The Dark Side of Camelot Read online

  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."

  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." She was abroad, sitting by herself in a European café, when she learned of Kennedy's assassination. "It was sort of symbolic in the sense that I was alone with it," she said. "I'd been alone with myself during that relationship and I was alone" at Kennedy's death. "I read newspapers. I read magazines. I read every single thing I could read. I did not cry."