John F. Kennedy Was a Sex Addict
John F. Kennedy liked telling anybody who would listen: “If I don’t have sex every day, I get a headache“. His short stint in office, tragically cut short by an assassin, is often romantically referred to as “the thousand days”. However, “the thousand nights” would be just as apt: the man was pretty much a satyr from Ancient Greek mythology come to life. Lacking anything resembling self-control, JFK celebrated his spellbinding inaugural address by having sex with a Hollywood star, then went on to seduce dozens of more women in the ensuing years.
Kennedy was obsessed with sex from an early age. He lost his virginity as a teenager in a Harlem whorehouse, and from that day on, women were seldom far from his mind. His insatiable urge for sexual conquests was fueled by an array of traumas rattling inside his head: his father’s conspicuous adulteries; issues with his mother; his ill health; a close brush with death during World War II; and the deaths of a brother and sister. They all combined in a complex mental brew to make JFK a compulsive womanizer.
Among his less serious dalliances before he became famous were affairs with a former Miss Europe, Inga “Binga” Arvad, whom the FBI suspected of being a German spy, and textile heiress Frances Cannon. Cannon went on to marry a New Yorker magazine writer named John Hersey, who did a story on PT-109 that made Kennedy nationally famous, put him on the map as a World War II hero, and set the stage for his political career.
As a Congressman in the 1940s and 1950s, Kennedy indiscriminately sampled from a smorgasbord of women, running a gamut that included accomplished women, strippers, socialites, secretaries, and airline stewardesses. He was in it for the sex, not the intimacy. As one of his lovers described him, Kennedy was “nice – considerate in his own way, witty and fun. But he gave off light instead of heat. Sex was something to have done, not to be doing. He wasn’t in it for the cuddling“.
Unlike many who sow wild oats in their youths, then slow things down as they mature, JFK followed an opposite track: he became increasingly more promiscuous, reckless, and insatiable as he aged. Even marrying the stunningly beautiful and elegant Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953, and getting elected to the US Senate that same year, did not slow him down. Kennedy continued his reckless pursuit of extramarital affairs, any of which could have blown into a scandal at any moment, and blown away his presidential ambitions, or crippled his presidency after he got elected. Even in his relatively brief time in the White House, he had affairs running the gamut from a 19-year-old intern, to a mob-connected socialite, to Marilyn Monroe.