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that exhibited those qualities in full measure, especially in his description of a dinner party. “I was taken into the kitchen and introduced to all the help who were just over from Ireland,” he said into the Dictaphone. “I find them more attractive than the guests.” He shared with Jackie an overwhelming concern for the sheer physical attractiveness of humans, wincing at the sight of ugliness. “Jenny Ryan was there with her rather squinty-eyed children for a five-week period,” he said. “Mrs. Shaw [the nanny] is the loveliest figure actually on the beach and has a beautiful red-brown bathing suit that goes with her hair. She has let herself go however slightly around the middle.”

Shortly after Jack formally announced his candidacy on January 2, 1960, Jack and Jackie flew to the Half Moon Hotel and Cottage Colony in Jamaica for their last vacation before the onslaught of the campaign. Jackie had at times been desperately unhappy with her marriage. She had recoiled from the heat and fire of publicity, but what she had faced until now was no more than a match compared to the bonfire of attention that would greet her in the next months. She had a strange premonition that Jack and she might die on this Caribbean island. She wrote a last will and testament and mailed it to Evelyn Lincoln. “If we don’t arrive back from Jamaica will you please send whats [sic] below to Jack’s lawyer—Jim McInerney—my will! Otherwise just tear it up!!”

I Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy wish to make provision for my daughter Caroline—that in the event of her parents deaths she should go to live with her fathers youngest brother Edward J. Kennedy and his wife Joan—to be raised as one of their own children…. Everything I have should be left to her—money, furniture, jewelry, etc—

Signed

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Jan 11, 1960

Even after announcing his candidacy, Jack continued unabated in his pursuit of women. He seemed heedless of the risk, taking chances in circumstances in which he should have been more circumspect, and with the kinds of women whom he once had considered beneath him even for an evening.

Hoover’s FBI began receiving unsubstantiated reports about Jack’s conduct. A guard in the Old Senate Office Building told an informant that in July 1959

he was checking offices in the Senate Building one night and noted on the top of Kennedy’s desk a photograph openly displayed. This photo included Senator Kennedy and other men, as well as several girls in the nude. It was taken aboard a yacht or some type of pleasure cruiser … the thing that disturbed him most was that the senator would show such poor judgment in leaving this photo openly displayed and said that other members of the guard and cleaning forces were aware of the photograph and that Kennedy’s “extracurricular activities” were a standard joke around the Senate Office Building.

Far more seriously, on March 23, 1960, Hoover received a memo containing allegations from an informant friendly with various hoodlums, including Meyer Lanksy, whom Jack had probably met in Havana in 1957. The man said that he had been told that when Jack was in Miami, an airline stewardess had been sent to his room. He also said that

in Miami he had occasion to overhear a conversation which indicated that Senator Kennedy had been compromised with a woman in Las Vegas, Nevada. He stated that he knows that Senator Kennedy was staying at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas about 6 or 8 weeks ago during the filming of a movie entitled “Ocean 11,” starring Dean Martin. He stated that he observed Senator Kennedy in the nightclub of the Sands Hotel, during this period, but has no idea as to the identity of any possible female companion.

Jack had been in Las Vegas precisely when the informant said he had. There he met Judith Immoor Campbell, a stunning, twenty-six-year-old woman known now as Judith Exner. Fare takes strange shapes: a Japanese destroyer cutting through the Blackett Strait, thrusting a PT-boat captain into a hero’s role; a brother blown up in the skies of England, leaving his sibling a wealth of obligations;