Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [154]
Novelty and turnover mattered in Jack’s personal world. And, naturally, there were rules. Chuck Spalding liked to say that nobody got as much as forty-eight hours with him. If you bored him, you got less. Anyone ever imagining he was an equal colleague soon knew better. Even social friends might step across invisible boundaries and pay the price. Ben Bradlee was “banished,” to use his word, for several months in 1962 for daring to mention to another reporter how sensitive Kennedy was to critical reporting. Proving Bradlee to be right, Jack gave him a protracted cold shoulder—a kind of grown-up’s “time out”—until eventually the Bradlees were returned to his good graces.
In the White House, he didn’t leap up at dawn like some presidents, but read the newspapers in bed over breakfast. He regularly went for a swim before lunch, took a nap afterward, and then would have another swim before dinner. Kennedy was far from the healthiest president on record, but, clearly, he wanted to come across as that. In photographs, especially, he projected a smiling vitality. When it came to his ongoing medical problems—above all, the intractable back pain—he didn’t complain. Nor did he explain.
As a married man, he’d decided not to forgo his bachelor pleasures. It seems not to have occurred to him. Lem had been right to try to warn Jackie at the wedding. But one of his affairs had an abrupt ending not of his own choosing. In March of 1962, he was visited by J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI, which had kept tabs on him during his Inga Arvad days, had now been chronicling his current relationship with a woman “of interest” to the Bureau. “Information has been developed that Judith E. Campbell, a freelance artist, has associated with prominent underworld figures Sam Giancana of Chicago and John Roselli of Los Angeles. Went on to note the phone calls back and forth between the White House and Campbell.” President Kennedy broke off the liaison with Campbell, who’d been introduced to him by Frank Sinatra, later that day.
His affair with the free-spirited Washington socialite Mary Meyer was very different. This was a relationship of equals. Divorced at the time of their relationship, she’d been married to a top CIA strategist, Cord Meyer, and was the sister of Tony Bradlee. So well did Jack segment his life, he could be good friends with her brother-in-law at the same time he was sleeping with her. He’d regularly see Meyer, who was legendarily attractive and also unpredictable, at Georgetown and White House parties. Sometimes he’d even be the one inviting her to White House functions. “She’d be difficult to live with,” he once noted to pal Ben. But, then, he didn’t have to.
Now that they’d been settled in the White House for more than a year, Jack had grown accustomed to being no longer able to avail himself of the absences necessitated by the campaign trail. His response was to start arranging his time to avoid being alone socially—even alone with Jackie, it seems—for any extended period. He used New York overnights, Palm Beach weekends, campaign trips, and Jackie’s summer-long departures to the Cape for “girling” with pals Chuck, Torby, or George Smathers invited along for company. If they went away together for a weekend, he invariably asked one or more of his pals along. Whether it was the Virginia hunt country, Camp David, Hyannis Port, or Palm Beach, he made a point to start calling around Tuesday to fill up the guest list. His nature seemed to render him unable to look forward to a weekend alone with his wife, or even a dinner, without the addition of outside company.
Rachel “Bunny