When Did JFK's Infidelities Become Public Knowledge?
- Thread starter Amadeus
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It was two things.
1. Watergate made the press a lot less inclined to keep any detail out, which itself was something which flowed from changes in the social landscape since 1963
2. And even under the old rules, he was long dead. It was accepted that once a decent time had passed, one could start talking about it in public. There might be some restraint if the widow was still alive, but of course Jackie had by then remarried.
1. Watergate made the press a lot less inclined to keep any detail out, which itself was something which flowed from changes in the social landscape since 1963
2. And even under the old rules, he was long dead. It was accepted that once a decent time had passed, one could start talking about it in public. There might be some restraint if the widow was still alive, but of course Jackie had by then remarried.
Isn't the rule of thumb that you are free to make jokes/reveal polarizing information about serious things after a minimum of 11 years?
I think Jackie's remarriage was a major contributor to the eventual emergence of the infidelity stories. Once she became Mrs. Onassis and began reveling in that luxurious lifestyle much of the mystique of the Camelot myth died.
This is a good description of the “messiness” of history, and thank you very much.
As yet another example, my previous doctor once told me that a study found depressed people are more realistic than non-depressed people, as if we need a bias of optimism in order to get our butts in gear and try things!
Thank you. It's not a matter of depression
as accurate. Pragmatism is accurate. Depression accepts the bad, makes it dominant and exclusive and sees it as terminal and lets it be a monster of dread and anxiety without bonds of context. I do not mean to demean the seriousness of depression by saying that; I understand it's pain and that it is overwhelming. It's merit is recognizing the bad. It's sin is doing the wrong thing with that information. Optimism is a great driver but ignores every problem or potential problem. One is the ugliness of the world as the exclusive understanding of the world and assumption of inevitable doom, the other is the beauty of the world as the exclusive understanding of the world and assumption of inevitable success.
The middle ground is simple truth and accepting it: accepting both the truth you find joy in as well as the truth you would rather not be. It is accepting both with humility and grace. It is moving through, moving on and moving forward. This is the way of wisdom. As a parable, Lao Tsu does not smile while tasting the vinegar because it is pleasant. He smiles because the vinegar is as bitter as it meant to be, and in that way is pleasant.
I'll be a pain: I do not believe Kennedy had an affair with Marilyn Monroe. I say that because there's no real evidence of it and Kennedy's friend Senator George Smathers said it did not happen because he would have heard it from Kennedy himself if it did.
I think I'd give Kennedy more credit in 1964. It may not be Johnson's numbers but I would argue it would be more sizeable than sometimes given credit. The Republicans shot themselves in the foot with Goldwater. I'd argue it was even more likely that Goldwater would be the nominee if Kennedy lived compared to the OTL. Goldwater almost dropped out because of the assassination.
Rockefeller had lost his chance with his divorce. Yet he will still try to be a spoiler for any moderate alternative to best Goldwater for the nomination. This was already a year Republicans were likely to lose. Kennedy would not have gone as dirty as Johnson (albeit Kennedy was no angel; neither was Goldwater). But he didn't need to. Goldwater is a Quixotic effort, equal parts the angels of his Conscience Conservatism (oddly it's own romantic idealism to match anything of "Camelot" mythologizing) and the dread resentments and bigotries of his followers in that election. He would be the nominee, he is going to lose and it will be a hard loss that no other Republican would have suffered exactly to that degree.
I believe the book I mentioned was the correct original source. I'm not certain because my memory is not perfect but I believe it was the first hint for the public at Kennedy's affairs.
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That's interesting. What specifically did the book say about Kennedy's affairs?
Also, since I've seen you described as a JFK expert on this forum, what is your opinion of what a Kennedy second term would look like?
Apparently JFK didn't have an "affair" with Monroe in the sense that he didn't have a long running romantic relationship with her. He did, however, have a one night stand with her. The source of this information is Monroe herself, who told multiple friends that she spent one night with JFK but that was it. I've seen multiple media portrayals of JFK where both he and Bobby are depicted having affairs with Monroe (and are then blamed for Monroe's death) but this just isn't supported by historical evidence. (The otherwise good 2011 miniseries "The Kennedys" and "A Woman Named Jackie" both show Monroe overdosing on drugs as a result of JFK rejecting her but that simply did not happen).
Professional dirt hound Freddy Otash says the affair happened in this interview in the mid 80s, so it was on the public's mind since then, if not earlier.
It may not even be in the (early draft of the) book so much as something that came out as part of the fallout and arguments around the book that became a national discussion in itself when the Kennedy family tried to block (parts) of it. Honestly, I cannot remember.
To your second point: that's the billion dollar question, isn't it? Let me say this comes at the intersection of mythology and resentment to the mythology, fact versus hearsay (but sometimes all we have is the hearsay), and all that often says more about the people discussing it rather than the figures and events they are discussing. It's also a matter of the human flaws of the figures involved; not just in the moment but how they discuss the moment later, how they contextualize it, how they take blame or credit, how memory changes, or how they may be outright lying. Who and how do you trust? How do you interpret human nature? Our speculation may be right but you cannot escape the opinion portion of all this. It may be under a bedrock of academic airs and marble, but it is still there.
If we feel a ping of desire or ire reading something, that speaks of us rather than what we are reading. And if you direct your speculation to appease either side of that nature in you, that is tailoring the history and making it a fiction with a historical cast of characters to lend gravitas. Granted, alternate history is fiction. But a bad alternate history is telling the people what to say rather than listening to what they say to the author and writing that. It is a director rather than an observer of events playing out in cause and effect with the interplay of your cast's personalities.
On a living Kennedy scenario, I have come to the view of what I call "the Tapestry"; a vast interplay of events and concerns that weave together, impact each other, pull on or loosen each other and binds each other together. Interrelated with that are the personalities and probabilities of the players involved and who you take as honest, half honest or a liar. I will not be able to cover everything or everything in full detail here: I'm human. And I don't like doing this because it gets parsed quoted and then it can become a back and forth of the different optimisms, resentments or other personalities of the person quoting me. That is further complicated with who is a good source or a bad source or the ulterior motive we have to gauge, which affects context and what is really the truth. This is a similar reason I rarely reply to Kennedy / Vietnam threads anymore: I don't want to be the person that is the focal point for all the discussion on that back and forth with whatever positivity or hostility there is. And there always is because it's a personalized issue of true passions, good and bad.
My opinion in easy brackets:
- Kennedy runs against Goldwater. If there is time, we may get Lincoln-Douglas debates. They discussed this. Those debates may not occur because life is a busy thing. If they did occur: the fear would be giving Goldwater legitimacy. The positive would be this is a diplomatic forum discussion between Liberalism and Conservatism for the soul of America we perhaps really needed to have. It is a married couple that needs to work it out that never did. I think Kennedy comes out looking very good in contrast to Goldwater. I think Goldwater may make some long term inroads, albeit that does not mean a Conservative revolution. I also think this would be a major historical conversation you would be hit over the head with in school for all eternity; an absolutely pivotal moment in American history.
- Kennedy beats Goldwater handily. He's Goldwater. The people that hated Kennedy were already Goldwater people. Kennedy goes into his second term with majorities he can work with.
- Kennedy manages to get the major legislation through. This is not just the Great Man theory. I do respect Johnson's political aptitudes but the movement on legislation was not only 'Big Daddy'. It was also the majorities in the Congress, the changes in makeup and movement done there, and the effort of the politicians there against their intractable foes in tandem with an administration that was supportive and working very hard to make things happen. I'd argue that the "we could have beat Kennedy but not Johnson" was both an opinion statement and an excuse to dodge responsibility for Civil Rights getting through. It was an idea whose time had come (and there's a book of that name that you can look up on this thesis) and the pressures were already in play.
- That said, Kennedy is not Johnson and is not going to go as much full bore on what Johnson did. He's a Good Government Liberal (as much as he saw Liberal as meaning a New Dealer, which he was not). He was not a Big Government Liberal. That does not mean there will not be a big government or imperial presidency. It does mean that it would be for a purpose rather than its own sake or it's own sake as the merit. That being said: how much of what Johnson did in addition to the base line (which Kennedy may pursue instead) survive much past him?
- EDIT to add this: Kennedy lets Hoover hit mandatory retirement age in 1965. He does not override that via executive order. OTL, even Johnson wanted Hoover gone and replaced. I must emphasize, the mandatory retirement age meant keeping Hoover on was an action. Letting it affect him and force him to retire required no action. This was undone when Bill Moyers started talking about that with the press, forcing Johnson to backpedal and keep Hoover onboard (to Johnson's annoyance).
- Kennedy would seek stronger peace overtures towards the Soviet Union and detente earlier than occurred. This detente had been tried before under Eisenhower, before the U2 ended it. It would be achieved later in the 1970s. But this was the second great period to achieve that. It was after the hostilities of the 1960s, which began with the U2 Incident and carried through Kennedy's early term and which had peaked with the Cuban Missile Crisis before rolling back with it's outcome. Kennedy wants detente, wants a comprehensive test ban treaty as part of it, wants to lower international pressure and chaos, and has the prestige and legitimacy and communication relationship with Khrushchev to do so coming off of Cuba '62. This would be his grand achievement.
- Complicating that is the similar likelihood that Khrushchev is going to be ousted. I think Kennedy could still work with Brezhnev and the OTL detente bears that out.
- Kennedy would seek rapprochement with Castro because they were already discussing that. No one was as surprised as me by that fact. In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets were wary of Cuba and Cuba was wary of the Soviets. Neither particularly wanted the other or trusted the other as a partner. Kennedy thought if he delayed normalizing relations until after 1964, he could sell it to the public. This would lessen tensions in the Americas and lessen the chaos of Cuba as a proactive player in Communist insurgencies globally and especially in the Americas. It would also lessen the American assumption that Castro was behind every left wing effort in the Americas.
- Complicating that is Santo Domingo and Brazil. I don't know how Santo Domingo would play out and I'm not sure how Brazil would play out in this scenario. Kennedy was not above coups as an idea. The context is important: the coups were not simply the CIA giving money and making the coups happen at their dictate and direction. It is close, but no Cuban cigar. The coups were generally already against the backdrop of a chaotic situation of some shade with domestic problems and resentments, talk of a coup already in their national militaries, while the US was also upset with the current leadership. This is where the US role gets murky in Brazil or Vietnam. The US took advantage of domestic affairs, put pressure on those affairs (big asterisk here for what that means and the culpability of it) and reassured US support would continue. The US effort in Brazil was going to be Operation Brother Sam, which began but was not needed because the Brazilian military wrapped up the coup before the US military was needed.
- Castro may not like that. Even if the US plays less of a role or no overt role, Castro may still assume overt and direct US involvement. Or Kennedy may back off it and it may not happen regardless or be delayed or lessened.
- Vietnam: I would not be able to give proper enough length to that here. I would not because it was a real war, with men and women killed and injured. I would not because it was a real hurt to real people, physically and spiritually. I would not because with all that as true, it is not intellectual and detached: it is real and emotional and flairs individuals passion. Vietnam is the black box of my statement that sometimes, this all says more about us than it does the topic being discussed. An alternative Vietnam must be discussed as itself and too often, by the optimists it became the proverbial middle finger by a Flower Power Christ Kennedy to a Lyndon Johnson that never would have been, or a resentful "it still happened or it happens even worse" by the people personally irate at the Camelot mythology.
- Kennedy would frankly prefer Vietnam did not exist. He felt Berlin, Cuba, etc were greater concerns. He was wary of the Vietnamese government and it's failures. That was all exacerbated by the insanity the Diem regime pursued in 1963.
- My opinion is that the 1963 Withdrawal order is an absolute red herring of the administration with Vietnam. It is a symptom but not what is really in play here. It was to give Kennedy leverage in what he would really do with Vietnam by getting it out of press focus and to make it look like the US was doing something. It gave red meat for optics, while the reality would be given a free hand. And that free hand was "we'll cross that bridge when we get to it". That does not mean the OTL war. What that does mean is dealing with the situation as and in the way it presented itself, it's options and it's opportunities
- I do not see John Kennedy making an Americanized war with half a million troops put in place with the excuse of a Gulf of Tonkin incident that turned out to be either partially or outright false. Or even if partially true was not warranting of a massive ground war directed by US bodies and effort, nakedly and openly. I don't see that in Kennedy's personality or past actions. If you have time, look into the "Virtual JFK" documentary.
- I think Kennedy would have not wanted to see South Vietnam fall but at the same time he would not want to have to US tied directly to the albatross of a war that the South Vietnamese would need to win themselves, which they were not thus far. Direct involvement means absolute responsibility for every failure or success with total public and media attention which would limit flexibility and demand and dictate rather than allow actions. There's the hell of it.
- I think Kennedy would want Vietnamization and peace with honor in whatever way he could get it. I have argued in the past and still do that Kennedy would have sent aid and supply and advisers, but would not directly involve US military war efforts in Vietnam.
- The hell of it is Diem is dead and gone. Diem is dead and gone because he was basically committing suicide with his corruptions, provocations, oppression of the Buddhist majority and embarrassment to the US in all of that. How much media attention it was getting and Madame Nhu touring the US was another serious problem. There was no way Diem would stay. But you end up with a new bad without him: a revolving door of leaders. That doesn't mean the US makes it Korean War II. That does mean the situation is now different and "we must cross that bridge".
- This gets into the tapestry. Everything I mentioned is interconnected and the problem is we must not only understand Vietnam in the larger context but the larger alternative context. Vietnam is easy to become myopic on because it screams and gets itself into trouble every way it can. It distracts. It's chaos is by nature impermanent but in action seems permanent despite that impermanence. It has that quality both in historicity and in alternate history discussion.
- Normalize relations with Cuba, detente with the USSR, and whether overtly or by passive happenstance, neutralize the situations of support in Vietnam and Cuba between the USSR and US to withdrawal a combat focus from those theaters and pressure a normalizing / acceptance of current realities by the domestic forces there. Wait out the revolving door of generals, keep involvement on a low boil, and shift the realities in the region by the global rather than local balance of power. Keep it off the front page, get out from under direct support when you can and whatever happens three years after whatever you did doesn't matter.
We don't know. We have some of the women who have talked about it (which then gets into the matter of evidence versus hearsay), but it is impossible to say without a literal record. If you wanted my opinions: less than you may think as a legend, more than you would reasonably think if you took into account realism, and as much but only as much as could be possible for an actual man with a life and a job.
Could you provide a source? I say this because the problem of this type of history is it is tabloid history. It does not mean it is wrong. What it does mean is that it is hearsay down the line, often without cited sources, and often where the sources that do cite a source are a source that cited a source that cited a source on and on down the rabbit hole to a source that is very flimsy. That is a problem with mainstream history books as well, but gets very rough in this area as there is less basis to be academic (and true) and more basis is assumptions of a juicy legend.
I've never found a good source for Monroe, but that does not mean it is wrong. I do not believe the RFK version, though. Robert Kennedy was very, very Catholic, and he was more his mother's son than his father's. He however did have the Kennedy libido, but that meant 11 children rather than a string of affairs.
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Apropos Marilyn Monroe, this article was my source: https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/john-kennedy-marilyn-monroe-affair.
With regards to a JFK second term, I basically agree with everything you said. I find it hard to believe that the same President who let the Bay of Pigs Invasion fail rather than invade Cuba, and the same President who was literally the only man at many EXCOMM meetings who wanted a peaceful solution to the Cuban Missile Crisis, would have committed the US to a ground war in Vietnam. During the Cuban Missile Crisis JFK defied nearly his entire cabinet and leading Congressional leaders in rejecting their advice to invade Cuba, whereas LBJ was one of the hawks who supported taking out the missiles through military force. That being said, JFK was no dove and I don't see him fully withdrawing the US from Vietnam. It is more likely he would do what Nixon did, namely that he would gradually withdraw US troops while training the South Vietnamese army and focusing on getting a ceasefire agreement that would save face. (But he would not invade Cambodia or carpet bomb Vietnam). If JFK was really that dedicated to pursuing additional treaties with the USSR, he would likely see a ground war in Vietnam as a major stumbling block to that. (IOTL, the Vietnam War prevented LBJ from being able to get a new treaty with the USSR). So in his calculating view of the world, JFK would not want Saigon to fall but he would be willing to sacrifice Saigon for his other goal of breaking new ground with the Soviets. Saigon likely falls in 1967 or so, but countless lives would be spared and people would not be chanting, "Hey, Hey JFK, how many kids did you kill today?" Then there are the many public and private statements indicating he didn't intend to fight a direct ground war in Vietnam, including these remarks at JFK's last press conference on November 14, 1963, "The purpose of the meeting at Honolulu, which Ambassador Lodge will be there, General Harkins will be there, and others, Secretary McNamara and others, and then later, as you know, Ambassador Lodge will come here- is to attempt to assess the situation--what American policy should be, and what our aid policy should be, how we can intensify the struggle, how we can bring Americans out of there. Now, that is our object, to bring Americans home, permit the South Viet Namese to maintain themselves as a free and independent country, and permit democratic forces within the country to operate, which they can, of course, much more freely when they are solved from the inside, and when the manipulation from the North is ended. So the purpose of the meeting in Honolulu is how to pursue these objectives." Link: https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives...-kennedy-press-conferences/news-conference-64
As far as the 1964 election is concerned, I think JFK would actually go ahead with debating Goldwater. Goldwater enjoyed substantial support in 1963, so JFK may see the debates as an "ace in the hole" that would allow him to defeat Goldwater through personal charisma. The contrast between the dashing young President and the severe, grouchy Goldwater would be just as stark in 1964 as the contrast between JFK and Nixon was in 1960. Goldwater would do better than he did against Johnson, but Kennedy would easily defeat Goldwater due to his personal charm as well as the peace and prosperity that the nation enjoyed in 1964.
If JFK, like Reagan, is wounded in Dallas but survives then he would return to Washington, DC as a national hero. Like Reagan, it would be easier for him to pass his domestic agenda so he may be able to enact a tax cut and the Civil Rights Act in 1964. But if those bills do not pass in 1964, then they would pass in 1965 when Kennedy has the same liberal Congressional majority that enabled Johnson to pass the Great Society. Kennedy would also pass Medicare and Medicaid. The Republicans make a resurgence in the 1966 elections, but to a lesser extent if there is no ground war in Vietnam. JFK may pass a new arms treaty with the Soviets in his second term. By 1968, JFK would be a mostly popular President although conservatives would blame him for the fall of Saigon and the rioting that occurred in the late 1960s. Assuming that JFK keeps Lyndon Johnson on the ticket in 1964, LBJ would stand a good chance of defeating Richard Nixon in 1968.