JFK's insatiable lust

IT WAS late on the evening of ­October 15, 1962, and the world was tottering like a drunken ­acrobat on the very edge of nuclear war.

SEX ADDICT But Kennedy s lust could not tarnish his image SEX ADDICT: But Kennedy's lust could not tarnish his image

In the cabinet room at the White House, President Kennedy and his aides were crowding around maps that proved, without any doubt, that Russia had sent missiles to Cuba.

Kennedy’s face was dark with worry. Then suddenly he noticed that a very pretty brunette secretary had walked into the room.

Ignoring for the moment the fact that the planet might soon be plunged into Armageddon, he turned to whisper to an aide.

“Get me her name and number,” he said. “We may avert war tonight and I shall badly need some R&R.”

For those close to the President, this was a far-from-unusual request. He would frequently seek sexual relief from attractive women working in the White House, particularly when he was feeling stressed.

His compulsive ­womanising was one of America’s best-kept secrets and he knew the compliant White House press corps would never infringe on his privacy. Only in recent years has the extent of his lustful adventuring become public.

Had the mainstream press revealed this at the time, there can be little doubt that his presidency would have fallen. The puritanical, Bible-quoting American Midwest would have risen up in moral fury.

As a young man, Kennedy ­pursued many women to satiate his desires. This week Lisa Lanett, now 87, has claimed that he had fathered a child with her during the Second World War.

Kennedy was then a young naval officer and even offered to marry Ms Lanett when she became pregnant. But she turned him down.

At the time, Kennedy was recovering from back surgery, having been injured injured when his ­torpedo boat was rammed by a Japanese cruiser. The injury, painful as it was, does not appear to have affected his sex life.

Also, Ms Lanett claims that Kennedy paid for their son’s ­education at a ­private school near New York. He is now a 63-year-old retired art dealer living in ­California.

In later years Kennedy would even become disarmingly open about his lust. On one occasion, while walking on a gentle English summer’s evening with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan around the perfectly trimmed lawns of Chequers, the President suddenly said: “Do you know, Harold, if I don’t have sex every three days I get a goddamn ­headache.”

Macmillan apparently nodded gravely, smiled and then (with smooth aplomb) returned to ­talking about the problems facing the Third World.

All close to Kennedy had always known about his womanising and, in retrospect, it seems amazing that it was never made public.

He continued to enjoy brief encounters, took mind-boggling risks and was not bothered that some of the fringe press had started gossiping about his sex life.

Cleverly, he surrounded himself with favoured journalists, men and women he could trust, and the question of his extracurricular activities was not even raised.

The only time he became ­concerned the “trusted” press might be forced to start questioning his escapades came when some ­gossip sheets carried hints about his affair with Marilyn Monroe. He summoned a former journalist William Haddad and demanded: “See the editors. Tell them you are speaking from me and that it’s just not true.”

He also enlisted the help of his brother-in-law, the actor Peter Lawford, who was told to dismiss the allegations as “garbage”. For once Kennedy realised that no good could come to his presidency if it became public that he was having an affair with someone as famous, promiscuous and mentally unbalanced as Monroe.

He was worried that he would experience some fallout from the 1963 John Profumo scandal in Britain, when the war minister shared mistress Christine Keeler with a Russian defence attaché.

One newspaper, the respected but now defunct ­New York ­Journal American, published a story about a “high elected ­American official” and a New York prostitute called Suzy Chang.

She lived in Britain and was said to be part of the Keeler ring of girls. ­Worryingly for JFK, she also claimed to have slept with him when he was a ­senator. Kennedy’s brother Bobby, then attorney general, was called in and the story was promptly killed.

But the most troubling liaison and one closely investigated by the Kennedy clan-hating FBI chief J Edgar Hoover was when the ­President had been sleeping with a call girl Ellen Rometsch.

This dark-haired beauty – an Elizabeth Taylor look-alike – had fled communist East Germany where, according to the FBI, she had not only belonged to communist youth groups but had also been a secretary to Walter Ulbricht, the country’s ­fanatical leader.

In the spring of 1963 Rometsch was said to have made “repeated visits” for sex with Kennedy at the White House and also had attended his notorious naked pool parties.

Brother Bobby was again called in to make sure that nothing leaked out. Had it been made ­public JFK’s chances of winning the 1964 presidential election (had he lived) could have been severely threatened. Bobby arranged for Rometsch to be deported and, once again, Kennedy money was used to buy silence.

Kennedy would boast about his burning ambition – to bed every woman in Hollywood. To a certain extent, he achieved this goal. Those he seduced included actresses Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, Jayne Mansfield and, a particular favourite, Angie Dickinson.

But he was just as happy to have sex with secretaries, prostitutes who were smuggled into the White House, and even close friends of his wife, Jackie.

He lacked all self-restraint and, just a few hours after uttering the words that had galvanised the nation during his inaugural address – “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” – he was partying in Washington and ­shouting: “Where are the broads?”

He also had an affair with a teenage White House intern, who according to historian Robert Dallek, in his biography of Kennedy, An Unfinished Life, had only the barest of qualifications. “She had no skills. She could answer the phone. But apparently her main skill was to provide sexual relief for JFK on trips and maybe in the White House.”

One of his more dangerous ­liaisons was with a highly attractive ­brunette Judith Exner, who became his mistress. On February 7, 1960, Kennedy’s close friend, the singer Frank Sinatra, introduced Miss Exner to JFK in a Las Vegas club. Kennedy was still a senator but had become a presidential candidate.

What made Exner dangerous, particularly in the eyes of the FBI, was that she was also mistress to mafia chief, Sam Giancana. The FBI had her ­followed and recorded her calls from Giancana’s home to Kennedy. Their affair ended in 1962 when FBI agents informed a now frightened Kennedy of their knowledge of the relationship.

In a Vanity Fair interview in 1996, Exner claimed that she ended the affair with Kennedy because she became tired of being the other woman. She claimed to have had Kennedy’s child aborted and even asserted to have carried pay-offs from Californian defence contractors to the Kennedys.

Later, in an interview with People magazine, Exner claimed that she took messages from Sam Giancana during the 1960 presidential ­election and passed them on to Kennedy.

Kennedy’s most controversial affair was with Marilyn Monroe. Mystery still surrounds her death and there is speculation about whether she was murdered on the orders of the Kennedys because she was ­becoming a public threat or being deeply troubled as she was, just took her own life.

Whatever the truth these stories of insatiable lust and sexual risk-taking – now public knowledge – have failed to damage Kennedy’s golden image. His assassination wiped the moral slate clean.

Today, it would be impossible for a US president to behave with such abandon.

The media, including the all-seeing internet, is everywhere. President Bill Clinton, whose lustful shenanigans were very modest ­compared with those of the ­romping Kennedy, discovered that to his cost.

This week’s claim that a 63-year-old man is his secret love child is hardly the first evidence of John F Kennedy’s compulsive womanising. But the terrible risks he took to satisfy his lust were covered up during his time in office

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