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