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Affairs, American Government, American Politics, campaigns, Government, history, JFK, John F. Kennedy, Kennedys, Lem Billings, Love, Mark Dalton, Mussolini, politicians, politics, President, sex, William Walton, women
“Jack’s greatest success in his first two years at Harvard was in winning friends and proving to be ‘a lady’s man’…
Jack’s discovery that girls liked him or that he had a talent for charming them gave him special satisfaction… ‘I can’t help it,’ he declared with evident self-pleasure [in a letter to an adolescent friend] . ‘It can’t be my good looks because I’m not much handsomer than anybody else. It must be my personality.’…
Jack’s easy conquests compounded the feeling that, like the member of a privileged aristocracy, of a libertine class, he was entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly, even gratefully, from the object of his immediate affection. Furthermore, there did not have to be a conflict between private fun and public good. David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne, a 1939 biography of Queen Victoria’s prime minister, depicted young British aristocrats performing heroic feats in the service of queen and country while privately practicing unrestrained sexual indulgence with no regard for the conventional standards of monogamous marriages or premarital courting. Jack would later say that it was one of his two favorite books.
One woman reporter remembered that Jack ‘didn’t have to lift a finger to attract women; they were drawn to him in battalions.’ After Harvard, when he spent a term in the fall of 1940 at Stanford (where, unlike at Harvard, men and women attended classes together), he wrote Lem Billings: ‘Still can’t get use to the co-eds but am taking them in my stride. Expect to cut one out of the herd and brand her shortly, but am taking it very slow as do not want to be known as the beast of the East.’
But restraint was usually not the order of the day. He had so many women, he could not remember their names; ‘Hello, kid,’ was his absentminded way of greeting a current amour. Stories are legion — no doubt, some the invention of imagination, but others most probably true — of his self-indulgent sexual escapades. ‘We have only fifteen minutes,’ he told a beautiful co-ed invited to his hotel room during a campaign stop in 1960. ‘I wish we had time for some foreplay,’ he told another beauty he dated in the 1950s… At a society party in New York he asked the artist William Walton how many women in the gathering of socialites he had slept with. When Walton gave him ‘a true count,’ Jack said, ‘Wow, I envy you.’ Walton replied: ‘Look, I was here earlier than you were.’ And Jack responded, ‘I’m going to catch up.'”
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Again from Dallek’s great biography, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, this excerpt pulled from chapter 2 (“Privileged Youth”).
navigator1965 said:
Interesting post, jr. Womanizing is a narcissistic trait. Is it exclusively a narcissistic trait?
Regardless, I am reminded of my father’s favourite saying: “Sometimes even one is too many.” I never understood what he meant until I was married. I am pleased to report that both he and my mother remain happily married into their ’70s.
jrbenjamin said:
There is an element of narcissism, certainly, or at least the need to feel affection. Though Freudian analyses of intense sexual drives can be overwrought; the fact is, it’s a basic desire that is innate.
One of the real charms of Dallek’s book is that he delves into the psychological drives of JFK’s sex life. In the beginning, Dallek argued, it stemmed from a compulsive desire to emulate his father and beat his older brother (who was not much of a womanizer compared to Jack, but who was Jack’s superior as measured by almost any other metric).
However — and this is crucial — Dallek argues that as Jack became President, his sexual drive functioned as a means of release and distraction from the intense pressures and anxieties of his office.
Another point, which should not be dismissed, and that Dallek emphasizes, is that Jack had seen early death, in his brother and sister. He was also very sickly. His manic desire for sexual intercourse could also have been a function of his feeling that he didn’t have much time, and that he should indulge his passion. Freud called this thanatos/eros: the death/life instincts.
Or, as Eliot bluntly phrased it: “Life is birth, copulation, and death”.
Thanks for reading and commenting. Cheers to you and your parents.
navigator1965 said:
And thanks to you in return for your superb response.
john said:
A philandering President, who’d have thought it possible?! It is probably necessary to give some consideration and allowance to the mores of the day and of his social class. (Think FDR.) However, while social standards change, the basic attitude with which one treats one’s spouse does not, I think. The way JFK treated Jackie is probably the issue that I most hold against his legacy. How she went on loving him so much is more a testament to her than to him. (Wow, I just realized…again, think FDR.) Is JFK’s relationship with Jackie something you are going to cover, JR?
Food,Photography & France said:
I like William Walton’s line:)