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By Root 1431 0

was an upscale prostitute who told of receiving a phone call from a friend of the president and being asked to go to the Waldorf Towers. She was shown to a suite where a second woman sat waiting. Kennedy entered the room, and together the two women performed their specialties on the president. That was just another sordid little tale, fit for nothing more than to be dropped into the FBI’s bottomless files of undigested, unverified facts and mindless allegations. The woman, however, had another client, a Russian diplomat. She was willing, her FBI handler said, “to give him up with pictures, the whole bit, if that’s what we wanted.” The Soviets had developed sexual blackmail into a dark art, and a woman who was willing to give up the Russian to the FBI might have been willing to give up the president to the Russian. That did not happen, but Kennedy had made himself endlessly vulnerable.

There was an obsessiveness in Kennedy’s sexuality, unlike that of other presidents whose adulterous trysts could also have been chronicled. The handsome, debonair Kennedy had an erotic quality unlike any of his predecessors, and it made of his assignations pleasurable vicarious reading, amply supplied in books, articles, and documentaries. “You must always remember that sex is something which gives every journalist, every writer, an equal start,” said Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, as wryly witty at ninety as at forty-five. “If you’re talking about economics, foreign policy, or war and peace, you have to have information. On sex, everybody is equal. Therefore, sex is the avenue by which the most incoherent gain attention.”

In the White House, the Secret Service agents were trained not to look at the president but only outward toward those who might harm him. Kennedy’s aides learned to do much the same thing. They looked away, and yet they knew that things were not right. A serial adulterer is rarely one of humankind’s noblest specimens, yet the men around Kennedy, the men who knew him best, loved and revered him deeply. Paolella sensed what was going on, but that did not diminish what he and his colleagues felt. “I would say I think everybody loved him,” the agent reflected, his voice etched with feeling. “I mean, there’s no doubt, he had charisma, he had a kind of self-deprecating sense of humor. And he never let you think that he was above you.”

Jackie abhorred what she considered the prisonlike atmosphere of the White House and was spending as much time away as in Washington. She had the feeling that those around her husband had “hit the White House with their Dictaphone[s] running.” It was as if his aides and advisers were seeking to live twice by memorializing their every moment when they ended up not living at all, or only half a life. She thought, “I want to live my life, not record it.” Her perceptions of the events and people in the White House were sometimes savagely penetrating, but she kept all her impressions largely to herself, pointedly never even keeping a journal.

The president found it difficult to understand Jackie’s fey reticence. At the first state dinner, the president held Jackie’s arm behind her back and pushed her toward a group of women reporters in the Blue Room. “Say hello to the girls,” Kennedy said, to which his wife muttered a perfunctory “hello.” As she turned back out of the Blue Room, the imprint of Kennedy’s fingernails was still visible in Jackie’s arm. Kennedy may have been the most powerful leader in the world, but he was discovering that he had become at least partially hostage to the will and whim of his wife, soliciting her time and bargaining with her over the functions that she would grace with her appearance.

The president’s other women were much easier to handle. Most of them were so overawed by Kennedy’s sheer presence, so caught up in the moment, or so narrow of mind-set, that they had no rich insights into the man and his psyche. His young Boston mistress was one of the few who observed with depth and sagacity. She did not see the president very often, but when the call came, as it did