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There was a tremendous optimism about him that was very attractive, and a sense that good fortune would smile on him. But in the end I think that all that vitality became a trap, masking or even obliterating a more nuanced way of being. His image of high-performing achievement robbed him of his connection to his interior life. His light and energy could be stimulating, but it could also be intimidating and competitive. There was a magic circle, but there was always the threat of being cast out of that special place. So what do you do to maintain your position? Well, in this situation, you especially did not want to be boring or insipid or wishy-washy. I was always afraid of losing color, dwindling into invisibility. So I would try to be smooth and perfect, and then I’d be resentful that I was trying so hard and would be sullen and annoying. One day I was wearing a red-and-white-striped T-shirt, and he said, “Don’t you have anything better than this to wear in the White House?” I was glad he noticed that I wasn’t trying to look good the way everybody else did. And I was furious because he didn’t understand that I was “making a point.” All those feelings and nowhere for them to go. Because he, magical he, prized smoothness. There were so few colors, and yet human beings have so many colors.

Kennedy set up his Boston mistress in the White House, parading her past such bluenose academics as Bundy and Rostow. He had a heedless disregard for the chances he was taking, though just as Dr. Cohen had warned him about his drug use, so too did he continue to have ample warnings that his sexual indulgences might become public knowledge. Florence Kater had continued trying to expose what she was convinced was a sexual relationship between Kennedy and Pamela Turnure, sending out letters to prominent journalists, even picketing one of his campaign speeches. The president could have tried to quiet Kater’s campaign by shuttling Turnure off into some obscure sinecure in Washington. Instead, he made the startling decision to bring Turnure into the White House as Jackie’s press secretary.

Kennedy had few limits on whom he would proposition and where he would proposition her. At one dinner party, with Jackie present, he passed a note to a guest asking for her phone number. He called her later in the evening. “I’m sending a car for you,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, I’m your wife’s friend,” the woman replied, though to Kennedy that was apparently a non sequitur.

Another Washington woman who accepted the president’s invitation talked to Kennedy’s old friend John White afterward. “It all happened in such a hurry that she couldn’t analyze her emotions,” White recalled. “But the feeling of this power was like a hurricane, wham, you’re swept off and left lying on this beach. And she said, ‘That’s unique in my life. No man had ever done that to me before, and there was a weird, wild pleasure in it. It wasn’t an ordinary matter of affection.’ “

The most dangerous of Kennedy’s many liaisons was with Judith Campbell Exner. She was shuttling between her occasional visits to Kennedy and her much more frequent sojourns in Chicago with her newfound friend Sam Giancana, as well as dating Johnny Rosselli and others in Los Angeles. She had not seen Kennedy for seven months from the summer of 1960 until she reconnected with him at the Ambassador East in April 1961. “A moment later we were in each other’s arms and it was like we had never been apart,” Exner recalled. There was hardly time for lengthy reminiscences since Kennedy had only twenty minutes before he had to leave for his next engagement.

In her later years, when her beauty was gone and she was sick with cancer, and she had no money, Exner made her living by telling and retelling the story of her life. She treated her life story like costuming that she would wear until no one was looking at her anymore; then she discarded it and tried on a new, more outrageous outfit that would bring her more attention and money. In 1988 she first realized what new versions