Image saved Jack Kennedy and his White House from the political consequences of the Bay of Pigs. There was no political bloodletting—no demand for congressional hearings, no exhaustive analyses by the New York Times or Washington Post. Americans rallied around their attractive and contemporary leader, and his approval rating rose to a remarkable 83 percent. Kennedy’s glamour made him the 1961 equivalent of a Teflon president, someone to whom no bad news could stick.
The manipulation was extraordinary. The president was living a public lie as an attentive husband and hardworking chief executive, a speed reader who spent hours each night poring over bulky government files. But the Secret Service agents assigned to the White House presidential detail saw Jack Kennedy in a different light: as someone obsessed with sex, and willing to take enormous risks to gratify that obsession. They saw a president who came late many mornings to the Oval Office, and was not readily available for hours during the day to his immediate staff and his national security aides; a president, some thought, whose behavior was demeaning to the office. In a series of unusual on-the-record interviews for this book, four of these men agreed to tell what they saw.
The mythmaking and media wooing began soon after Kennedy took office. Newspapers and magazines were filled with articles and photographs, usually touted as exclusive, of family life in the White House or a day in the life of the president. Even the most earnest publications fell prey. In March 1961 the deadly serious U.S. News & World Report devoted ten pages to photographs of JFK at work. In April a Washington Star photographer who had been granted access to the Oval Office in order to capture the president at his desk came away with a winsome series of photos of Caroline, then three years old, chatting on her father’s telephone with her grandfather Joe. The photos were syndicated to newspapers around the nation.
That month Life magazine published a glowing account of Kennedy’s “voracious” reading habits, depicting—undoubtedly with accuracy—the president’s absorption with newspaper stories about his administration. The article, written by Hugh Sidey, was accompanied by a photograph of Kennedy poring over a morning paper. Sidey’s story noted that the rate at which Kennedy read “has not been precisely determined, but his speed is at least 1,200 words per minute and sometimes more than that (the average person reads 250 words per minute).” One Kennedy adviser told Sidey that he watched as the president read a dense twenty-six-page memorandum on economics in ten minutes and then “asked 25 questions about it—intelligent questions.”*
A professional photographer named Jacques Lowe was hired by the family itself and given carte blanche to roam through the White House, taking photos at will. The major American television networks were also given unprecedented access. In February 1961 CBS presented a half-hour taped telecast, narrated by Walter Cronkite, that purported to be the first time television was permitted to show “the actual conduct of official business” in the Oval Office. Two months later CBS was invited to film a documentary about presidential family life in the second-floor living quarters of the White House, known to the staff as the Mansion. Jacqueline Kennedy told the cameras, without any apparent irony, that she wanted her daughter, Caroline, to have a “normal” life. John F. Kennedy, Jr., was then five months old.
Kennedy was the first president to hold televised news conferences, averaging one every two weeks in his thousand days. An estimated 65 million Americans tuned in to the first conference, five days after the inauguration, and saw the president at his informative best, answering questions—especially tough ones—with charm and wit. The news conferences and TV specials furthered the image, enunciated by Joe Kennedy years earlier, of John Kennedy as a celebrity politician, a leader whose presence inspired confidence and loyalty as it sold magazines and attracted huge television audiences.
There was nothing accidental about JFK’s decision to use television as a White House bully pulpit, just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt had used radio for his fireside chats. Before his inauguration, Kennedy met privately in Palm Beach with Blair Clark, a classmate from Harvard who was a reporter for CBS News. There was talk of an ambassadorial appointment for Clark but, more important, much talk about how to use television. “I don’t think he had anything but an instinct about television,” Clark recalled in a 1997 interview for this book. “He knew newspapers were less important. He instinctively knew that it was absolutely vital that he use it right.” The president-elect understood that he was a good performer, Clark added. “Jack Kennedy never forgot that he was an actor in a public drama. He had a quip and a smile—he was an actor about that. And that’s what you should be. Roosevelt was too, of course.”
Clark, who became a vice president of CBS News, said he helped persuade Jackie Kennedy to conduct the televised tour of the White House, and overrode her husband’s worry that he would be criticized politically for exploiting his wife. It wasn’t a hard sell. “He and she were so charming and young—the new generation,” Clark told me. “And the kiddies. There was a young couple struggling with problems—not household problems, but the problems of state. That was appealing. Never mind the serious business of government.”
The White House, like its leader, seemed to be more open and more accessible. “What impressed people was how candid he was,” recalled Fred Holborn, a Senate aide who moved with Kennedy to the White House. “He wouldn’t be nervous if you were in the room while he was taking telephone calls.” One surprise, Holborn added in a 1995 interview for this book, was the absence of Joseph Kennedy at the White House: “It was amazing how infrequently he called, and he’d only appear personally once a year.” Holborn, for all of his years with JFK, didn’t understand how it worked. Evelyn Lincoln explained in one of her interviews for this book that the Kennedy family had leased a private telephone line that ran from Joe Kennedy’s office in New York directly to the Oval Office and to the president’s living quarters. JFK also had a telephone installed in his private hideaway off the Oval Office. “It was a little office with a couch and telephone where [the president] could go and rest,” Lincoln told me. “It was called the prayer room. When anyone he’d rather talk to in his private way called, he’d say [on the intercom] to me, ‘Line five,’ and he’d go take it.” When his father called on his leased telephone line, Lincoln added, she would walk into the Oval Office and give him a card saying, “Your dad,” and the president would move to his hideway—especially if there were others present—to take the call.
The discrepancy between the public perception and the reality deepened after the president’s murder. Arthur Schlesinger and Ted Sorensen followed the script in their Kennedy books, depicting the president’s daily routine in the White House as one of constant work and constant action. “It was always an exhaustingly full and long day,” Sorensen wrote, “as he remained in the office until 7:30, 8:00 or even 8:30 P.M., sometimes returning after his customarily late dinner, and usually reading reports and memoranda in the Mansion until midnight.” Even when he and his wife were socializing with friends at dinner followed by a movie in the White House screening room, the president “would often slip away after fifteen minutes of the film to work, and then rejoin them when it was over.” One of the president’s few moments of relaxation, wrote Sorensen, came in the early afternoon, when he took fifteen-minute swims, accompanied by Dave Powers, his personal aide, in the White House heated pool.
Schlesinger, in his version, wrote that the president worked through the morning and then took a relaxing swim in the White House pool before lunching in the Mansion alone or with his wife. “When his family was away,” the historian added, “the President used to have his afternoon appointments on the second floor. But generally he returned to the West Wing [Oval Office] after his nap, where he worked until seven-thirty or eight at night.” In the evenings, there were small dinner parties, depicted by Schlesinger as “the most agreeable occasions in the world.” Weekends were preserved “as much as possible for themselves and the children.”
There is certainly a core of truth to the idyllic Sorensen and Schlesinger accounts. But they are far from the whole story, and far from the reality of life inside the Kennedy White House. The most dispassionate observers were the Secret Service agents assigned to the president’s personal detail, the men whose responsibility was to be consistently at Kennedy’s side ready to take a bullet meant for him. Their account of Kennedy’s daily routine in the White House bears little resemblance to what is known. The accounts also share a crucial starting point: none of the agents, before they were assigned to the White House—the most prestigious job in the Secret Service—had any idea of what was going on. They have kept their silence, until now.
Larry Newman, the first college graduate in his family, proudly joined the Secret Service in 1960, and in the fall of 1961 was quickly promoted to the presidential detail. His first major assignment was to provide security for a presidential speech in Seattle in November. Newman and Clint Hill, a senior agent, flew to Washington ten days before Kennedy’s visit. “We had excellent cooperation with the Seattle police department,” Newman recalled in a 1995 interview for this book, and the president made his speech and returned without incident to the safety of his suite in the Olympic Hotel. The floor of the hotel had been sealed; as Secret Service protocol dictated, access was limited to those with special clearance. That night Newman got what he called “my baptism by fire.”
Sometime after Kennedy was back, Newman heard “a commotion up at the elevator.” A local Democratic sheriff “had come out of the elevator with two hookers and was bringing them down toward the president’s suite. I stopped the man, and he was loudly proclaiming that the two girls were for the president’s suite.” The sheriff’s party included a group of local policemen who had helped to provide security for Kennedy’s speech. It was clear, Newman told me, that the sheriff and the policemen knew the women and knew they were “high-class call girls.” Before long, Dave Powers came out of the suite. The sheriff tried to walk inside with the two women, but Powers “cut him off,” Newman recalled, “thanked him for bringing the girls up, and took them into the suite.”
Newman was embarrassed, and at one point threatened to arrest the sheriff for interfering with the activities of federal officers. “He only wanted the thrill of letting the president know what a great favor he’d done for him, but what he wanted to do”—personally deliver the prostitutes—“was impossible.” Before leaving the floor, the sheriff officiously warned the two women that “if any word of this night gets out, I’ll see that you both go to Stillicoom [a state mental hospital] and never get out.”
“I couldn’t believe he said this, but he did,” Newman recalled. “One of the policemen, a lieutenant, asked me, ‘Does this go on all the time?’ I just didn’t know what to say and said, ‘Well, we travel during the day. This only happens at night.’ The cops, the firemen, and everybody else” involved with presidential security had been “alerted that these girls were going in and meeting with the president,” Newman said. “There was no question about that.”
Later that evening, Newman made what should have been a routine check of security along the corridors of the U-shaped hotel. The presidential party had booked all the rooms on the floor, and the suites for the president and his senior aides, Powers and Kenny O’Donnell, were located on one end of the corridor. At least six Seattle police officers had been assigned to guard the fire escape exits on the floor, but Newman found their posts unmanned. Instead the officers were all bunched together in a fire escape well directly across from the presidential suites. In a room next to the president’s, two young women on the White House staff could be seen having a three-way sexual encounter with O’Donnell. The president’s chief of staff had drawn the window’s gauze curtains but not the heavier blinds. The policemen were passing a pair of binoculars back and forth—binoculars that were supposed to be used to survey the streets outside. “They were waiting in turn so they could watch,” Newman told me. “The sergeant apologized to me and they reposted themselves, and that was it for me for the day. I didn’t know what to do or say.
“What I saw in Seattle became commonplace to me and the other agents when we were on the road. Dave Powers was the interface on these occasions, and he would find the women or bring the women along.” The women would be brought out of the president’s suite after three or four hours. “This became a matter of great concern,” Newman told me, “because we didn’t know who these people were and we didn’t know what they had on their person. You would just look up and see Dave Powers mincing down the hall and saying ‘Hi pal,’ and we had no way to stop it. We were told to just not interfere with it. We didn’t know if the president that next morning would be dead or alive.”
Newman, now living in Fort Collins, Colorado, is quick to say that he and his fellow agents loved Kennedy and loved the fact that he made an effort to learn the names of the agents and some personal details about them. “It was highly frustrating, because we thought so much of the guy,” Newman told me. “We really didn’t like seeing him think so little of himself, if that’s the right word.” One solution was to blame Powers, O’Donnell, and other Kennedy hangers-on who supplied the women. “They could have been better friends, in my opinion,” Newman said. “And also they could have had more respect for the security. They’ve written many books about how much they loved him. They were really running a hard risk on this.”
One of the risks involved the attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, and the possibility, in case of success, of a retaliatory attack by Castro’s agents on Kennedy. Even a botched murder attempt posed danger. Newman told of a dramatic off-the-record briefing for the Secret Service late in 1961, given by an army colonel who, so Newman and his fellow agents assumed, was on assignment with the Central Intelligence Agency. Newman could not recall the colonel’s name. “He gave us a protective briefing at the EOB [Executive Office Building],” Newman told me. “The ties between the Pentagon and the CIA were stronger then than they are now. He told us that they had Castro’s lunch at a shipyard in Cuba”; Castro had been fired on while attending a noisy party for the launching of a new ship, but the bullets instead struck the ship’s propeller. “We just missed him,” the colonel told the agents. The point was obvious, Newman said: “This was serious business and there was a possibility of retaliation against our leader. So he wanted to let us know how sharp we had to be and how tight we had to keep security at that particular time.”
Even under such circumstances, Newman told me, he and other agents did not have the authority to tighten presidential protection. “They [the president and his close aides] were the ones that were well aware of it”—the increased danger from assassination attempts—“and aware of more things than we were. And the tighter we made [the loop] … we couldn’t believe it … it got more riddled. What we learned from the people we had talked to was enough to literally scare us into [believing] that this was serious business. And if the administration knew that, [we thought] they would want to assist us in making the security as tight as possible.”
The president’s womanizing was his business, Newman said: “It didn’t really bother us from a point of morality.” But the Secret Service, he added, did not respect Powers, because he prevented the agents from conducting even a quick security check of the women’s purses. “He knew we were trying to protect the president. We didn’t know if these women were carrying listening devices, if they had syringes that carried some type of poison, or if they had Pentax cameras that would photograph the president for blackmail. Your security is only [as good] as its weakest link, and the weak link was Powers in bringing these girls in.”
In one typical case, he said, “I saw Dave Powers bring in two starlets who were easily recognizable. He had one [of the women] put a scarf over her head. They had a White House car go out and pick her up at the airport, and Powers met her at the car and walked her up to the second floor.” It was Powers who arranged for the ambitious Hollywood starlets to fly into Washington to service the president. “It might be their career if they told their [theatrical] agent in Hollywood they didn’t want to play,” Newman said. “A lot of agents felt sorry for a lot of the girls … that they were used this way. There wasn’t a thank you—not like an affair. It was just being used. It was like a function.” Afterward, while driving the women back to the airport, Powers would “counsel” the women, essentially warning them, Newman said, that “if this ever gets out in any way, your career is through.” The Secret Service agents on duty at the time were often unsure of a visiting actress’s identity, as they were about the identities of most of the women who came in and out. “If she wasn’t a starlet, we didn’t know who she was.”
Of course, Newman added, the agents understood that Powers “was doing the president’s bidding. You’d have to say it starts at the top and works its way down. It caused a lot of morale problems with the Secret Service. You were on the most elite assignment in the Secret Service, and you were there watching an elevator or a door because the president was inside with two hookers. It just didn’t compute. Your neighbors and everybody thought you were risking your life, and you were actually out there to see that he’s not disturbed while he’s having an interlude in the shower with two gals from Twelfth Avenue.… Other times when we were in hotels around the country and Powers would bring these girls that we didn’t know, we often said we would draw the black bean to see who got to testify before the House subcommittee [on the annual Secret Service budget] if the president received harm or was killed in the room by these two women. This was the president of the United States, and you felt impotent and you couldn’t do your job. It was frustrating.”
“We often joked,” Newman told me, that “we couldn’t even protect the president from getting a venereal disease.”
Newman and his fellow agents did not know that it was far too late to protect the president from venereal disease. Kennedy suffered much of his adult life from nongonorrheal urethritis, a painful venereal infection; despite repeated treatment, he went to his death with it. The navy pathologists who conducted the Kennedy autopsy on the night of November 22 found evidence of chlamydia, a high-ranking military officer told me in an interview for this book. Those autopsy notes were not published, the officer added, at the request of the Kennedy family.
The long-suppressed medical records describing Kennedy’s condition were uncovered in the Kennedy Library by the journalist Nigel Hamilton, and mentioned briefly in JFK: Reckless Youth, initially projected to be the first of a two-volume biography. (Hamilton chose not to continue the project.) The medical file, made available for this book, reveals that Kennedy had been treated since 1940 for a series of venereal diseases, and often experienced acute pain while urinating. In 1953 he was referred to the late Dr. William P. Herbst, Jr., a prominent Washington urologist, who treated Kennedy until the end of his life. Herbst’s incomplete handwritten notes, as released by the Kennedy Library, show that Kennedy was being repeatedly reinfected—and, presumably, infecting his partners. Kennedy’s most often repeated complaint, as noted by Herbst, was “burning” and “prostate tenderness.” Treatment included a massive dose of antibiotics and gentle massaging of the prostate gland. The documents indicate that his condition continued after Kennedy was placed under the primary care of Dr. Janet Travell, his hand-picked White House physician. Travell and Herbst apparently worked together closely in the treatment of the president.
Kennedy was aware of at least some of the implications of his disease. In a source note for the 1993 biography President Kennedy: Profile of Power, the writer Richard Reeves anonymously quoted a family doctor saying that Kennedy, anxious about the effect of his disease on his ability to father children, had his sperm count tested after his marriage.
The Herbst documents raise questions about Kennedy’s health and well-being at moments of international crisis. On April 14, 1961, for example, as Kennedy neared a final decision to authorize the Bay of Pigs, Herbst was summoned to the White House by Travell, and he treated Kennedy for “burning” and “occasional mucus” while urinating. The president had suffered a similar flare-up three weeks earlier, according to Herbst’s notes, and “responded rapidly” to penicillin. After an examination, Herbst ordered that Kennedy, if he did not improve within a few days, be treated with 600,000 units of penicillin. He received a shot with that dosage on April 17, as the Cuban invasion was getting under way.
Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of health research for Public Citizen, a public interest medical group in Washington, D.C., reviewed Herbst’s notes for this book in 1995 and described the April 17 dosage as “high then”—although, he added, such large dosages are more common today. “If he was having sex all the time,” Wolfe told me, “he’d get reinfected all the time.” Kennedy’s infection presented symptoms similar to gonorrhea, Wolfe added, but it was not that disease, because Herbst’s notes show that there were no gonorrheal bacteria in Kennedy’s urine. The president was successfully treated with a variety of antibiotics that include erythromycin, nitrofuran, and tetracycline.*
In his opinion, Wolfe added, the Herbst files show that Kennedy “clearly was suffering from a sexually transmitted bacterial disease called nongonorrheal urethritis.” Kennedy’s venereal disease was not formally diagnosed by the medical community until the late 1960s, Wolfe said, and is known today as a chlamydial infection. “Initially it was considered more of a nuisance than a serious disease,” Wolfe added, “especially by doctors who did not have it.” The disease is easily transmitted to women, and creates special risks for them; chlamydia can damage a woman’s reproductive tract and make her unable to bear children, while producing only mild physical symptoms. By 1997, untreated chlamydia was believed to be the cause of 35 percent of infertility among American women.
Six days after Kennedy’s death, according to notes Herbst made, Janet Travell telephoned and asked him to turn over his Kennedy file to her for safekeeping. In his notes, Herbst quoted her as saying that the file “‘does not belong to me but to the country.’ This I do not agree with,” Herbst wrote, “but [I] am sending it to her for what is considered appropriate disposition.” Kennedy, Herbst wrote on the last page of his file, one week after the assassination, was “reading constantly” and was “always considerate, courteous, friendly.”
The doctor obviously did not feel the same about Janet Travell. The Kennedy Library files show that Herbst apparently changed his mind and instead forwarded his notes to Bobby Kennedy. On December 6, 1963, Herbst wrote the attorney general and said he was including “a copy of the records” of Jack Kennedy’s clinical treatment. On that date, too, according to the library’s files, Travell, in a memorandum for the record, reported Bobby Kennedy’s “ruling” that the president’s medical records would be regarded as “privileged communication” and not be kept in a federal archive.*
The data about Kennedy’s venereal disease have come into public view only because Herbst hedged his bets and sent a copy of the file he gave Robert Kennedy, including handwritten notes, to the archives of the National Library of Medicine in Washington. The file was found in a locked drawer in 1982 by archivists at the library and brought to the attention of Dr. Manfred Wasserman, head of the library’s history of medicine division. Wasserman did not keep the file at his library, as Herbst had obviously intended, but in early 1983 instead sent it to the Kennedy Library with a note explaining that Herbst had hoped the file “would at some reasonable future time become available to researchers.” Wasserman wrote that Herbst had an “esteemed” reputation among the medical profession in Washington, and had been the physician to Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. Herbst had wanted the files kept “for posterity.”
Wasserman, in a 1995 interview for this book, said that he and his colleagues agreed at the time that such “delicate records” were “much more in the scope of the Kennedy Library than the National Library of Medicine. Without any question,” he said, “something like that belongs in the presidential library.” Asked what he thought of the Herbst file, Wasserman said, “You wonder if it [Kennedy’s venereal disease] was transmitted.” Thus Kennedy’s risk taking was as dangerous, at least to his health, as some of the Secret Service agents thought. There was also an obvious risk to his wife, and to his other sexual partners.
Another source of tension over the president’s well-being was Dr. Max Jacobson, the New York physician who was the doctor of choice in the early 1960s for many in fast New York society. Jacobson made more than thirty visits to the White House, according to gate logs, and attended to the president and the first lady, who was also his patient, in Palm Beach and Hyannis Port. “Miracle Max” Jacobson supplied the president, as he did so many of his patients, with vials of specially prepared drugs and hypodermic needles for self-administration.
Jacobson, who died in 1979, would come under investigation by federal authorities in 1968 for suspected misuse of amphetamines; his license to practice medicine was revoked in 1975 by the New York State Board of Regents. But many of the Secret Service agents had questions in early 1961 about Jacobson and his “medicines.”
“He was the bat wing and chicken blood doctor,” Larry Newman told me. He and other agents knew nothing about Jacobson’s medical credentials, Newman added—he was known to them as “Dr. Feelgood”—but they knew what the shots did to the president. “After lunch,” Newman told me, “he was done for the day if he didn’t have a boost.”
The physician, carrying his bag of drugs and needles, “came and went” in and out of the White House without challenge, Newman said, as Kennedy’s women did. He was part of “the inner circle, with Dave Powers, and nobody got in there.” One of the senior agents, Newman added, “knew what the guy [Jacobson] was doing, and tried to keep him away” from the president and first lady. “We didn’t see them [shots] administered or know the schedule” of when Kennedy gave himself other shots, the agent said, “but I was aware that during the waking hours … it was every six hours.”
George Smathers learned how necessary the shots were while playing golf with the president in Palm Beach. “We played about seven or eight holes,” he said in a 1996 interview for this book, “and then Jack said to me, ‘I’m just hurting so bad that I can’t believe it. I got to get a shot of painkiller,’ or whatever. But it was something in addition, some medicine he had. So we go back to his house, and Jack lies down and says to me or Frank, my brother, ‘Somebody’s got to give me a shot.’ He told us where the medicine was, and Frank went and got it. It had a big needle, at least two and a half, three inches long. Jack was lying down and he said, ‘Now, Frank, here’s what you got to do. Get this tall bottle and take the syringe,’… and so on. ‘And then I’m going to lie down and pull down my britches, and stick this needle in my butt and shoot it in there.’ Frank did just that—got it out, put it in, and whooo, stuck it right in his butt. That’s what [Kennedy] had to do. And he had to do that about once every six hours at that time.”
Kennedy was introduced to Jacobson and the magic of his shots during the 1960 campaign by Charles Spalding. In an interview, Spalding said that he had himself been referred to Jacobson by Stanislaus Radziwill, the exiled Polish prince, known as Stash to his friends, who was the brother-in-law of Jacqueline Kennedy.* “I picked up Jacobson from Radziwill,” Spalding told me. “I’d see Stash jumping around town and went to see Max. I guess it was speed or whatever he gave us.” After taking a shot, Spalding said, he visited with the Kennedys. “I was hopping around,” he told me. “They said, ‘Jesus! Where do you get all this energy?’ After seeing Max, you could jump over a fence.” Spalding’s former wife, Betty, recalled Jacobson with less fondness. “Chuck used to shoot himself,” she told me in an interview. “The doctor would give him the needles for use in the house. I don’t think [Chuck] knew what he was giving him.” Spalding would “take a shot,” his former wife said, and “get flushed in the face. His eyes would get a glazed look—the whites would look full of mucus and be fixed—and his mouth would get dry.” She did not want to know, Betty Spalding added, what it was her husband was taking.
Jacobson, in an unpublished memoir, wrote that he first treated Kennedy with a shot shortly before one of the televised debates with Richard Nixon in the fall of 1960. He traveled with Kennedy and gave him repeated shots during the president’s June 1961 visit to Paris and Vienna. One shot was given moments before Khrushchev was scheduled to arrive for a summit meeting, Jacobson wrote. The doctor was listed on the official White House staff manifest for the trip. Jacobson also treated the president, he said, during the tense moments of the October 1962 missile crisis. FBI records made available under the Freedom of Information Act show that in June 1962 one of Bobby Kennedy’s aides in the Justice Department sought to have a vial of Jacobson’s drugs analyzed by the FBI’s laboratory. The laboratory could not do so, the FBI reported, because the sample supplied was insufficient. In his memoir, Jacobson claimed that the president “hesitantly” told him that his brother Bobby “had demanded a sample of all my medications for testing by the FDA [Food and Drug Administration].” The doctor said he sent fifteen vials of medicine to the attorney general’s office, but heard nothing further. Jack Kennedy, Jacobson wrote, had no intention of stopping treatment. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” Jacobson quoted Kennedy as saying. “It’s the only thing that works.”
The president’s womanizing, like his questionable reliance on Jacobson’s “feel-good” shots, was widely known to members of the White House staff, Larry Newman said. Kennedy’s daily swims in the White House pool were not merely to soothe his back, as the Schlesinger and Sorensen memoirs depicted them, but a focal point for sexual activity. “It was common knowledge in the White House,” Newman said, “that when the president took lunch in the pool with Fiddle and Faddle, nobody goes in there.” These were two young female staff aides who would be “scooped up by Dave Powers and taken into the pool at noon with JFK. They would go skinny-dipping with Jack.” The president’s brothers, Bobby and Teddy, often joined in.
During those moments, Newman added, the pool was completely off-limits, even for staff members of the National Security Council who were dealing with international crises. “We had one occasion when one of the military aides came up from the Situation Room,” Newman told me, carrying a cable that needed immediate attention from the president. “He came around the corner and he was moving fast—and stopped and cursed when he saw me standing up, away from the [pool] door, and just said, ‘How long has he been in there?’ I didn’t answer him at first. Then I said, ‘Oh, about half an hour.’ And he said, ‘What’s your best guess?’ And I said, ‘Another half hour. Take your best shot if you want to go in. It’s up to you.’ So he swore again and said, ‘I’ll wait.’ He stood there awhile and shuffled his feet. And he said, ‘I got to get an answer on this.’ And then turned around and went in by the Oval Office and then paced back out. Eventually Kennedy came out, in about half an hour. This guy was a ranking officer in the military and he wasn’t going in that room at all.”
An added complication was the affection and respect the agents had for Jacqueline Kennedy. “We thought a lot of her, and it sort of pulled you and pushed you both ways,” Newman told me. “You thought, ‘Well, I’m really proud because I’m with a popular guy and the public loves him and he’s good to the Secret Service.’”
The president did not carry on when his wife was in the White House, Newman said, but the first lady spent much of her time, especially on weekends, with their children at the rented family retreat at Glen Ora, near Middleburg, in Virginia’s horse country. Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent in charge of her protection, usually went with her. “When Jackie left with Clint for Glen Ora,” Newman told me, Kennedy “was out of there [the Oval Office], had his bowl of soup, and hit the pool with Fiddle and Faddle. When she was there, it was no fun. He just had headaches. You really saw him droop because he wasn’t getting laid. He was like a rooster getting hit with a water hose.” Despite the president’s womanizing, Newman said, he and the other Secret Service agents on the detail were convinced that Mrs. Kennedy “really loved him.”
There were obvious tensions in the marriage, however. One Secret Service agent said he came away from a two-year assignment on the presidential detail feeling “sorry for Jackie. She was real lonesome.” He recalled driving her home by herself from parties. “She seemed sad—just a sad lady,” he said in an interview. At times, according to Mary Gallagher, the first lady’s personal secretary, “the president was so busy that Jackie occasionally had to make a date to get to see him in the evening.” In her 1969 memoir, My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy, Gallagher described the procedure: “I would call Evelyn [Lincoln] and ask, ‘Has the President anything to do Thursday night?’ And another time, ‘Has the President anything on his schedule for Saturday night? Would he like to go to a dinner dance?’”
The White House pool was an especially important area for sexual partying in the Kennedy years and, not surprisingly, it was Joe Kennedy who paid for the pool to be redecorated and repainted in the spring of 1961. A new sound system was installed, enabling swimmers—and partygoers—to listen to music while in the water. Most important, the one wall in the pool area with windows was redesigned; workmen covered the glass with a large mural depicting the sunset over St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands. A private passageway also was constructed that enabled the president and his guests to have direct access from the pool area to an elevator leading to the second-floor living quarters. In her 1966 oral history for the Kennedy Library, Dr. Janet Travell praised the setup: “He would have his swim just before lunch and put on a beach robe and beach slippers and walk from the pool directly to the elevator and upstairs, not meet anybody, and rest and have his lunch.”
A few days after arriving at the White House, Newman caused near panic among a group of Secret Service supervisors by casually wandering after duty hours into the sacrosanct pool area, which contained exercise machines, and treating himself to a workout and a swim. “I told my supervisor that was a pretty nice thing they had, and I thought the man was going to have a baby. He was very nice and patient with me, but he said, ‘Never, never do that again.’ And I didn’t.” Newman, the new guy on the job, was mystified. He came to understand that the supervisors knew what Kennedy was doing in the pool, “but they didn’t want to tell the agents. Nobody wanted to talk about it because … they didn’t want to end their careers. You [the newly assigned agents] just learned by doing. It gave new definition to on-the-job training.”
Newman said he agreed to talk to me on the record about what he saw in an attempt to balance history. “It irks me that some of the people who worked with him are historically incorrect about how he ran his presidency, how he ran his life, and what a picnic the whole thing was. There were things that went bump in the night,” Newman added. “It was also our time with him,” referring to the Secret Service, “and we loved the man. By the same token, we grieve that he would conduct himself in such a way as to make us so vulnerable and make the country so vulnerable.”
Newman left the presidential detail in 1963, not long before the president’s assassination, and was reassigned to the Secret Service office in San Francisco. He worked in Secret Service field offices on the West Coast for the next twenty years, pursuing counterfeiters among others, and became chief of security for Western Union after retiring.
William T. McIntyre, of Phoenix, Arizona, arrived at the presidential detail in the fall of 1963, just as Newman was leaving, from a two-man Secret Service office in Spokane, Washington. He came with high expectations. “How often does a twenty-eight-year-old guy get a chance to participate in anything in and around the center of government?” McIntyre asked in a 1995 interview for this book. “You expect to see a lot of professionalism, a lot of integrity.” He, too, was given no warning of what was to come. The new arrival was briefed by Jerry Behn, head of the White House detail, and immediately assigned to the midnight shift. McIntyre got his first hint on the first or second night on duty. His shift supervisor, the highly respected Emory Roberts, took him aside and warned, McIntyre told me, that “you’re going to see a lot of shit around here. Stuff with the president. Just forget about it. Keep it to yourself. Don’t even talk to your wife.” Over the next few days, McIntyre said, he saw “girls coming in—hookers.” Roberts was nervous about it. “Emory would say,” McIntyre recalled with a laugh, “‘How in the hell do you know what’s going on? He could be hurt in there. What if one bites him’” in a sensitive area? Roberts “talked about it a lot,” McIntyre said. “Bites.” Despite such fears, McIntyre said, “we would never stop them from going in if Powers or O’Donnell was with them. We wouldn’t check them over.”
McIntyre, too, had a pool story. He was on duty when Jacqueline Kennedy decided, on short notice, that she wanted to take a swim. Her husband, as Mrs. Kennedy undoubtedly suspected, “was in the pool with a couple of bimbos.” The agent on duty refused to let her in, and an angry first lady summoned Clint Hill, the senior agent on her detail. “By the time Clint got there,” McIntyre recalled, “the president had gotten the word somehow” and fled the pool. “You could see one big pair and two smaller pair of wet footprints leading to the Oval Office.” In McIntyre’s view, a public scandal about Kennedy’s incessant womanizing was inevitable. “It would have had to come out in the next year or so. In the [1964 presidential] campaign, maybe.”
McIntyre said he and some of his colleagues on the White House detail felt abused by their service on behalf of President Kennedy. “Each agent is, after all, a sworn law enforcement officer,” he told me. “When you see some type of criminal offense, whether it’s a misdemeanor or a felony, occurring in your presence, blatantly, that makes you feel a little bit used”—especially if it’s done by the president. “A procurement is illegal,” McIntyre added. “And if you have a procurer with prostitutes paraded in front of you, then as a sworn law enforcement officer you’re asking yourself, ‘Well, what do they think of us?’ When that occurs, the agent would feel that his authority and his reason for being there is nullified.” McIntyre said he eventually realized that he had compromised his law enforcement beliefs to the point where he wondered whether it was “time to get out of there. I was disappointed by what I saw.”
Tony Sherman, of Salt Lake City, served two years on the Kennedy presidential detail before returning to Secret Service field work on the West Coast and in Salt Lake City. “It was just not once every six months, not every New Year’s Eve, but was a regular thing,” Sherman said of the presidential womanizing in interviews in 1995 and 1997 for this book. “I’m serious in my job. I didn’t want a part of it. It’s difficult to talk morally about other people, but we aren’t talking about other people. We’re talking about the president of the United States. We’re talking about my country. And we’re talking about people my age with wives and children who were willing to give their lives.”
“It took me a week to learn what was going on,” Sherman said. He learned the hard way. Within a week or so of being assigned to the president’s personal detail, Sherman flew with Kennedy for a weekend at his father’s home in Palm Beach. Sherman was assigned to the midnight to eight A.M. watch. At around two in the morning he heard noises at the pool, and he investigated, gun at the ready. To his dismay, he found the president and a prominent European socialite, both naked, at play in the water.
“We had bosses who’d been around a long time,” Sherman told me. “Their attitude was different: ‘This is a family. We not only protect the family, we protect the ability of him to do whatever he wants inside the family.’ We got to the point where we’d say, ‘What else is new?’ When you see nude bodies going down the hall.… Were we bothered by it? It didn’t matter. There were women everywhere. Very often, depending on what shift you were on, you’d either see them going up, or you’d see them coming out in the morning [from the president’s family quarters]. People were vacuuming and the ushers were around. And we were there. There were several of them that were regular visitors. Not when Jackie was there, however. We’d say good morning.”
There were many days, Sherman told me, when Kennedy “didn’t work at all. He’d come down late, go to his office. There were meetings—the usual things—and then he had pool time before his nap and lunch. He is president, but it’s so regular and so often that we didn’t know what to think. If the president is happy and doing his job, we’re doing our job. But I wanted out.” He left the White House detail shortly before Kennedy’s assassination.
Sherman also told me that one of the Secret Service’s jobs was to prevent Kennedy from being caught in the act by his wife. Jackie would “visit New York and things would go on in the White House pool,” Sherman said. “We would receive word that the first lady was landing, and we would notify the president, and his friends would leave. I never figured for the two years I was there that she really didn’t know what was going on. It would have been impossible” to keep her eyes shut. There was one very tense moment when the warning didn’t come until Mrs. Kennedy was en route from the airport, Sherman told me. The agent in charge screwed up his courage and ran into the pool to tell the president that his wife would arrive within fifteen minutes. Bobby and Ted Kennedy were also in the pool. “The door opened,” Sherman recalled, “and people scattered. And as [the president] ran out, he was holding a bloody mary in his hand. I happened to be on the post and he said, ‘Here. Take this.’ He didn’t know what to do with it. He went and everybody left, none the wiser. Another day on the beat. It got to the point where we didn’t worry about [the president’s pool time], particularly when both brothers were around. How safe can you be in the White House, in the swimming pool … both your brothers with you?” Bobby and Ted would do anything, the agents knew, to protect their brother. “We felt secure,” Sherman said.
Sherman’s worst moment came during a presidential trip to Honolulu, where Kennedy attended a Pearl Harbor memorial ceremony. The president stayed in the residence of Admiral Harry Felt, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet; Sherman’s job was to secure the premises, with the help of a marine colonel. Hot towels and the president’s favorite foods and drinks were ordered and in place when Kennedy arrived, said his hellos, and disappeared into a bedroom. “Within ten minutes,” Sherman said, “a [White House] staff member arrived in a car escorting two ladies who were not on the guest list. They were unknown to me but were in the company of a staff member—therefore they were allowed in the house. I knew what they were there for, I guess. This was sort of the usual routine in many stops. And the colonel turned to me and said, ‘Uh, who are they?’ And I turned to him and I said, ‘Well, they’re secretaries, and I assume there’s some work the president wants done this evening.’
“I got mad. This is not what the president of the United States should be doing. There was no regard for who was there. The marine colonel—he knew what was going on. Other people were there. Navy people were in the house. Cooks were in the house. There were police on the streets. What can you say? I got angry at any president who doesn’t treat the White House like I think he should. You’re dealing with people who are in intimate contact with the president and may have been sent there by other people, if you want to get really spooky about it. The possibility of blackmail and things like that are astounding. I never knew the name of the outsiders, where they came from, where they were, or anything. I opened the door and said good evening and they said good evening. And in they went and the door shut. And when I reported for my next shift the next day, the president was still alive.”
Joseph Paolella, of Los Angeles, remains proud of the fact that he was the first Secret Service agent of Italian descent to be assigned to the presidential detail. Paolella loved the assignment and adored Kennedy, but he shared the agents’ constant concern that the president would end up being a blackmail victim. “The worry was that one of these women could be a spy … might be working for the Russians or Communist Party,” Paolella told me in a 1997 interview. Sometimes the agents were upset about the president’s women for a different reason—they weren’t very attractive. In one case, a prominent California Democrat came for a meeting with Kennedy and brought along “these real skinny-looking broads,” Paolella told me. “You’d say, ‘Geez, what’s the president doing with something like that?’ We might think he could do better than that. But not from a protective standpoint.”
Paolella left the Secret Service in 1964, after six years on the job, because of his dislike of President Johnson. Protecting Jack Kennedy had been far more exciting, and Paolella, a bachelor, had enjoyed being near a president who attracted women at every stop. Some of the agents and military aides who traveled with Kennedy, surfeited with available women, soon found themselves doing what the president was doing. Drinking and partying became a constant feature of presidential travel, especially on the weekend trips to Hyannis Port and Palm Beach. After leaving the Secret Service, Paolella told me, he talked to no one about what he witnessed in the Kennedy White House. “In those days,” he explained, “no one would have believed it.”
Agents acknowledged that the Secret Service’s socializing intensified each year of the Kennedy administration, to a point where, by late 1963, a few members of the presidential detail were regularly remaining in bars until the early morning hours. Larry Newman said in one of his interviews with me that an “honest snapshot” of the Secret Service’s partying in the months before the president’s death would have triggered much public anger. The irony, Newman added, was that the fault may have been Jack Kennedy’s. “It’s not like he ruined you [as an agent],” Newman said, “but you get the tone of the way the detail works from the top. It was loose.”
The looseness extended beyond the president. At least three female Kennedy family members propositioned various Secret Service agents, according to Newman, Paolella, and their colleagues. One Kennedy relative was particularly forward, and was eventually given a colorful sobriquet by the agents—“rancid ass.” Peter Lawford, the president’s brother-in-law, was seen by the agents as a contemptible buffoon who drank too much, was too aggressive with women, and, on presidential trips, was constantly trying to push himself into the Secret Service’s backup car. There was one occasion, during a raucous party in December 1962, at Bing Crosby’s huge estate in Palm Springs, California, when, Paolella told me, agents literally rescued a young airline stewardess from Lawford’s drunken advances, and left him sprawled in the desert.
The Crosby party was the high point—or low point—of presidential partying, Paolella said. Some of the women at the pool, the agents knew, were stewardesses from a European airline; their names, as usual, were not known to the Secret Service. The party was so noisy that a group of California state policemen on duty at the front of the estate, which bordered on a desert wilderness area, assumed that the shouts and shrieks of the partygoers were the nighttime calls of coyotes.
Paolella was reluctant to provide further details, but Larry Newman, who also was on duty that night, was not. He and Paolella “thought we were going to have a quiet tour of duty around the house,” Newman told me. “But as the evening got darker, the state police were calling us on the radio and asking us if there were coyotes up around the house bothering the president.” The two agents were posted in front of the home, and they agreed, after some discussion, that they had to intrude on the president’s privacy by going poolside for a look. What they saw, Newman told me, was Powers “banging a girl on the edge of the pool. The president is sitting across the pool, having a drink and talking to some broads. Everybody was buckass naked.” At a later point in the party, Newman said, Powers moved to the edge of the pool, bent over, made an obscene gesture, and said, apparently to the president, “Hey, pal. Look at this.” As always, Powers became increasingly frantic in his efforts to amuse the president. He began running in and out of the Crosby house with armfuls of Crosby’s suits and diving with the clothes into the pool. “The president thought that was pretty funny—laughed and about fell out of the chair,” Newman told me. “The only difficulty was Bing Crosby didn’t think it was funny.” The White House later had to pay for the ruined clothes, Newman said.
He and Paolella were just doing their job, Newman said, by checking out the private party. “It may sound a bit perverted,” he said, “but some of the girls had foreign accents … and you have to keep an eye on him to see he doesn’t get lost or somebody doesn’t come out of the desert. We also had to keep the California state patrol on the checkpoint at the main highway and not [have them] come up and check the coyotes and see if we were all right. We didn’t want them to see that the president was swimming with all these ladies and they were all nude. So we had to lie to them, and we just agreed with them that there are coyotes running like hell all over the place and we couldn’t stop them. We’d let them know if it got too thick.”
Newman said he and Paolella subsequently discussed what they had seen with their supervisors, and were told to ignore the events—“just act like nothing was happening.” A fellow agent later remarked, to the displeasure of his supervisors, that “nothing’s happening out there, but one coyote is sitting on top of another one.”
“You had to have some kind of a police squadroom humor about the thing,” Newman said, “because here you are. You’ve got the Cold War going on. You’re protecting the leader of the free world. And the highway patrol is going to come up and you’re protecting him from getting caught naked. And you’re carrying guns and you have all kinds of automatic weapons and you can’t see in the desert, and the only thing you find is Peter Lawford out there, moaning in his beer because he can’t get with a girl that he’s just met that night.”
* Years later, in his oral history for the Kennedy Library, Sidey told of telephoning a reading institute in Baltimore where, he had been told, Senator Kennedy had taken a speed-reading course. No one there could confirm such a high rate of speed. “They suggested that he probably read about seven or eight hundred words a minute, which was twice normal,” Sidey recalled. “The president didn’t like that one bit.” After some back-and-forth, Sidey recalled, he and the president agreed on a reading speed of 1,200 words per minute, and that was the statistic published in Life magazine. “I noted for months and years after,” Sidey told the library, that “this became the real gospel on his reading speed.”
* The cortisone injections that Kennedy needed to control his Addison’s disease may have heightened his sex drive. The side effects of the steroid include, for many users, an enhanced sense of confidence and personal power, and a marked increase in libido.
* Travell said nothing about Kennedy’s venereal disease in an oral history for the Kennedy Library recorded in 1966. In describing her treatment for a high fever Kennedy suffered in June 1961—his sickest day in the White House, she said—Travell explained that she had to treat the infection with “large doses of penicillin on the basis of the history that we had that he was extremely tolerant of penicillin.” Kennedy’s fever spiked at 105 degrees that night, Travell said, adding that it went down to 101 degrees after treatment. She chose to tell the press corps that Kennedy’s fever had reached only 101 degrees, explaining that “I skipped the whole intermediate period of the night” when his temperature soared. Travell played a similar role during the 1960 campaign in denying, as Kennedy’s physician, that he was suffering from Addison’s disease. She was interviewed for the library by a not-very-probing Ted Sorensen, who had drafted many of the misleading 1960 campaign press releases describing the candidate’s state of health.
* Jack Kennedy liked Radziwill and especially liked his hard work on his behalf in 1960 as an effective vote-getter for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket in Polish communities in the Midwest. Gore Vidal, who had the same stepfather, Hugh D. Auchincloss, as Jacqueline Kennedy (his half-sister and half-brother were her stepsister and stepbrother), recalled in a 1995 interview for this book that Kennedy wanted to give Radziwill a job in his upcoming administration. But Radziwill had been accused of fiscal improprieties while working with the Red Cross in London, Vidal said, and his FBI file, Jack Kennedy later told him, “weighs ten pounds.” Kennedy then repeated to Vidal his dialogue with the FBI about the Radziwill report: “Do I have to read all this?” “Oh no, just don’t appoint him.”