of a Kennedy-Monroe affair threatened to become an embarrassment to the White House. Kennedy enlisted a former New York reporter who was a member of his administration in a campaign to squelch the talk. He asked his aide to tell editors that he was speaking for the president and that stories about him and Marilyn simply were not true.
Kennedy also believed that reporters liked him and would be reluctant to embarrass him by publishing stories about his sex life. Of course, he understood that a president’s relations with the press are always to some degree adversarial. But throughout his political career and even more so when he began running for president, he made himself available to the press, and by so doing created subtle ties that reporters were loathe to undermine. At the 1956 convention, when Kennedy, in T-shirt and undershorts, began to leave his hotel bedroom to take a phone call in the sitting room, an aide said, “You can’t go out there in your shorts, there are reporters and photographers there.” “I know these fellows,” Kennedy replied loudly enough for them to hear. “They’re not going to take advantage of me.”
Kennedy’s wit and articulateness especially endeared him to those journalists who had soldiered through the Eisenhower years with a president who often left the press puzzling over what he had actually said or meant to say. Two taped TV specials on President’s Day that gave Americans an unprecedented view of Kennedy at work, and a February 1962 guided tour by Jackie of the executive mansion that described the restoration of the White House heightened media regard for the Kennedys and made it unlikely that reporters would debunk JFK’s attractive image as a family man.
Kennedy’s popularity with the press and public also partly rested on the glamour he and Jackie brought to the White House. Though most Americans did not think of themselves as connoisseurs of highbrow culture, they saw the president and First Lady as American aristocrats. Their stylish White House soirees—the president in white tie and tails and Mrs. Kennedy in the most fashionable of gowns—interest in the arts, and association with the best and the brightest at home and abroad made the country feel good about itself. To millions of Americans, under JFK the United States was reestablishing itself not only as the world’s premier power but also as the new center of progressive good taste, a nation with not only the highest standard of living but also a president and First Lady who compared favorably with sophisticated European aristocrats. However overdrawn some of this may have been, it was excellent politics for a Kennedy White House working to maintain its hold on the public imagination.
By contrast with the press and public, Kennedy was not so sure he could control the FBI. After Hoover made clear to Kennedy in March 1962 that he had information about Judith Campbell Exner’s ties to mob figures, Kennedy stopped seeing her. Nor apparently would he take her phone calls. Hoover did not, as Johnson told some reporters, have “Jack Kennedy by the balls.” Hoover was past retirement age, and his continuation in office depended on Kennedy’s goodwill. Still, Kennedy might have assumed that if Hoover was ready to call it quits, he would try to take him down before leaving.
Did Kennedy’s compulsive womanizing distract him from public business? Some historia
ns think so, especially when it comes to Vietnam. Kennedy’s reluctance, however, to focus the sort of attention on Vietnam he gave to Berlin or other foreign and domestic concerns is not evidence of a distracted president, but of a determination to keep Vietnam from becoming more important to his administration than he wished it to be. Certainly, when one reviews Kennedy’s White House schedules, he does not seem to have been derelict about anything he considered a major problem. One can certainly argue that his judgment was imperfect about what should have been his highest priorities. A number of domestic matters received relatively less attention than foreign policy issues. But the supposition that he was too busy chasing women or satisfying his sexual passions to attend to important presidential business is not borne out by the record of his daily activities. And according to Richard Reeves, another Kennedy historian, the womanizing generally “took less time than tennis.” By the spring of 1962, after fifteen months in the White House, Kennedy had little reason to believe that his philandering was an impediment to his ability to govern and lead.
BY AUGUST 1961, Heller and Federal Reserve chairman Martin had told Kennedy that the economy was in a vigorous recovery like those that had followed the two previous recessions in the fifties. Martin believed that the economy was in better shape than it had been for a long time and that the country could look forward to “a non-inflationary period of expansion and growth.” Holding down deficits and inflation now replaced talk of tax cuts as higher priorities.
Corporate views of Kennedy as a traditional “tax and spend” Democrat had made him eager to convince the business community that his administration was not “engaged upon a reckless program of [defense] spending beyond control and of artificially easy money.” In September 1961, he instructed Heller, budget director David Bell, and White House aide Fred Dutton to describe expanded spending on defense as fueling the recovery. He also asked them to rebut articles in Reader’s Digest and Life describing a large increase in welfare programs. The Digest’s assertion that his programs would cost taxpayers “18 billion dollars annually in a few years,” was, he stated, “wholly untrue and we ought to make him [the article’s author] eat it.”