The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [449]
“Mary, where have you been?” Blair Clark asked.
“I’ve been out walking around the White House,” she said in her gaily lilting voice.
“In the snow?”
No one else that evening would have even contemplated leaving the party to walk out alone on the White House grounds deep with snow. Clark believed that Meyer might have wandered out there because Kennedy had just told her their affair was over. She may also have been the one contemplating just how far she wanted her relationship with the president to go. Or she may simply have felt like walking in the snow in her summer gown.
“What is the scandal?” Kennedy asked with delicious anticipation.
The president was on the telephone with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who on March 22, 1963, had just returned from England with a precious piece of political tittle-tattle. Kennedy treated gossip like chocolate bonbons, a pleasant little addiction that he enjoyed tasting several times a day. Schlesinger had a particularly sweet item about John Profumo, the British war minister, who had gotten himself into a wicked fix.
“Well, he has written a number of letters to a girl who turns out to have been the mistress of a Soviet military attaché,” Schlesinger said.
“Is that the girl that was written about in this morning’s paper?” the president asked, already up to the moment on the story.
Kennedy treated the scandal as if it were happening to some exotic species of political animal. He himself had indulged, however, in precisely the same behavior that doomed Profumo’s political career, carrying on with a woman who was also involved with one of his nation’s enemies. The president, moreover, had done so with reckless nonchalance, learning nothing from the debacle with Exner, continuing with liaisons that were even more dangerous.
Later that spring Kennedy sailed down the Potomac on the Honey Fitz with a group that included his carousing comrade, Senator Smathers. The sexual gossip of the moment dealt not with the capital but with London, where the Profumo affair risked bringing down the Conservative government.
“How serious do you think it would be?” Kennedy asked, as Smathers remembered. “Do you think there is any possibility of anybody in my administration getting in a similar situation?”
“I don’t believe so,” Smathers replied. Then Kennedy went through the cabinet members one by one, describing the sexual predilections of each man, or the lack of them. By any measure, it was unlikely that the president had a Profumo in his cabinet. What was left unsaid was that the threat of scandal lay not in the cabinet but in Kennedy himself.
“It’s different from the case you tried when you were assistant U.S. attorney in 1941,” Jack said, his knowledge startling the Florida senator. That case arose from the question of whether state officials had illegally encouraged young women to cross state lines for immoral purposes. Smathers had won the verdict, and the case had gone all the way to the Supreme Court. Kennedy said that he had read about the matter when he had studied Smathers’s 1950 senatorial campaign. What was startling was not that he remembered but that it was something that he was reflecting on at this moment.
Up until now, Kennedy fancied that he could laugh with impunity about poor Profumo. On June 29, however, the New York Journal-American reported that a “high elected American official” had been the paramour of Suzy Chang, another of the British call girls involved in the scandal. There apparently was no truth to the rumor that Chang and her colleague, Christine Keeler, had bestowed favors on Kennedy, but the president had for so long treated sex as an endless buffet that it sounded plausible. Bobby called in the offending reporters, and his stern lecture was enough to convince the paper to back