by Peter Janney
Six years earlier, just after his marriage to Jackie, Jack said something revealing to his Senate staffer Priscilla McMillan: “I only got married because I was 37 years old. If I wasn’t married, people would think I was queer.”38 The remark revealed more about Jack’s concern for his political image than anything else. His father once remarked to Jack’s sister Eunice, who confided doubts about Jack’s political future, that “it’s not what you are that counts. It’s what people think you are.”39 Jack needed a glamorous, beautiful wife for his image. Shortly before marrying Jackie, he reportedly said to a Senate colleague who was trying to fix him up with a date, “Look, you might as well know, I talked to my dad and he told me now is the time to get married.” He then added that his father considered Jackie to be the best choice “for a lot of reasons. I mean, she’s the perfect hostess; she’s got the background; and she’s Catholic.”40
Not long after his visit with Mary in Provincetown, Jack had another revealing exchange with Priscilla McMillan, herself an attractive and articulate woman who resisted his advances. “I was one of the few he could really talk to,” McMillan told author David Horowitz. “Like Freud, he wanted to know what women really wanted, that sort of thing; but he also wanted to know the more mundane details—what gave a woman pleasure, what women hoped for in marriage, how they liked to be courted. During one of these conversations I once asked him why he was doing it—why was he acting like his father, why was he avoiding real relationships, why was he taking a chance on getting caught in a scandal at the same time he was trying to make his career take off. He took a while trying to formulate an answer. Finally he shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know really. I guess I just can’t help it.’ He had this sad expression on his face. He looked like a little boy about to cry.”41 McMillan, who went on to become a well-known author, later reflected on Jack’s compulsion for skirt-chasing: “The whole thing with him was pursuit. I think he was secretly disappointed when a woman gave in. It meant that the low esteem in which he held women was once again validated. It meant also that he’d have to start chasing someone else.”42
Indeed, “skirt-chasing” had become a Kennedy family heritage, what one perspicacious woman later referred to as “the wandering penis disease.” It had passed from father to son. In fact, Joe Kennedy Sr., himself afflicted, once told J. Edgar Hoover that he should have gelded Jack when he was a small boy.43 A number of prominent Kennedy biographers over the years have given credence to the fact that Jack led a kind of “double life,” a life of dysfunctional compartmentalization when it came to his sexuality and relationships with women. “Yet with Jack, something different was at work than [just] a liking for women,” noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “So driven was the pace of his sex life, and so discardable his conquests, that they suggest a deep difficulty with intimacy.”44 Presidential historian Robert Dallek underscored the idea that “Jack was a narcissist whose sexual escapades combated feelings of emptiness bred by a cold, detached mother and a self-absorbed, largely absent father.”45 Even while married to Jackie, Jack’s unabashed philandering never abated; indeed, being married only seemed to exacerbate his compulsion.
From the very beginning, soon after she met Jack in the spring of 1951, Jackie had been warned about what life with Jack would inevitably entail. His Choate schoolmate Lem Billings told her in no uncertain terms before their marriage what she could expect with a man twelve years her senior who was, as he put it, “set in his ways.” Even more presciently, Jack’s close friend Chuck Spaulding observed, “Jackie wasn’t sexually attracted to men unless they were dangerous like [her father] old Black Jack [John V. Bouvier III]. It was one of those terribly obvious Freudian situations. We all talked about it—even Jack, who didn’t particularly go for Freud but said that Jackie had a ‘father crush.’ What was surprising was that Jackie, who was so intelligent in other things, didn’t seem to have a clue about this one.”46 Marital fidelity wasn’t ever a part of this equation. Jackie valiantly tried to bury her head in the sand, but the toll it took undoubtedly aggravated the possibility of further miscarriages.
The antecedents of Jack’s long-standing problem of intimacy with women had a more dynamic dimension than just the imprinting of his childhood. Author Nigel Hamilton’s analysis of Jack’s mother Rose Kennedy as “a cold, unmotherly, and distant woman whose main contribution to Jack’s character was his strangely split psyche, leaving him emotionally crippled in his relations with women,” was only one part of this equation.47 Unlike Mary Meyer, he seemed to have had little interest in any sober self-examination, reflection, or understanding. No doubt his experience of abandonment as a child, sustained by the lack of little direct maternal care, aroused a projected vengeful disposition toward the opposite sex: Women were to be used, then discarded at his whim. Failing any deeper internal investigation, conquering his emptiness—and keeping it at bay—required an infusion of one sexual triumph after another, however momentary the relief. He had to have known he had a problem.
Nonetheless, the power of love beckoned him to romance during the same time that Mary Pinchot was in love with Bob Schwartz. During his stint as a Navy ensign in the Foreign Intelligence Branch of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in Washington, Jack began a serious affair with a beautiful blonde, blueeyed Danish woman who had become a close friend of his sister Kathleen’s. Still married but estranged from her second husband, Inga Arvad was a classic stunning bombshell. New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, who had helped procure her a job as a reporter at the Times Herald, once described Inga as “a perfect example of Nordic beauty.” Slightly older than Jack, she exuded sexuality. The two had no illusion that their relationship would be anything but a passing affair. It also had to be kept secret, so that Jack’s parents wouldn’t find out. Jack and Inga camouflaged their connection, using Kathleen and her boyfriend, John White, making it look like just a convenient foursome. Little did Jack know, however, that his father’s spy network was aware of the relationship right after their first date.
By all accounts, Jack became smitten with Inga, as did she with him, in spite of her making it clear that she “wouldn’t trust him as long term companion.” During World War II, many dating relationships were imbued with an ethos of “living in the present,” given the reality of an unknown, uncertain future during wartime. “Inga Binga,” as Jack affectionately called her, had tremendous self-assurance; her life purpose was not about just getting married and settling down. Though there are no in-depth accounts of their relationship, this was probably the deepest emotional, intimate attachment to a woman that Jack had ever made in his life up until that time. Yet, she was not the sort of woman for Jack to take home to mother and father, and he knew it.
In addition, Inga’s past soon rose to create problems from another direction. Years before, as an aspiring journalist, Inga had manipulated her way into being given access to the Nazi elite, including Adolph Hitler. Attending the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, sitting in the same box as the Führer, Inga had had her picture taken. After the United States entered the war against Germany, the FBI, already aware of Inga, began watching her when she was a student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. It was feared she might be a spy. Because Jack was now a Navy officer with security clearances for his work at the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI, unbeknownst to Jack, opened a file on their relationship.
Unexpectedly, in January 1942, nationally syndicated columnist Walter Winchell revealed in the New York Mirror that Jack and Inga were “an item.” The story was so explosive that it had the potential to relieve Jack of his commission in the Navy, given the ONI’s paranoia. Instead, two days after the Winchell column, Jack found himself transferred to the Charleston Naval Shipyard. He told one reporter, “They shagged my ass down to South Carolina because I was going around with a Scandinavian blonde and they thought she was a spy!”48
Jack and Inga spent several months exchanging love letters and talking on the phone constantly, with I
nga visiting Charleston on weekends. The relationship, however, grew stormy. Among other things, Inga feared she might be pregnant. Jack knew he would never be allowed to marry her. His “fight for love” could not withstand the Kennedy family pressure, nor what would undoubtedly have been a epic confrontation with his father. He was still shackled by the expectations of paternal authority, unwilling to assert his full separation and independence. The epitaph of Jack and Inga, and the love they had shared, was being written.
For his part, patriarch Joe Sr. knew exactly what a toll his son’s struggles were taking. There were FBI wiretaps on Jack’s phone calls with Inga, as well as wiretaps in her hotel room when she came to visit him in Charleston. No doubt the elder Kennedy’s connections arranged them. Not wanting to incur any ill will from a tempestuous Jack, or spur any rebellion, the cunning father never indicated the slightest disapproval of his son’s relationship with Inga. But, according to several biographers, Winchell’s column was probably engineered by Joe Kennedy himself. When Jack, with Inga’s acceptance, finally ended the relationship several months later, according to these same biographers, Inga had been paid off by his father to finally leave.49 Heartbroken, Jack now turned his attention to preventing his unpredictable, precarious health issues from sidelining him to a desk for the duration of the war. More than ever, he wanted to break away from his father and the chains of the Kennedy family that enslaved him.
Jack’s closest platonic friendship with a woman was with his sister Kathleen, affectionately known as “Kick.” She was perhaps the only woman contemporary in his early adult life with whom he was able to sustain an ongoing emotional connection. Just three years younger than Jack, Kick had been born fourth in the family—after Joe Jr., Jack, and Rose Marie (“Rosemary”). Because Rosemary’s mental retardation relegated her to an institution, Kick was the eldest daughter in the Kennedy clan, and she and Jack forged an important bond. Both were rebellious, having contested the shackles of the Catholic Church and a mother chained to its religious dogma. Jack admired his sister’s spunk, her ability to speak her mind and create a life of her own choosing. He defended her when she courageously broke with her parents’ wishes by marrying non-Catholic Billy Cavendish, the young Marquess of Hartington. Unfortunately, young Cavendish was killed in the war in 1944, less than a month after their brother, Joe Jr. Devastated by these deaths, Kick and Jack, understanding more completely the frailty of life, shared an even deeper bond.
As a Massachusetts congressman in the summer of 1947, Jack visited Kick in Ireland. He was overjoyed to find her now in love with wealthy English aristocrat Peter Fitzwilliam. Fitzwilliam, however, was not only Protestant, but also still married, although the plan was that he would soon be divorced and marry Kick. Despite both Joe Sr. and mother Rose’s eventual warning that they would disown her if she went ahead with this plan, Kick was undeterred. Seeing how happy she was, Jack again admired and supported his sister’s boldness and independence. Moved by and envious of Kathleen’s joy at being in love, he told his friend Lem Billings that in all of his relationships with women, except possibly for a short while with Inga, he had never lost himself, or fallen in love as his sister Kathleen had.50
Less than a year later, in May 1948, Kick and her husband-to-be died in a plane crash en route to the south of France. Her death threw Jack into deep despair, provoking a spiritual crisis about the meaning of life itself. Losing his brother Joe to the war effort could be understood and eventually accepted, but Kick’s death utterly confounded Jack in a way nothing in his entire life ever had. Unwilling to tolerate his mother’s glib explanation that this had been God’s way of saving her daughter Kathleen from a “sacrilegious marriage,” Jack had no one within his family to turn to for comfort. Not only had Kick been his best friend, she was also the only woman at the time who had provided a bridge to his confused and broken emotional life. Kick had been “the one in the family with whom he could confide his deepest thoughts,” said his close friend Lem Billings.51
Kathleen’s death left Jack emotionally barren. Resignation gripped him. “Kathleen’s death depressed Jack and made him even more conscious than ever of his own mortality,” noted presidential historian Robert Dallek. “He told the columnist Joe Alsop that he didn’t expect to live more than another ten years, or beyond the age of forty-five.”52 Scaling the White House didn’t eradicate his emptiness, nor did it ameliorate any of his physical infirmities, which sometimes intermittently became acute. Jack’s rampant promiscuity grew into a bona fide sexual addiction. His reckless daring was the kind of obsessive pursuit that was not only dangerous from a national security perspective, but ultimately personally destructive. Recurrent bouts of venereal disease, originally contracted when he was a student at Harvard from sex with prostitutes, plagued him during his years in the White House.
The other ingredient in this equation was drugs, to which Jack was introduced by Max Jacobson, MD, a New York physician known as “Dr. Feel Good,” who had a colorful reputation in the early 1960s for assisting fast-lane, high-society New Yorkers with their “moods.” He had been introduced to Jack by his close friend Chuck Spaulding during the 1960 presidential campaign. Spaulding himself was a patient of Jacobson’s, whose elixirs by injection contained any number of amphetamine derivatives. “Miracle Max,” as he was also sometimes called, made more than thirty visits to the White House during the Kennedy presidency, not counting his trips to Palm Beach and Hyannis Port. So indispensable had Dr. Feel Good become that he even accompanied the president to Paris and Vienna in 1961. He also supplied Jack with vials of specially prepared concoctions, as well as the hypodermic needles to inject them on his own.53
One former patient of Jacobson’s, who spoke on condition of anonymity, worked in the doctor’s lab at night as a way to defray the costs of his services. “I would mix up some of the cocktails given to JFK,” said this source. “They were labeled ‘Beaker A, B, and C.’ Nobody knew what was in them except Jacobson. He [Jacobson] would code label the directions as to how to mix the cocktails. There were things in those cocktails that exacerbated his [JFK’s] sex drive, I’ll tell you that right now!”54 Jack became so dependent on these drugs, he had no intention of stopping them. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” he told his brother Bobby, who thought he should have Jacobson’s elixirs analyzed by the FDA. “It’s the only thing that works.”55
Yet whatever infirmities Jack battled—including a rampant sexual addiction—however fragmented and impaired his capacity for genuine intimacy, something kept driving him toward Mary Meyer. Something kept driving him toward Mary Meyer. Had it been the memory of some young, pristine romantic force that was first awakened that Saturday evening at Choate in February 1936? Had the intensity of his wartime romance with Inga Arvad engendered some distant hope of absolution in love? Or was it the possibility of redemption, one last chance to bridge the gulf between himself and another—in love—so as to heal himself in such a way that he might become more whole?
With all his charm, good looks, wealth, and presidential aura, Jack could have attracted almost any woman, and often did. Certainly, there were many documented contenders—Helen Chavchavadze, Diana de Vegh, Mimi Beardsley (Alford), Judith Exner, and Marilyn Monroe among them—but none who became important to him in the way that Mary Meyer did. Her allure for Jack wasn’t that of an imagined, superficial sexual escapade—though her eroticism, firmly imbedded in her femininity, was known to have brought many a man to his knees.
Mary’s primary attraction for Jack may have ultimately been trust—in the end, love’s most powerful aphrodisiac. She was independent and self-contained, free of any need for any kind of entrapment or manipulation. Jack respected her as an equal. With Mary, the spark of redemption was likely ignited in the wounded darkness of his shadow. After all, real love was the foundation for the approach of healing, the process of which for Jack would have required a lifelong “work-in-progress” commitment to self-examination and recovery. Yet even in the midst of an
uncontrollable, compulsive sexual addiction, the question remained. Had a shared bridge of hope with Mary helped him further define the unique track of his presidency—a trajectory that finally during the last six months of his life would embrace the pursuit of world peace initiatives, away from the Cold War?
9
Mary’s Mission
He’s lost in the wilderness. He’s lost in the bitterness.
This is a man’s world, this is a man’s world …
But it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl.
—James Brown
“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World”
It is true that my discovery of LSD was a chance discovery, but it was the outcome of planned experiments and these experiments took place in the framework of systematic pharmaceutical, chemical research. It could be better described as serendipity.
—Dr. Albert Hofmann
The so-called sixties “drug culture” was not a campus fad. It was a worldwide renaissance of the oldest religions.
—Timothy Leary
SITTING AT HIS desk in a cramped office at 5 Divinity Avenue in the Center for Research in Personality at Harvard, Dr. Timothy Leary looked up and saw “a woman leaning against the door post, hip tilted provocatively,” studying him intently. “She appeared to be in her late thirties. Good looking. Flamboyant eyebrows, piercing green-blue eyes, fine-boned face. Amused, arrogant, aristocratic.”1 It was April 1962, and the Harvard lecturer had for months been immersed in the onslaught of problems and crises that his Harvard Psilocybin Project had been attracting. Mounting publicity had resulted in increasing scrutiny, not all of it by any means good. Both Leary and his colleague, Professor Richard Alpert, had been recently “vigorously criticized” at a faculty meeting for ethical and empirical violations that involved giving the hallucinogen psilocybin to undergraduates. Ordered to surrender their supply, they were forbidden to continue their research.