by Unknown
That was the end of the story.”
My theory now on how the President managed to hide his activities from many of the people closest to him in the White House is that he was a genius at compartmentalizing. As Ted Sorensen wrote in his 2009 memoir, Counselor: Throughout our years together, there was a dichotomy in our relationship. I was totally involved in the substantive side of his life, and totally uninvolved in the social and personal side. Except for a few formal banquets, we never dined together during the White House years. The times we were together socially over the eleven years we worked together were few enough that I can remember each one.
As Kennedy’s chief speechwriter, Sorenson supplied the JFK “voice.” He knew how the President’s mind worked and could brilliantly articulate his beliefs and dreams better than anyone. But even this man, who judged himself second only to Bobby Kennedy in his access and value, never dined with the President alone, never really saw him beyond office hours.
Sorensen’s words made perfect sense to me. The President’s compartmentalizing allowed him to effectively segregate people in all the areas of his life, one from the other. There was a compartment for his wife and children. There was a compartment for the sprawling Kennedy clan that gathered at the family compound in Hyannis Port. There was a compartment for his inner circle of advisers. There was a compartment for his friends. There was a compartment for members of the press, many of whom felt he was just as much their friend as the object of their reporting. And most obviously, there was a compartment for his girlfriends. His genius was in limiting how often these various compartments overlapped. As Sorensen put it, “I do not remember everything about him, because I never knew everything about him.
No one did. Different parts of his life, work, and thoughts were seen by many people—but no one saw it all.”
All of which is why it seems plausible that so few people who claimed to know him knew about the extent of his womanizing. The President was in total control of who was invited into his world and what they were permitted to see.
But it must have been exhausting.
The President’s strategy even kept me guessing about the extent of his relationship with Fiddle and Jill. Did the President sleep with one or both of them, too? The First Lady certainly had her suspicions about Fiddle. “This is the girl who is supposedly sleeping with my husband,” she once said (according to Barbara Gamarekian’s oral history) in an uncharitable aside, spoken in French, to a reporter from Paris Match as the two of them toured the West Wing and came upon Fiddle at her desk. But I had no idea if it was true. If I had suspected anyone in the White House had been in the same boat as I, it would have been Fiddle. I adored Fiddle. She was always poised, always saying the right things. She greeted me with enthusiasm whenever we met, treating me as if I were her younger sister. Despite her cheerful, playful persona, she was as discreet as a CIA agent. We talked a lot—mostly about clothes—but I cannot recall one instance where she revealed a single piece of information about the President. Although Fiddle—and Jill, too—had an easy relationship with the President and were regulars at the noontime swims, more than that I cannot say.
A telling example of how aggressively President Kennedy tested the limits appeared in Sally Bedell Smith’s Grace and Power. In the second week of June 1961, she reported, the President’s back problems flared up to the point that his physician, Dr. Janet Travell, ordered him to take four days off in Palm Beach, Florida, so he could soak in the saltwater pool at the estate of a wealthy friend, Paul Wrightsman, and rest. There with him were the President’s close friend Chuck Spalding, Dr. Travell, the White House chef Rene Verdon, and a few staffers, including Fiddle and Jill. Among the press corps that followed President Kennedy everywhere was Time magazine’s White House correspondent, Hugh Sidey. As Sidey recalled it, Kennedy invited him to a big dinner one evening in Palm Beach, where Spalding, Fiddle, and Jill were also present. It was a “weird night,” according to Sidey, with the President holding forth, telling jokes and wild tales in the most unguarded manner. When dinner ended, Sidey offered Fiddle and Jill a ride back to their hotel, where he was also staying—which touched off a series of awkward moments. Fiddle and Jill told him that they had their own car but nonetheless got up to leave. Once in the car, they then told Sidey their car wouldn’t start and they had to go back to the house to call for help. At that moment, the clouds of confusion parted for Sidey.
“Hugh, you stupid guy,” he told himself.
Although my White House adventure began because I had asked to interview Jacqueline Kennedy, I never once met—or even saw—her during my time there.
One reason for this was that her office was in the East Wing and I was in the West Wing, and the two sides of the White House, though not a hundred yards apart, were separate worlds, operating independently of each other. Never did I hear one of my colleagues in the press office say they were going over to the East Wing.
But the main reason I never saw or met her was that she spent most of the summer of 1962 away from the White House. After her state visit with the President to Mexico in June—where she charmed her hosts by giving a short speech in impeccable Spanish—she basically left Washington for an extended three-month holiday. In addition to Glen Ora, where she often retreated for long weekends with her children, she had rented a seven-bedroom home in Hyannis, not far from the Kennedy compound. From August 7 to August 30, she was away with Caroline in Italy, and upon her return, she headed straight to Hammersmith Farm, her childhood home in Newport, Rhode Island, remaining there with her children until early October. Only then did she return to the White House. Which explains why the President had so much time for me.
Like so many young women in America at the time, I admired Mrs. Kennedy’s regal poise and sense of style. (So did my mother, who had met her in 1961 when Mrs. Kennedy hosted Miss Porter’s alumnae at the White House. My mother kept the invitation and an engraved White House matchbook in her photo album.) By all accounts, she was a devoted mother and supportive wife, a woman—as would later become abundantly clear—of great strength and character. It shames me, then, to admit that I don’t recall feeling any guilt about my role in her life. In my nineteen-year-old mind, I wasn’t invading the Kennedys’ marriage. I was merely occupying the President’s time when his wife was away. Probably because she was away all summer, she didn’t loom over our interactions. With few exceptions, the President never talked about her when he was with me—and he certainly never said anything unflattering or critical.
As in so many other things, it pains me now to say I simply took my cues from the President. If he wasn’t troubled about his wife, why should I be?
I realize how blithe that sounds, but it’s the truth. As I said before, I never thought that maybe I wasn’t the only “other woman” in the President’s life. I simply declined to think about it.
It wasn’t until much later, when the biographies started coming out, that the full extent of his philandering began to dawn on me. Only then did I hear about women such as Helen Chavchavadze, yet another young Farmington graduate, and Mary Pinchot Meyer, a worldly socialite and dazzling former reporter, who acquired almost iconic status among biographers, in large part because they were among the few of the President’s women who could be identified by name.
Unlike me, these women weren’t invisible. They had been an integral part of the Kennedys’ social life for years, meeting their children, toasting their successes, and attending intimate dinners hosted by Mrs. Kennedy in the 1950s when she was a senator’s wife and in the 1960s when she was First Lady.
As I read about these women—and figured out that the President was carrying on with some of them at the same time he was seeing me—I began to appreciate two things about him.
The first was the great care the President took to shield his wife from his infidelities. I believe he placed her on a pedestal as the perfect partner to help him realize his ambitions. And he planted that pedestal in a private space where all his “o
ther women,” including me, would never be permitted to enter.
The second was that, at all times, he was protecting himself, too. How do you do that while raising children and being a husband and leading a party and running a country and traveling the world, pursuing a vision of democracy?
You build walls, you compartmentalize, you make sure that no one ever knows you completely.
*Ted Sorensen, JFK’s gifted speechwriter, wrote the following about JFK in his 2009 memoir Counselor: “His only notable weakness as a boss was his reluctance—indeed, his inability—to fire anyone. Instead he promoted them.… I first discovered this Kennedy shortcoming back in the Senate when JFK told me that Evelyn Lincoln—the most loyal, devoted, hardworking, and totally trustworthy member of his team—did not have the intellectual capacity to handle his increasingly important telephone calls and correspondence, that he had tried firing her, but that she kept showing up at her desk every day anyway.… JFK kept her on, took her to the White House, and continued to value her loyalty.”
*Meader’s LP sold more than 7.5 million copies, still the top-selling comedy album of all time. You could hear it on the radio, in dorm rooms, and in living rooms wherever you went that season.
*It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1962.
Chapter Seven
The President was quite vain, particularly about his hair. During that summer, he would frequently summon me to the Oval Office and ask me to administer a hair treatment before one of his televised press conferences. The hair treatments were apparently a daily ritual that originated during the 1960 campaign. He insisted on using products only from Frances Fox, a company in upstate New York. He liked to lean back in his rocking chair and close his eyes while I massaged some tonic and an amber-colored ointment into his scalp.
Then I would brush—never comb—it all into place. Sometimes a visitor would walk in while this was going on, and the President would signal for me to continue, and talk to his visitor as I worked away.
When I wasn’t giving hair treatments, I was continuing to work in the press office, running errands, answering phones, stocking office supplies, clipping the wires, handing out press releases, and filing press photos. But as the summer wore on, I began feeling less connected to the work. I was spending more of my time thinking about my affair with the President, and being pulled deeper into his personal orbit.
Despite all the time we spent together and the increasing level of familiarity between us, I never rose above being the obedient partner in our relationship; the inherent imbalance of power between us was simply too great. In all our time together, it never once occurred to me to call him Jack. Even in our most intimate moments, I called him Mr. President. I still do today. It is a frame of mind, I suppose, that never fades. Considering the trappings of power that surrounded him even when he was not in the public eye—the valet, the cooks, the Secret Service agents, the staffers like Dave Powers who, though close friends, all addressed him as Mr. President—it’s not as strange as it sounds. To do otherwise would have seemed inappropriate.
The weekends the President went to Hyannis that summer were hazy, empty, aimless days for me. My roommate was usually out of town on weekends, leaving me to my own devices. I spent my days doing laundry and window-shopping in Georgetown, and my nights reading in bed. I had no social life to speak of. Only once do I recall going out, to a cocktail party in Georgetown given by young Jay Rockefeller, the future governor and senator from West Virginia. It seemed like everyone there was right out of college, working at real jobs for people of consequence. I worked for people of consequence, too, I thought, but in an inconsequential capacity. The fact that I was romantically involved with the most consequential person in town didn’t do me much good here; it wasn’t exactly something I could talk about. So I nursed my drink, concluded that I was totally out of place, and went home early. I couldn’t wait for Mondays to come.
On late summer weekday afternoons, the President often left the office a little early and took guests on cruises along the Potomac River on the presidential yacht Sequoia. The Sequoia was a beautiful ship, built in 1925, 104 feet long, with a large main salon and several decks where guests could sip cocktails while a soft breeze took the edge off Washington’s oppressive heat. Dave Powers was often on board, as were Massachusetts Congressman Torbert “Torby” Macdonald, the President’s roommate from Harvard, and Paul “Red” Fay, the undersecretary of the Navy and an old wartime friend of the President’s. The atmosphere was like a polite fraternity social event. There were more men than women, and the women were not necessarily married to the men they boarded with. I was always introduced as “Mimi who works for Pierre in the press office.”
One afternoon, I was introduced to a woman who immediately sensed that I wasn’t there in a press role. She was not naïve. She worked for—and was rumored to be having an affair with—Florida senator George Smathers. As we sipped drinks on the upper deck, she took me aside.
“You are too young to be here,” she said. “You’re going to regret it. All of a sudden you’ll turn around and you’ll be twenty-five and you won’t have a life.” I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. How did she know? I summoned up my best Farmington poise and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” But I was a heedless girl, blinded by the President’s power and charisma, and fully committed to keeping our affair secret. How else would I respond but with feigned ignorance and denial? In a way, what I said to her was true. Although I meant it as a mind-your-own-business brush-off, I really did have no idea what she was talking about. I didn’t appreciate that I was too young, that I was out of my depth, that the dazzle of an affair fades with time, that it’s not healthy to be at the perpetual beck and call of a married man, that there would be consequences to what I was doing. I wasn’t even capable of imagining life at twenty-five; I was nineteen and having fun and living in the moment.
Twenty-five seemed to be a million miles away.
In mid-August, the President and I were in the Oval Office, doing the hair treatment, when he asked me if I wanted to see Yosemite National Park. He said it with the casual air of someone asking if I wanted to go to the movies. He explained that his secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, had been urging him to publicize the emerging issues of conservation and environmental protection, and a trip to several notable sites out west was now in the works. He said he thought I’d find it beautiful, and did I want to come?
The idea of such a trip, of course, was irresistible. I’d never seen Yosemite, and could count the number of times I’d been on an airplane on one hand. Yes, I said. I would love to go. The President said that Dave Powers would be making all the arrangements.
On Friday, August 17, the President embarked on the kind of whirlwind tour that only heads of state with advance teams and their own air force can achieve. First he stopped in Pierre, South Dakota, to dedicate the Oahe Reservation dam. Later that day, he was off to Pueblo, Colorado, to look at another water project, and receive a cast-iron frying pan—a symbol of the Old West—from a local pol. From there, he flew to California to spend the night in Yosemite National Park, and after that made a quick visit to the San Luis dam project in Los Banos, California.
I would be flying in the Air Force support plane, along with the luggage, press office equipment, and other White House staffers. I was instantly seduced by the sultanic style of presidential travel. There was nothing left to chance, nothing to worry about. I was told where to drop off my suitcase at the White House and what car I was to ride in to Andrews Air Force Base. (The President wouldn’t be with us; he flew by helicopter.) There was no fussing with tickets, no lugging of bags. My name was printed along with everyone else’s name on the official passenger list—and if that caused resentment among other women in the press office who saw the list, I was oblivious to it. We were driven by motorcade past a military honor guard, out to Andrews Air Force Base. We were dropped off on the tarmac and climbed the long flight of stairs onto the plane
, where we were greeted with platters of food and drinks. Upon arrival, we were told, our suitcases would be delivered directly to our rooms.
Yosemite was beautiful, a moonscape, unlike anything I’d seen before on the East Coast, but a pattern started there that, unfortunately, I would soon become accustomed to. I came to think of it as the Waiting Game. I sat around, waiting until the President needed me. That was my role. So while everyone in the President’s retinue was free to wander the Ahwahnee Hotel—a hulking mountain lodge with massive stone fireplaces and painted wood-beamed ceilings situated within sight of Yosemite Falls—I never even left my room.
“Stay put,” Dave had told me when we arrived. “I’ll call you when the President wants you.”
So that’s what I did: I stayed put. I sat in a chair and stared out the window, watching an 1,100-foot ribbon of water cascade down a sheer granite cliff less than a mile away. Then as evening fell and daylight faded, I ordered room service and sat alone picking at my food, waiting for the President to call. In describing it now, it sounds as if I’m painting a melancholy scene. But if I harbored any thoughts of self-pity or loneliness in my room, I don’t recall them.
The truth is, I was thrilled to be part of the presidential entourage, thrilled to be getting out of stifling Washington, D.C., in the middle of August, and, most important, thrilled to be spending time with President Kennedy. I had been assigned a room three doors down from his suite. This would be the first night we’d ever spent together outside of the White House.
Around eight-thirty that night, Dave Powers appeared, and escorted me to the President’s room. I knocked on the door, and the President answered. When I walked in, there was no hug or kiss. In fact, I don’t remember the President ever kissing me—not hello, not goodbye, not even during sex. Instead, he greeted me with a cheery hello, seeming almost surprised that I was at the door. Then he relaxed in a chair, complimented me on how I looked, and asked about my day. I said nothing about how I’d spent the day in my room, waiting.