Could JFK's Womanizing Have Led To A Major Scandal?

Cook

Banned
Only because the women involved were spies or informants for the Soviets.
That was not the case with the Profumo affair; John Profumo was brought down purely from the scandal of having an affair with a ‘party girl*’, there was no espionage. Christine Keeler never commited any crime, nor was she even remotely involved in espionage; her only crime, if you could call it that, was poor choice in who she had sex with.


*She liked to party, not party in the political sense.
 
I believe there's a story in which Johnson is in the middle of an interview and just whips his cock out and tells her "I'm the goddamn President of the United States, suck my dick." or something fairly close to that.

The historians I rely on for my LBJ goodness, Robert Caro, Robert Dalek and Randall Woods, they write that he used to urinate in the kitchen sink of his congressional office with only a thin screen between him and his female staffers; he used to take out his apendage and show it to male friends visiting from Texas; and he used to give orders to his (all male) Cabinet officers through an open door while sitting on the toilet.

Intimidating a hostile woman journalist like you just described, I think that has a ring of Colbertian truthiness around it, at best.

Also, even if it's true, it doesn't go to the fact of LBJ never having anonymous sexual relationships.
 
What if the woman became pregnant? Could that be big enough to hurt Kennedy? OTL, about 80 years before an illegitimate child scandal almost derailed Grover Cleveland.
 
What if the woman became pregnant? Could that be big enough to hurt Kennedy? OTL, about 80 years before an illegitimate child scandal almost derailed Grover Cleveland.

A distinct point, and public sexual mores in the 1880's were considerably more restrictive than the early 1960's. Cleveland saved his candidacy, IIRC, because (1) he came clean about his affair reasonably soon and (2) his fiance, Frances Folsom, spoke up publicly in his support.

If the woman in question were pregnant, that might also change things, especially if she gave birth and tests proved the paternity of the child.
 
Or, another way to make the scandal big enough to be news even in the 1960s, would be if the woman he cheated on was married to someone else.
 
Maybe lonely housewife with JFK, pregnant or not. Husband violent, tries to kill JFK. Shots fired but miss, media must cover story, and it comes all comes out. But how to get a parade of girls...
 
If the pre Watergate press started probing Kennedy's affair might they start looking into other's affairs.Might we get this piece of post Watergate morality earlier.
 
Let's not overlook...

Or, another way to make the scandal big enough to be news even in the 1960s, would be if the woman he cheated on was married to someone else.

Let's up the ante still more: Marilyn is discovered to be pregnant, and the news leaks out before anyone can cover it up. Later it's found that JFK is the only man who was around her at the appropriate time, and that the witnesses refuse to stay quiet and/or can't be silenced.
:eek:
 

katchen

Banned
It is ironic to think that if Marylyn Monroe had gone public with her affair with JFK, she might have forced his resignation from the Presidency--but saved both their lives. If Marylyn was murdered, then going public would have made her murder politically useless. If IOTL, Marylyn's death WAS suicide, Marylyn going public would have been an affirmative act that would have made suicide less likely. And if JFK had to resign, he would not have gone to Dallas on November 22, 1963.

I don't know if LBJ would have been able to break the Southern filibuster on the 1964 Civil Rights Act without the Kennedy Martyr factor, though. And if he hadn't, the 60s would have been a much more tumultuous time with demonstrations continuing on equal accomodations and racial discrimination at the same time that they started on the Vietnam War. It would have been especially tumultuous if a Republican, even Barry Goldwater managed to win the White House in 1964 and no civil rights or voting rights bill.
 
In regards to the aforementioned Mary Pinchot Meyer, she is believed to have turned on JFK in more ways than one. Timothy Leary may have provided her with LSD (legal then) and/or marijuana, which she used on JFK. (Of course, she may have gotten some from other sources. Her husband, Cord Meyer, was in the employ of the CIA. (Even more interestingly, Cord Meyer knew Timothy Leary in the past, when both were members of the American Veterans' Committee.))
 
This thread has taken a turn. Rometsch is the only way, but she was involved with several members of Congress as well.
 
The historians I rely on for my LBJ goodness, Robert Caro, Robert Dalek and Randall Woods, they write that he used to urinate in the kitchen sink of his congressional office with only a thin screen between him and his female staffers; he used to take out his apendage and show it to male friends visiting from Texas; and he used to give orders to his (all male) Cabinet officers through an open door while sitting on the toilet.

Intimidating a hostile woman journalist like you just described, I think that has a ring of Colbertian truthiness around it, at best.

Also, even if it's true, it doesn't go to the fact of LBJ never having anonymous sexual relationships.

I might have simply misremembered parts of the story myself. I flip-flopped a lot on whether I liked or hated LBJ when I was still a newbie to the history thing.
 
This thread has taken a turn. Rometsch is the only way, but she was involved with several members of Congress as well.

That's the thing: one big leak dominoes into the Samson effect, ending this media system and perhaps a few careers along the way.
 
That's the thing: one big leak dominoes into the Samson effect, ending this media system and perhaps a few careers along the way.


Quite so, about the career-ending aspect. And you do realize, don't you, who is likely to emerge as Mr. Clean once JFK, LBJ, and others are taken down? None other than Richard Nixon.

Oh, sure, there will be those who point out that no woman would want to be involved with Nixon, but that won't matter: suddenly he'll be perceived as a boy scout (at least in this regard), and a shoo-in for the presidency. What happens after that is up for grabs, though: it all depends whether or not there's an opportunity for analog of Watergate, and whether or not someone in his administration takes a step back and asks, "Are you crazy?", effectively knocking such an idea into a cocked hat.
 
What if the woman became pregnant? Could that be big enough to hurt Kennedy? OTL, about 80 years before an illegitimate child scandal almost derailed Grover Cleveland.

Or, another way to make the scandal big enough to be news even in the 1960s, would be if the woman he cheated on was married to someone else.

See what I posted previously.

Nelson Rockefeller got his close friend's wife pregnant, and while it raised a few eyebrows, he went on to be re-elected Governor of New York State and later became Vice President.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Rockefeller

"The rapidity of it all—he gets a divorce, she gets a divorce—and the indication of the break-up of two homes."

Different times; they didn't call them the Swinging Sixties for nothing.
 
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Really?

To be blunt, these claims (which I don't think I've ever heard before) only make LBJ comparable to JFK if we ignore the fact there's a large volume of accounts of Kennedy having anonymous sex, but no such claims about Johnson. Maybe Johnson thought he had bested Kennedy in teh sexing of staffers and political hangers on, but that's not really JFK's entire field of play...

I was a little surprised that Dalek excerpted portions of letters that young Jack had written on football team trips, because that's solid evidence for him engaging in sexual activity with women whose names he never bothered learning, or at least quickly forgot. So it's now 'respectable' to assume he may never have changed this MO during his lifetime.

Also, is there even an 'other end of the spectrum' for JFK's extra-marital relationships--i.e. did he have any serious mistresses, from his own social caste, whom he might have considered settling into unofficial marriage with if he'd prematurely left politics, all while still officially married to Jackie? 'Cos biographers point to two women Johnson might have conceivably left Lady Bird for if he'd tanked in the 1948 senate election; Alice Glass and Helen Gahagan Douglas.

I've only ever read of one longterm-ish Kennedy girlfriend who was his social equal. Mary Pinchot Meyer.

I'll contribute to this with a response which it is important to note is intellectual and not emotionalist or protective: So what?

I grant you his prolific sexual escapades, as I did in the post you replied to. But I reiterate that men of Kennedy's era in power, and really any power (corporate, political, etc) were very much womanizers with a string of mistresses and dalliances and assorted extramarital affairs. Nelson Rockefeller died in what was most likely the midst of sex with a mistress for goodness sake. So as prolific as Kennedy was in his sexual escapades, in context it really isn't all that grand...at least compared to the populist notion of Kennedy having affairs as something no one else was doing. It's like Kennedy was playing football and was one of the best players. If there's no football team and he's alone and just tackling people to the ground in the hallway, that's one thing, but when there's an organized sport going on then it is another.

And the fact of the matter is, it doesn't amount to a hill of beans. The media of this era in the United States was not the scandal media we saw around the Watergate years and since then. They would have left his sexual dalliances alone. And the fact is that sex in Washington in that era is like Jenga: Kennedy may be doing it and it may harm him, but so are at least a large amount of the Senators and the Congressmen, if not most of them bodily capable of it. What is there to save them? That was a problem that even affected modern politics during the Clinton scandal. The GOP, with a Lee Atwater era fanaticism went after Clinton. That fanaticism also seemed to make them forget themselves because it then came out how all these Republicans crying foul on Clinton and damning him were themselves have extramarital affairs.

The concept of "Marilyn's Baby: The Ruin of Kennedy" is a very interesting one, I grant you, and I would myself read that timeline were someone to make it. However, it's easier said than done to have a sex scandal in America in the 1960s. Perhaps the only way to do it would be to have that "Marilyn's Baby" scenario. If certain biographies are true about her (and I'm not sure they are) she was an emotionally chaotic person with certain psychological issues who could have vindictively not left Kennedy alone and sought to bring him down...if the stories about his affair with her are true. That reminds me about the insane woman Charlie Chaplin was involved with in the 1950s who had a baby after he broke up with her, she claimed it was his, and destroyed him with negative publicity in the subsequent court proceedings. But I don't know if it's in Marilyn Monroe's character to do that, and I'd lean towards it not being so.
How Kennedy would deal with a bastard child, I'm honestly not too sure about. Pushing for and securing an abortion is a possibility, but I'm honestly not sure something as frankly wicked as that'd be would be what he would do. I frankly lean towards the idea that he'd pay the woman off and/or pay to support the child and mother for a number of years, all the while keeping it covered up. It could then come out years later, or could never come out.

On a quick note related to that last point, there have been people that came out and claimed that they were JFK's love child in recent years. These people have been debunked or are otherwise not very trustworthy. The one most likely man, who bears a strong resemblance to JFK, had a hair test which proved he was not JFK's son and subsequently blasted off about how there was a giant Texan conspiracy involving LBJ murdering Kennedy that he knew about, which makes it all the less likely he is JFK's love child since the LBJ conspiracy is the least believable.
 
As you say, there was a gentlemans agreement. Remember at the time having discreet mistresses was acceptable for upper class men

Was on this side of the pond too; but that didn't prevent it from coming all out in the wash when there was a serious political aspect to it, to whit, when John Profumo, a fully paid-up member of the establishment, was sleeping with a Soviet spy's bit on the side. The notion that the same thing could not have happened to Kennedy over Ellen Rometsch (or any other politically implicating bonk of his choice) is, to my mind, tenuous.

That was not the case with the Profumo affair; John Profumo was brought down purely from the scandal of having an affair with a ‘party girl*’,

No, John Profumo was brought down because he was the Minister for War and he was engaged in an unwitting ménage a trois with a Soviet naval attache. There was a serious potential - though as it turned out, baseless - question over national security. It was a serious scandal and wasn't centred around the simple fact of Profumo having an illicit bonk. If that had been the case, it would without a shadow of a doubt have never got out, any more than Hugh Gaitskell's womanising or Dorothy Macmillan's affair with Bob Boothby, or any of the other innumerable trivial sexual follies of the estsablishment did.
 
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Anonymous sex. Some of the accounts are of JFK having anonymous sex in the White House, besides the more regular extramarital sex with typists and genteel ladies who attend East Wing tea parties. Rampantly so.

FDR, LBJ, Nelson Rockefeller (okay, transpose NYS' governor's mansion for WH), Bill Clinton, they're never accused (right verb, considering we're talking Anglo history, I guess) of having anonymous sex whilst in high office. Apparently they stuck to office girls and/or genteel political fellow travellers etc.

Don't need a wall of words to contextualise that. That sure ain't relationship sex.

Now, if there's a case to be made that President Kennedy has been unfairly slandered about the sex-with-broads-he-didn't-even-look-in-the-face claims, I'll at least consider that argument; IIRC Dalek in his book doesn't bother clarifying whether or not older Jack continued the same habits of younger Jack (casual sex with 'floozies'), and I don't think a biographer gets the final word if they're not willing to go out on a limb.
 
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