恶人谷

He was romantic, sharing late-night dinners with her and putting love songs on the record player, and he was sexually sadistic, asking her to perform sexual services on his friend Dave Powers—the president's “leprechaun”—which she once did (while JFK stood in the pool and watched), to her everlasting regret. Sometimes he treated her like the debutante she was, begging her to sing a Miss Porter's School song and teasing her for dating a Williams boy; and sometimes he treated her like the kept woman she had become, peeling off $300 and telling her, “Go shopping and buy yourself something fantastic.”

Throughout the marriage, John always had girls: there were girlfriends and comfort girls; call girls and showgirls; girls on the campaign trail and girls who seemed to materialize out of thin air wherever he was. There was also the occasional wife of a friend, or the aging paramour of his randy pop, for those moments when the fancy ran to mature horseflesh or masculine competition. His penchant for prostitutes demoralized the agents assigned to protect him: “You were on the most elite assignment in the Secret Service,” the former agent Larry Newman told a television interviewer a decade ago, “and you were there watching an elevator door, because the president was inside with two hookers.” Mimi Alford describes a JFK who once asked her to service his friend (and his “baby brother,” Teddy, though she refused), who took her to a sex party and forced drugs on her, and who callously had a functionary line her up with an abortionist when she thought she was pregnant, and yet Janet Maslin can write, accurately, in her New York Times review of Once Upon a Secret, that there's “not a lot of news” in the book.

It's impossible to think Jackie had no idea that any of this was taking place. Once while giving a Paris Match reporter a tour of the White House, she passed by Fiddle’s desk and remarked—acidly, and in French—“This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband.” Moreover, she was one of the worldliest women of the 20th century, no stranger to the variety of sexual experiences that so often shaped the lives of bored aristocrats. Her father was a chronic cheater, and her mother later became the third wife of a notorious lady-killer. By means of this second marriage, Jackie became a sort of stepsister and a close pal of Gore Vidal, one of the few people who could explain completely the nature of her husband’s sexuality, as it was so much like his own: “Neither [of us] was much interested in giving pleasure to his partner,” he wrote in Palimpsest. “Each wanted nothing more than orgasm with as many attractive partners as possible.”

It is, of course, possible to see the two of them in a distinctly unflattering light, as a couple of pampered children of very rich men, whose highest calling was toward their own best interests and constant diversion. She was a shopaholic who loved to party and ride horses and vacation in the most happening ports of call, to settle her boyish, perfectly dressed frame into well-upholstered chairs with her pack of Salems and her glass of champagne and to exercise her savage gifts for mimicry and comic malice. She was no fan of Martin Luther King Jr., that “phony,” that “tricky” person. “I just can’t see a picture of him,” she told Schlesinger, without thinking, “That man's terrible.” Jack had told her of Hoover's tape of King arranging an orgy (later Bobby also told her “of the tapes of these orgies they have”), a predilection that, tellingly, had scandalized Mrs. Kennedy far more than her husband. Her regard for “that freedom march thing” is clearly low, while her voice thrums with excitement when she's describing good furniture and good food.

As for John Kennedy—what did he do for us? He started the Peace Corps and the Vietnam War. He promised to put a man on the moon, and he presided over an administration whose love affair with assassination was held in check only by its blessed incompetence at pulling off more of them. (“That administration,” said LBJ—painted birds long forgotten, the mists of Camelot beginning to clear—“had been operating a damned Murder, Inc.”) He fought for a tax break the particulars of which look like the product of a Rush Limbaugh fever dream, he almost got us all killed during his “second Cuba” (writing of JFK and the missile crisis, Christopher Hitchens noted: “Only the most servile masochist … can congratulate [Kennedy] on the ‘coolness’ with which he defused a ghastly crisis almost entirely of his own making”), and he brought organized crime into contact with the highest echelons of American power. More than anyone else in American history, perhaps, he had a clear vision of what his country could do for him.