The President as Priapist

...Beschloss was not doing a Kitty Kelley life-and-loves catalogue about Kennedy's bedroom adventurism...

...The assignation would actually take place in rooms on the floor below the penthouse, where the chosen lady could arrive unseen by the Secret Service guards stationed outside the penthouse doors...

...The lady of choice would arrive—perhaps after a cocktail party hosted by Henry Fonda at an East Side brownstone...

...It was a significant factor in how his peers sized him up...

...He was stuttering in reply" [italics in original...

...Only a few hours earlier, the White House had received welcome news from Moscow: Khrushchev Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for the Washington Times...

...Beschloss describes another such incident at Camp David, this time involving a presidential peer...

...There is some evidence that those around Kennedy treated him with less respect than is due the American president...

...This same behavior also may have caused some of his subordinates to doubt his competence and not only to defy his leadership, but to berate him for exercising it...

...A triumphant President Kennedy had called in two members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral George Anderson and Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay...

...The historian quotes from the diary of Hervé Alphand, then French ambassador, that President Kennedy's "desires are difficult to satisfy without raising fears of scandal and its use by his political enemies...

...Then, according to Beschloss, there ensued a stunning display of rage by two military subordinates directly at their commander in chief: Admiral Anderson cried out, "We have been had...

...Kennedy's sex exploits often occurred in New York's Carlyle Hotel on Madison Ave...

...missile bases in Turkey without consultation of either NATO or Turkey...

...The entourage of White House correspondents who traveled with the president would be informed at a late afternoon briefing by Pierre Salinger that "the lid was on," and they were free to disport themselves as they pleased because there would be no breaking news or official announcements...

...would remove the nuclear missiles he had installed in Cuba...

...What is of importance is that from all the evidence we have, Kennedy made no systematic effort to ensure, by security investigation or otherwise, that all of the women with whom he was involved lacked the motive or the ability to use evidence of their relationship to blackmail him on behalf of a hostile government or organization...

...There has been little talk, though, about how reckless behavior may have affected his ability to function as chief executive...

...Turn, for example, to the marvelous narrative history published in 1991 by Michael R. Beschloss—The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev 1960-1963—which contains many eye-opening interviews with participants in the crisis years...

...Following the humbling 1961 Bay of Pigs misadventure, President Kennedy held a private meeting with his predecessor...

...Khrushchev's blink meant that the U.S...

...Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower listened to the explanations of why the invasion of Cuba had failed...

...This might happen one day, because he does not take sufficient precautions in this Puritan country...

...We should invade today...

...BY ARNOLD BEICHMAN ALL THE TALK about President Kennedy and his sexual exploits with a White House intern is full of leers and jeers and smutty comparisons to President Clinton...

...Kennedy stayed in the Carlyle's huge penthouse with a magnificent view of Central Park from its wall-sized picture window...

...Could it be because they perceived him as the priapist he was and were contemptuous...

...The full story of Kennedy the pri-apist will never be known, because those who know rarely talk, and those who talk do not know the whole story...

...I can add something from personal knowledge—as told to me by the late Arthur J. Goldberg, then secretary of labor...

...He thanked them, in the president's words, "for your advice and your counsel and your behavior during this very, very difficult period...

...McNa-mara looked at Kennedy and noticed that "he was absolutely shocked...

...So far as we know, there was no blackmail or scandal during the Kennedy years...

...Whether the President wished to sleep with women not his wife," he wrote, "does not concern the historian of his diplomacy...

...airstrike against Cuba planned for the following Tuesday could now be canceled...

...But there is a reason that responsible historians will be unable to avoid discussing President Kennedy's reckless sex life...

...and East 76th Street, where he could enjoy the privacy not available at the White House...

...Beschloss found disquieting evidence that Kennedy's womanizing troubled statesmen like British prime minister Harold Macmillan...

...The risk of a superpower global confrontation was over at least for a time, although, as Beschloss points out, quite a price was paid by Kennedy to The latest revelations came from a 1964 interview with a White House aide, uncovered by historian Robert Dallek and recently unsealed by the JFK Library Khrushchev for that victory: a pledge not to invade Cuba and unilateral removal of U.S...

...Prime Minister Macmillan felt that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty had been badly negotiated with Chairman Khrushchev by President Kennedy because he was "weakened by constantly having all those girls, every day...

...He then upbraided President Kennedy in barracks language for not supplying the essential air cover and concluded with this rather contemptuous guideline: "I believe there is only one thing to do when you go into this kind of thing: It must be a success...

...For example, on Sunday, October 28, 1962, a startling event occurred in the Cabinet Room of the White House...

...General LeMay pounded the table: "It's the greatest defeat in our history, Mr...

...Kennedy would then pop down a back staircase and return at his leisure to the presidential bedroom in the penthouse...