by Unknown
I had no regrets the next morning as we rode the train to the race’s starting line in Greenwich Park (I finished in a personal best of three hours, twenty-seven minutes). The guilt wouldn’t fully take hold until I was on the plane back to New York, and facing the prospect of seeing Tony again. As the reality of my infidelity sank in, I couldn’t avoid one obvious fact: After years of accumulated silence with Tony, my marriage was crumbling.
So there I was, sitting in the living room of my comfortable home in Brooklyn Heights with my younger sister, Deb, in 1983. Deb’s wedding had taken place in my home the year before. We were reminiscing about the ceremony when the conversation veered into a frank discussion of men. It was our first sisterly talk about sex, which prompted me to confess about my tryst with Bill. Deb was surprised to hear that I was the one who instigated it. The image of me jumping into another man’s bed—in other words, asserting myself—was unexpected, out of character, a side of me she’d never seen. My experience was so different from hers, besides. She’d had many boyfriends before marrying at age thirty-three.
“I’m just amazed that, before Bill, you confined yourself to one man,” she said.
“That’s not quite true,” I replied. “When I was working in Washington in the sixties, I had an affair with a married man.”
“It was JFK, wasn’t it?” she said.
“How’d you know?”
“Just a hunch,” she said. “That’s his reputation, isn’t it?” I was so taken aback by her intuition—as if she now saw the truth about me, as if maybe it was obvious all along—that I didn’t feel the need to go into detail. I focused on how Tony had forbidden me from ever bringing it up, which Deb found puzzling. “Then why are you telling me?” she asked. I didn’t have a ready answer and, mercifully, she dropped the subject. I think both of us were relieved. She knew how unhappy I was, and what more was there to say?
I kept working at the NYRRC for three more years. Bill and I continued to train and race together—from 10K races to triathlons—until injury and surgery converted me into a casual runner. Sometimes I would daydream about a life with Bill, though he never even held that out as a possibility. Whatever fantasies I had harbored about us ended when I accepted a full-time job as manager of a local tennis and squash club and, ever so slowly, drifted away from the world of runners and back into my unhappy marriage.
For the rest of the eighties, I didn’t think about telling the secret to anyone. In fact, living in our crumbling marriage was so painful that I hardly shared anything with my friends or family. Tony and I barely acknowledged each other—and that emotional unavailability to each other was also hurting our teenage daughter Jenny. She resented both of us, but she lashed out at me because I was the easier target.
“You are the poorest excuse for a mother,” she screamed at me one day.
I don’t remember what inspired Jenny’s tirade, but it was a brutal wake-up call, one of those moments that cut you to the core. She saw me as I was—a hollow woman incapable of standing up for herself. I thought about it all day as I ran errands in Manhattan. It was a Friday in April 1989. Tony was coming home early so he could go to New Jersey for the weekend. I walked down Madison Avenue to Grand Central Terminal, entering from the west entrance off Vanderbilt Avenue. I stood at the top of the stairs, looking down at the commuters scurrying like ants, then up at the Kodak Colorama across the lobby.
There was an enormous romantic scene of a couple holding hands on a tropical beach. Clichéd though it was, all I could see was love, and it made me profoundly sad because I couldn’t imagine a future for myself with any romantic love in it. The tears began.
I’ve always thought Aha moments are supposed to be quiet insights, the result of peaceful meditation or a flash of brilliance. They’re not supposed to be violent. But this one hit me hard, like a punch in the stomach. Right then I knew I had to end my marriage. I’d never felt such a strong sense of resolve.
When I got home, Tony was standing in the kitchen, talking on the phone to friends in New Jersey, making plans for getting away that weekend. I stood in the doorway, staring at him, counting the seconds until he noticed me. As he twisted the long yellow cord of the wall unit around his hand, he held up his index finger—his signal for me to wait a minute. Finally, he hung up and looked at me with an impatient expression.
“I want a divorce,” I said.
“What?” he asked.
“I think you heard me.” I wasn’t going to say anything more. I waited for him to respond.
“Are you sure?” he said. “You’ve never known what you wanted, but if that’s it, then that’s what you’ll get. I think you’re going to regret it.” His words hung in the air, more a threat than an attempt to change my mind.
He was right, in a way. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but I knew I had to take a step toward change. I knew that Tony wasn’t solely to blame for my unhappiness or the ruin of our marriage. It was my fault as much as his. I had not made his life happy. But I also knew that I had reached an endpoint to the misery we created for each other.
Tony was furious, but it wasn’t in him to sulk or fester in anger; he immediately started making a plan. He bought an apartment on Willow Street nearby, while I stayed in our Garden Place home. We both hired lawyers, and after twelve months of acrimonious negotiations, we were no longer man and wife.
A few months later, in summer 1991, I was recounting the details of the divorce to my closest friend from Farmington, Marnie Pillsbury. She had been Marnie Stuart when, with Wendy Taylor, we shared a floor-through apartment in Georgetown my second summer as an intern.
We had gotten together for dinner because Marnie wanted to perform one of her periodic checkups on my well-being. She was and is that kind of friend.
Marnie was very patient as we conducted a postmortem on my twenty-six years of marriage. I told Marnie that screwing up the courage to end the marriage in 1989 had actually not been that difficult for me.
In some ways I had no choice. Marnie refused to accept that it was years of attrition that had forced two people apart.
“There must have been something bigger than that,” she said.
“Well …” I hesitated. I had resisted telling Marnie for so many years, my natural instinct was to maintain the status quo. But then I realized that I wasn’t married to Tony anymore. My marriage vow was obsolete. So was my promise to bury my secret.
Marnie didn’t say a word as I played back the affair with President Kennedy.
She was the best kind of friend, the kind who listens and doesn’t feel she has to offer a solution to every problem. Sometimes all we want is for another person to hear us.
As for me, I savored the opportunity to finally tell a friend who had known me back then in my intern days. I felt that I was not only liberating the adult me but the nineteen-year-old me as well. It felt good.
Bit by bit, I was peeling away the layers. The next time I shared my secret was in the aftermath of Jacqueline Onassis’s death on May 19, 1994. I was having dinner with K. C. Hyland, a friend and Wheaton College classmate, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. K.C. had walked over from the West Side through Central Park and happened upon the swarm of reporters and adoring fans who were standing vigil outside Mrs. Onassis’s apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue. It had been two days since Mrs. Onassis had died, and they were waiting for the occasional briefings on the funeral arrangements that her son, John F. Kennedy, Jr., provided.
Knowing that I had worked in the Kennedy White House, K.C. brought up Jackie’s death over dinner and asked me if I had ever met her.
“No, never,” I said, and then I described my attempt to interview Jackie while I was at Miss Porter’s, which led to my internship.
“You must feel terrible about Jackie’s death,” she said.
“I do,” I said, “but it’s really reminding me of the President.”
“What’s that about?” she asked.
And so I told her.
It was
four years after my divorce. I had just turned fifty. K.C., recently separated, and I had shared many walks in Central Park and dinners together.
Our intimate talks covered just about all the topics single women in Manhattan would touch on—work, family, and, of course, men. It was natural and comfortable to tell her my secret that evening, everything from swimming in the pool, to cooking scrambled eggs, to traveling on trips and staying over at the White House. She was stunned at first but regrouped to press me for more details. She was particularly interested in the logistics—the how, where, and when; how we dealt with the First Lady; what role did the Secret Service play, et cetera. I talked nonstop for two hours. No doubt I had some residual fear that it wasn’t right to be revealing so much detail (old habits die hard with a thirty-year secret). But K.C. was so interested in the minutiae and in my portrait of the President that it mostly felt healthy to let it all out.
Afterward, K.C. told me that she felt honored that I shared my secret with her, and “heavy with responsibility,” as she put it, “to not tell a soul.” She got it. She appreciated the burden I had carried for so many years. So much of what we do and how we think is driven by our need to be understood by others. In sharing my secret with her, I had finally been understood.
The final person I told was my boss, Dr. Thomas K. Tewell, senior pastor at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. He was a trained professional at dealing with confessors. He was also a man of wisdom whom I admired greatly. And he was a friend whom I felt comfortable calling Tom.
The year was 2000, the final year of the Clinton presidency and two years after the Monica Lewinsky scandal had erupted. By then I had been working at the church for five years, running their audio ministry, which meant I produced and marketed the audios and videos of any public activities at the church.
Fifth Avenue Presbyterian is not a humble white-steepled house of worship on a side road in the suburbs. It’s a major brownstone edifice five blocks north of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on one of Manhattan’s busiest corners. Tom was a gifted speaker, and he geared his Sunday sermons to appeal to a big audience, not just church members but strangers passing by.
His sermon on February 13, part of his survey of the Ten Commandments, focused on the Seventh Commandment—“Thou shalt not commit adultery”—and his title, “Sex Is a Twelve-Letter Word,” was sure to be a crowd-grabber.
That Sunday morning, the downstairs pews and upstairs balcony were standing-room-only. I set my recording machines on automatic and took a seat in the sanctuary. I didn’t do this often, but I wanted to hear this message in person (and I was curious about that twelve-letter word). It turned out to be faithfulness. Tom’s theme was that if you wanted to pursue a life of faithfulness in the way God intended, you must pay attention to three principles. Principle number one was that human sexuality is a sacred gift and must be exercised with great care. Sex is not a game. Principle number two was that God is not a prude. He doesn’t want to rob us of pleasure, but promiscuity destroys relationships. Someone always gets hurt. Principle number three asserted that the deepest desire of the human spirit is for intimacy. Sex without intimacy is not faithfulness.
It’s hard to argue with these principles, and Tom reinforced them with stories, some funny, some disturbing. One of them hit me hard. He said, “Sex makes headlines. We are bombarded by the scandalous headlines. We all know the names, and we know the stories—the congressmen, the judges, the athletes, the entertainers, and the pastors, and, yes, even the President of the United States, not just the current one, but the stories go back through history of presidents who were involved with women who were not their wives.” A good sermon reveals the truth; a great sermon does it in unexpected ways.
And this one surprised me. At first I thought Tom was speaking directly to me, but he was mostly referencing the Clinton-Lewinsky affair and highlighting how it had hurt more than one or two people.
I have never felt more self-conscious sitting there in the sanctuary. It was as if Tom had turned on a spotlight and focused its powerful beam on me.
I have never been particularly religious, not in the sense that I went to church regularly or believed in a specific doctrine. But I do consider myself spiritual. I believe in a force beyond us, called God, and that our seeking and striving to understand that force adds meaning to life.
I also love coincidences, which I consider a first cousin of spirituality. I’m always trying to add significance to coincidences that other people tend to ignore. I believe both mystery and guidance is taking place when a phone call comes in just as I’m thinking about the person on the other end of the line, or when the perfect book falls off the shelf as I’m searching for answers to a problem, or when a train ride I normally don’t take brings an old friend needing help back into my life. I pay attention to the small arbitrary links between other people and myself. It’s one way I seek connection.
As I sat there in the pew, hearing Tom’s remarks about presidential sex lives and connecting it to my past, the coincidence overwhelmed me.
I knew at that moment that I would seek him out after the service and tell him my story. I needed to unburden myself completely. On most Sundays, after the service, while I was making tapes and labels and updating the church’s website, Tom would stick his head in my office so that I could give him a thumbs-up or
-down about the sales prospects of his talk (that Sunday’s sermon immediately became our all-time bestselling audio). But that day he sensed something wrong with me, and we arranged a time to talk at the end of the day in his spacious seventh-floor office overlooking the church clock tower.
I started out by telling Tom how close to home his sermon had been for me. I didn’t stumble over the next part. I used pretty much the same words with which I opened this book. I was eager to get everything off my chest.
Perhaps I needed him to tell me that I wasn’t guilty of promiscuity way back when. Perhaps I needed him to help me connect the dots on why I was always searching for intimacy but had failed to find it. Perhaps I just needed some sanctioned spiritual authority figure to tell me that I was okay—and that I could forgive myself.
Tom didn’t disappoint me. He was surprised but not dumbfounded by my story.
He had heard many more painful stories over the years. He took my discomfort and held it up to God in prayer. He prayed that I would always be surrounded by God’s grace and guidance as I dealt with this part of my life.
I realize now that each time I told the secret to someone I was getting one step closer to restoring my emotional health.
With Joan Ellis, I learned that the world wouldn’t fall apart if I broke my promise to Tony.
With my sister Deb, who intuited the JFK relationship, I learned that maybe I was overestimating the shock value of my past and exaggerating the shame that other people would cast on me. My sister, for one, didn’t see anything shameful in my secret.
With Marnie I got a vivid flashback to the girl I was back then in 1963—a young woman sufficiently lively and winsome to attract the President of the United States. I had literally shuttered away and forgotten that young woman.
With K. C. Hyland, I got understanding.
With Tom Tewell, I received comfort, peace, even a sense of forgiveness. His exact words were, “There’s more healing to be done here, and it will happen.” For the first time since JFK’s death I was blessed with a feeling of grace and serenity. Why it happened then, I can’t say for sure. Some feelings materialize within us, and their source is a mystery. The best explanation comes from a talk I had in 2010 while interviewing Dr. Evan Imber-Black, a therapist and authority on the power of secrets in families. She told me that my JFK secret had been at the heart of my marriage to Tony. In agreeing not to talk about it, the secret shaped how the two of us related to each other. It was a simple dynamic: We can’t talk about this, so we can’t talk about anything else that might possibly lead back to it. That’s how silence entered the marriage and grew and never left. Now here I w
as nearly forty years later, breaking that silence without fear of reprisal—and knowing that it was a healing gesture.
That’s the best explanation for the serenity I felt. My secret wasn’t that big a deal anymore. I had outgrown it. It was part of who I was, but it didn’t define me—and after talking with Dr. Tewell, it didn’t restrict me. A burden had been not only lifted but discarded.
I knew what the poet Kim Rosen meant when she wrote, “When you welcome what you’ve been running from, your life is no longer shaped by trying to avoid it.” My secret was not buried. It wasn’t a secret at all. It was simply a fact from my past.
Chapter Fourteen
Whatever serenity I felt would be severely tested three years later by the New York Daily News.
I hope it’s obvious, by this point, that I don’t have any illusions about myself as some crucial, clandestine character in history. I know I am a footnote to history—no, strike that. I’m not even a footnote, because that would suggest that I had a role in the course of historical events that was consequential in some way, that had some impact on a conversation or a decision that affected the lives of others. That didn’t happen. If anything, I’m a footnote to a footnote in the story of America’s thirty-fifth president, someone so far off the radar that a diligent biographer couldn’t identify me by my full name in his JFK biography.
But that began to change on Tuesday, May 13, when the Daily News ran a teaser item titled “Fun and Games with Mimi in the White House,” linking the name to an intern’s affair with JFK. The news item had no specific information connected to me, but I sensed they were closing in on the truth. In an earlier time I would have panicked and melted into a nervous puddle. But at this point my only concern was reaching my daughters, who were now in their thirties and married with children, so they could hear the truth from me rather than from the press.