The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [263]
Already, in March 1959, Jack feared there might be a wiretap on one of his telephones. By then he was having to deal with an obsessed Georgetown matron, Florence Kater, who had rented an apartment to his secretary, Pamela Turnure. Turnure was a sensuous version of Jackie, a provocative, sumptuous presence among the dowdy professional women who largely peopled Jack’s office. Kater had taken a picture of a man she said was Jack, with his hand over his face, exiting Turnure’s Georgetown residence at one o’clock in the morning. She also claimed to have a tape recording of their activities in the apartment. Kater charged that in July 1958 Jack had confronted her and her husband, threatening that if the couple did not stop bothering him, Leonard Kater would lose his government job. In the months since then, Florence Kater wrote that James Mclnerney, Jack’s attorney, had visited her seven times. She had in her possession what appeared to be a signed note from Mclnerney dated January 24, 1959, when she handed the attorney copies of the photo and tape.
It was a different time in American journalism, and no newspaper or magazine printed a word of the woman’s charges or what Kater purported to be a photo of Jack “racing like a scared turkey bird from his girlfriend’s house in his own self-incriminating pose as he tries to run out of camera range.” She was, however, an obsessed woman who seemed likely to go far to expose Jack’s alleged philandering.
Jack needed no more flashbulbs going off in the Washington night to alert him to the imminent danger of exposure. And now Miller had given him a memo about the ubiquitous rumors. The political operative was a forceful, highly opinionated man who could have been faulted for setting forth his truths unshorn of nuance. But Miller was no liar, and that Sorensen so quickly silenced him sent a signal that others should tiptoe lightly outside Jack’s bedroom door and keep their mouths tightly clamped.
Jack believed that he could get away with his conduct without costs or consequences. He felt that others could do the same. His friend Chuck Spalding’s marriage was full of the kind of volatility that never surfaced in Jack’s relationship with Jackie. “Here comes the agony and the ecstasy,” Jack whispered to Chuck as his wife approached. “Why don’t you do what I do? Why get a divorce?”
What Jack accepted as a civilized solution was emotionally impossible to the Spaldings, who saw it as institutionalizing the rankest hypocrisy. As Spalding looked back on his long friendship with the Kennedys, he saw that Joe’s sexual conduct was a malady that he inflicted on his sons, causing them damage even if they could not see the ravages of their conduct. “It just tears at the human fundamentals,” Spalding reflected. “When I first saw Jack—coming from a Catholic family—it was good to see some of that animal freedom. Some of it was like a soldier home from the war who has run into normal life. How many people think they can take Gloria Swanson on their vacation and make it work? But that doesn’t mean others can make it work. It left the Kennedy men with vulnerability in that area. It was like a contagious disease.”
Jack was no out-of-control Lothario ready to sacrifice his political future on the sweaty altar of sexuality. He was after the greatest prize in American political life, and there were days, even weeks, when he had no time or interest in yet another momentary dalliance. But he had one favored way to relax, and nothing was going to change that.
As for his wife, Jack may not have been sexually loyal to Jackie, but he deeply appreciated her wry, mocking quality. If not for the exigencies of politics in a democracy, he probably would have enjoyed standing aloof with his wife and looking with her in disdainful amusement at what passed as humanity. He dictated a letter to her after a visit to Newport, probably in the summer of 1959,