J

BEWARE DESIRE

Every man has a passion gnawing away at the bottom

of his heart, just as every fruit has its worm.

—ALEXANDRE DUMAS

ohn F. Kennedy achieved indisputable greatness through stillness
in those thirteen fateful days in October 1962. The world is
forever in his debt. But we should not allow that shining moment to
obscure the fact that, like all of us, he had demons that dogged and
haunted him and undermined that same greatness—and as a result,
his stillness.
Kennedy grew up in a house where his father often brought his
mistresses home for dinner and on family vacations. It was a house
where anger and rage were common too. “When I hate some
sonofabitch,” Joseph Kennedy liked to say, “I hate him until I die.”
It’s probably not a surprise, then, that his young son would develop
his own bad habits and wrestle with controlling his urges and
appetites.
The first time Kennedy’s sex drive got him in trouble was during
the early days of World War II, when he began dating Inga Arvad, a
beautiful Dutch journalist who many suspected was a Nazi spy.
When he was running for president, he had an affair with Judith
Exner, who happened to be the girlfriend of Sam Giancana, a
Chicago mobster. But instead of suffering any consequences for
theses massive lapses of judgment, Kennedy skated away clean each
time, a fact that only escalated his risky behavior.