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.”
When discussing the poor, the blacks, the Jews, “he used to say, ‘Poor bastards.’ That was it. There were a lot of poor bastards in this world. There were people who either didn’t get jobs they wanted or they didn’t get programs they wanted. That phrase covered so many times when he would have turned someone down for a job, or would have turned down some legislation that was being pressed on him. You know, ‘Poor bastard, they’re going to feel terrible.’” Kennedy seemed to believe that “people who are different have different responses. The pain of poor people is different from ‘our’ pain.”
Kennedy was aware of the disconnect. While interviewing candidate Kennedy for a Time magazine cover story in the late 1950s, Hugh Sidey suddenly asked if he had any memory of the Depression. Sidey had grown up in rural Iowa and vividly recalled the harshness of those days. “Kennedy had his feet on the desk, and he looked across at me and he said,” Sidey said in a 1997 interview for this book, “‘I have no memory of the Depression. We lived better than ever. We had bigger houses, more servants. I learned about the Depression at Harvard—from reading.’” Jack Kennedy, Sidey told me, with some consternation, “just hadn’t encountered breadlines or bums that used to come to our doors and ask for handouts. He was the ambassador’s son, and that was a very elegant existence. He was never in contact with the reality of the Depression.”
Kennedy’s former lover believed that it would have been difficult for Kennedy, given his comfortable family circumstances and the belief in his own destiny, to understand the aspirations of the people in Cuba and South Vietnam, the nations that became the object of presidential obsession, anger, and frustration. Kennedy, the woman said, “did a wonderful thing in trying to bring people into a sense of participation. But I feel most of it was on the basis of being special, and surrounding himself with the best and the brightest—with people whose accomplishments were their badge of worth.” Thus, when “things got really troublesome,” she said, the president and his immediate aides “reinforced each other’s isolation. Those people, in their specialness, got separated from reality. It was as if Bundy, McNamara—all of these extraordinary men—in rising and shining, had cut off their ability to feel their own pain. I never did experience John Kennedy in a moment of reflection or pain or sadness,” she told me.
The affair came to an end in late 1962, the woman said, but not before she learned of Kennedy’s extensive womanizing. She was “crushed” by the news. “I thought, ‘Gee, maybe I’m really special.’ But no, I was one of many, many people. That was helpful in the long run, because I decided to leave Washington, and it was time to go.”
The end was unsentimental. “It was very painful to be with someone who was everything and I was nothing,” the woman said. “It was painful to have it called love. It was painful to be chosen and to have someone be interested in me for my class, my speech, my looks, my whatever—but not my heart.”