Latest news with #Taraborrelli
Yahoo
11-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Jackie Kennedy Hired a ‘Spy' in the President's Office for Details About ‘Suspicious Calls' to JFK
When John F. Kennedy became the president of the United States in 1961, his wife, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, made sure someone in the West Wing was on her side. The new book JFK: Public, Private, Secret by J. Randy Taraborrelli, published on Tuesday, July 15, revealed that Jackie 'installed a spy' in the office of her husband's secretary Evelyn Lincoln 'to keep her abreast of any suspicious calls.' The alleged spy spoke anonymously to Taraborrelli in 2024 and confirmed that she was 'hired by the White House' at Jackie's suggestion. 'Jackie's instructions to her, she said, were simple: 'Just keep me posted of anything that perks your ears,'' the woman apparently recalled to Taraborrelli. Jackie Kennedy Allegedly Confronted JFK About Rumored Marilyn Monroe Affair One woman who kept calling at the time was allegedly Judith Campbell, whom JFK had met through Frank Sinatra. In fact, Campbell had a past with the blue-eyed singer, according to the book. While JFK apparently met Campbell before his presidency began, the book claimed she was around more than once after he took office. In 1976, Campbell became 'the first prominent woman to claim publicly to have had an affair' with JFK. The book detailed many of the former president's alleged marital indiscretions — noting that Jackie was aware what was going down — but Taraborrelli noted that JFK liked Campbell because she apparently reminded him of flight attendant Joan Lundberg. Details from Lundberg's unpublished memoir were featured in Taraborrelli's new biography, revealing that she met JFK at a bar in August 1956. The following month, he returned, and they allegedly had 'wild' sex. JFK's alleged September 1956 rendezvous with Lundberg came after Jackie gave birth to their stillborn daughter, Arabella. When JFK returned home, Jackie questioned him about Lundberg. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Family Guide: His Siblings, Kids, Wives and More 'He explained that Joan was someone he'd met in Los Angeles,' Taraborrelli's book reads. 'Joan is vague in her unpublished memoir about how much Jack told Jackie, only that he told her pretty much everything.' At one point during their affair, Lundberg revealed she was pregnant. JFK sent $400 for her to get an abortion — which she did. JFK and Jackie were married from 1953 until his death in 1963. The former president was assassinated at age 46 in November of that year during a trip to Dallas. Jackie died at age 64 in May 1994 following a battle with cancer. Along with their stillborn daughter, Arabella, JFK and Jackie were the parents of daughter Caroline, 67, son John Jr. (who died in 1999) and son Patrick (who died shortly after he was born.) JFK: Public, Private, Secret is out now. Solve the daily Crossword
Fox News
27-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Marilyn Monroe 'could be trouble,' Jackie Kennedy warned JFK: author
It is widely believed that Jackie Kennedy was no stranger to President John F. Kennedy's infidelities. But when it came to Marilyn Monroe, it was different, which is why she allegedly confronted her husband. The claim was made by J. Randy Taraborrelli, who has written a new biography about the 35th president, "JFK: Private, Public Secret." It's a follow-up to his 2023 book on the late first lady, "Jackie: Public, Private, Secret." For his latest book, Taraborrelli drew from hundreds of interviews conducted over 25 years. "Jackie cared [about Monroe]," Taraborrelli told Fox News Digital. "Jackie said to him, 'This one's different. This one could be trouble.' But JFK was the President of the United States. He was dealing with Khrushchev, communism and the potential of an atomic war. . . . I don't think Marilyn Monroe was really on his radar, to be honest, other than having her sing 'Happy Birthday' at Madison Square Garden." Taraborrelli claimed the conversation in question took place before Kennedy's birthday bash on May 19, 1962. Monroe, who had already established herself as a Hollywood sex symbol, gave a breathless rendition of "Happy Birthday" while wearing a nude-hued, skin-tight beaded gown. Jackie was not present at the festivities. Instead, she participated in the Loudoun Hunt Horse Show in Leesburg, Virginia. It was a decision Jackie's mother didn't approve of, the book claimed. "It's selfish," the matriarch told her, as quoted in the book. "Remember who you are. You are the first lady of the United States. She's just an actress." But Jackie's mind was made up. "I think the reason for her concern was because she knew her husband well, and it made sense to her, I think, that he was having an affair with Marilyn," Taraborrelli explained to Fox News Digital. Taraborrelli said Jackie "singled Marilyn out from all the others," feeling that the screen siren "could be a bigger problem." "JFK's response to that, though, was that he told her nothing was going on between him and Marilyn," said Taraborrelli. "But did she believe him? Could she believe him? Why would she believe him?" Tararborrelli continued. "… Why would she take his word for it? Jackie thinks maybe JFK is lying, but she doesn't know." Taraborrelli admitted there's "so much gray" in the story because "everyone knew a different version of events." "What we do know is that Marilyn shows up at Madison Square Garden, she sings 'Happy Birthday' to him. Jackie decides not to attend because she doesn't want to endorse it." For decades, it's been rumored that the president and the movie star had an affair. According to Hollywood lore, it's long been claimed that the pair spent a weekend at Bing Crosby's house in early 1962. For his book, Taraborrelli spoke to Pat Newcomb, who was Monroe's publicist and close friend. She told him that no meeting had ever taken place at Crosby's home. "Pat Newcomb said Marilyn Monroe told everybody all kinds of things, but she never told everybody the same thing," Taraborrelli explained. "She just did not believe that JFK and Marilyn were having an affair. And as I wrote in the book, she doesn't strike me as a person who would lie about it, not at the age of 95. I think that's what happens with people as they get older, and many of my sources for this book were in their 90s and 100s. They have a lot less reason [to lie]. Why protect Marilyn about 65 years after the fact? There's nothing that I got from Pat that made me feel like she was interested in some kind of mythology." "She said, 'Look, I don't even know where Bing Crosby lived,'" Taraborrelli shared. "… You don't think about what your friends were doing 65 years ago. But if your friend was having an affair with John F. Kennedy, the president, I think it's something that you'd remember, right? She's also Marilyn's publicist. She would've been the one to set up Marilyn going to Palm Springs to be with JFK at Bing Crosby's house." WATCH: NEW MARILYN MONROE PHOTOS TAKEN BY CLOSE FRIEND REVEALED IN BOOK Taraborrelli said he had spoken to several sources to learn whether Monroe and Kennedy had ever had a tryst. He concluded that there isn't enough evidence to support that theory. "[Pat] was pretty adamant that … it could have just been a figment of Marilyn's imagination," Taraborrelli claimed. "And here's the thing that people need to understand – Marilyn Monroe was the best narrator of her own life. . . . She often imagined a life for herself that wasn't really true. . . . And I think that's a big part of how all of this has evolved over the years." "When it came to that weekend at Bing Crosby's house, Pat Newcomb didn't know anything about that," Taraborrelli shared. "She said if it had happened, she would've known, because she was her best friend. We also looked at other sources who've told that story over the years, and we were able to debunk them." Taraborrelli does believe that at one point, Monroe called the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port in 1962 before the Madison Square Garden event. It's a claim that was previously shared in his book about Jackie. But he was adamant that despite Jackie's reported worries about the blonde bombshell, "we don't have enough evidence to support that Marilyn and JFK had an affair." According to the book, Louise "Fifi" Fell, a socialite and friend of the Kennedys, hosted a black-tie party at her New York City pad in 1962. It was there, Taraborrelli claimed, that Kennedy met Monroe. "It was a cocktail party, and Peter Lawford [actor and Rat Pack member] invited both Marilyn and JFK," Taraborrelli told Fox News Digital. "Marilyn was very, very late in getting there. JFK almost left without having met her." Six months earlier, Monroe was at a Frank Sinatra concert in Las Vegas. Kennedy's sisters, Jean and Pat, were also present. Lawford then invited Monroe to dinner at the couple's Santa Monica home in honor of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, said Taraborrelli. An excited Monroe allegedly told close friends that it was "a date" with Bobby. It was really a get-together with "at least a dozen others," Taraborrelli pointed out. Monroe died in August 1962 from a barbiturate overdose. She was 36. According to Taraborrelli, Jackie was said to be saddened by the news. "It was tragic and awful," Taraborrelli reflected. "People were just very sad that an overdose ended her life. It was a terrible, terrible thing." While Taraborrelli couldn't verify the rumor surrounding the star, he did make a surprising discovery about Kennedy. "What surprised me were the complexities of his story," Taraborrelli explained. "In this book, I didn't want to defend him … but I think you can understand him better. Towards the end of the book, he takes total accountability on his part when he tells his sister-in-law, 'The way that I treated Jackie was very painful, and by painful, I mean shameful.' That accountability surprised me. He became a man who understood the hurt caused by his actions [in their marriage]. He did everything he could to rectify it before his death." "Jackie and JFK were getting ready to renew their wedding vows," he said. "Her mother even remarked how Jackie was still so in love with JFK. And then he was murdered. It's a terrible story, but it's one of accountability and forgiveness."
Forbes
19-07-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
Not Long Before His Assasination, JFK And Jackie Kennedy Did Something Meaningful—They Finally Fell Deeply In Love, A New Book Claims
President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy ride in a parade on March 27, 1963 in ... More Washington, D.C. (Photo by National Archive/Newsmakers) The mere fact that First Lady Jackie Kennedy became a widow at 34 years old is tragic enough. But, as longtime Kennedy biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli writes in his new book JFK: Public, Private, Secret, it becomes somehow even more devastating to learn that the assassination of Jackie's husband President John F. Kennedy came at a moment in their relationship when they finally, after 10 years of marriage, were deeply in love. When the two married on September 12, 1953, 'it really was an arranged marriage, even though they didn't actually use that language,' Taraborrelli tells me. 'I mean, JFK needed a wife. He was single and he was in his thirties, and his father knew that, without a wife, he was never going to be able to be president. You needed a First Lady, so he needed a wife—and Jackie ticked off all the boxes. She's beautiful, she's cultured, she's smart, she's educated, she's charismatic, she's everything that you would want in a wife.' From Jackie's side, her mother Janet Auchincloss worried that her daughter—a ripe old 24 years old at the time of her marriage—needed to get settled, to marry and have children. Jack fit the bill for a suitable spouse. The problem? The two, as Taraborrelli put it, lacked chemistry. Today, he says, the relationship just wouldn't continue past the early dating stage, but at that time, these were two people who looked great on paper, and 'love was not in the equation.' These were two people who 'made the calculated decision that they were going to take a chance,' Taraborrelli says. 'Hopefully he would be faithful, but maybe he won't be—but at least you will be settled with somebody who has money and power. And that was really what the mandate was.' John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier sit together in the sunshine at Kennedy's family home at ... More Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, a few months before their wedding. As Jackie prepared to marry Jack, Janet asked her eldest daughter if she loved him. 'And Jackie kind of waffled on it,' Taraborrelli says, before she told her mother, 'I enjoy him'—which Taraborelli says 'tells you everything you need to know. What also tells you everything you need to know is that Janet was okay with that answer.' Their 10-year marriage was not smooth sailing. To reference an earlier point, Jack was decidedly not faithful (more on that in a moment). In 1956, the couple's first child, Arabella, was stillborn; Jack was away at the time of her birth, on vacation without his wife, and he didn't return from said vacation to be with Jackie even after such a crushing loss. It took him almost a week to get back to her, and only did so after a friend told JFK that 'if you don't get back to your wife, no woman in this country is ever going to vote for you,' Taraborrelli says. 'And that's what brought him back.' A scene from the Kennedy-Bouvier wedding on September 12, 1953 in Newport, Rhode Island. (Photo by ...) 'He was so screwed up in his mind at that time,' he adds. 'And that was the beginning of everybody sort of realizing, we've got a big problem here with this guy. He's got no empathy. He's got no emotion. He's hard as a rock, and you can't get through to him.' The problems persisted. According to JFK: Public, Private, Secret, in 1958—two years later—one of Jack's affairs, this one with Joan Lundberg, resulted in an unplanned pregnancy. Jack began his affair with Joan in the aftermath of Arabella's death, 'and nobody wanted anything to do with him,' Taraborrelli explains. 'This isn't to excuse it—I'm not defending him, but I'm explaining him. That's how it started with him and Joan. She was there. She was open. She didn't take his bullshit.' 'He's trying to figure it out, and he's doing it in a reckless way,' he continues. 'He's fallible and he's messed up and he's screwed up beyond belief, but he's trying to figure it out. And Joan was a conduit to that.' Taraborelli tells me that, because JFK was opening up to Joan, he also began to open up more to Jackie. 'She was helping him become a better person,' he says of Joan. After the birth of Jack and Jackie's daughter Caroline in 1957, Jack began to fall for Jackie in a different way. 'And before Joan realized it, he was in love with his wife, and not with her,' Taraborrelli says. 'So it's such a crazy story, but man, it's exactly what happened.' Even though Joan's pregnancy—which was ultimately terminated—was a wakeup call for Jack, his affairs didn't end in 1958. Though the dalliances were plentiful, one affair Taraborrelli refutes? The famous one with Marilyn Monroe—which Taraborrelli says 'we've gotten all of it wrong.' Marilyn Monroe sings "Happy Birthday" to President John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden for his ... More upcoming 45th birthday. 'I now don't think that there was a relationship at all,' he says. 'I just don't believe it. And I think that you have to be willing as a historian like I am to change your opinion based on the current state of research.' He tells me, 'As sources come forward and give you new information, it's incumbent upon you to then change your story. You can't be that guy who's going to be wedded to a thing that you believed 30 years ago.' The book details Jack's relationships—his romantic ones, yes, but also his familial ones, like with his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Kennedy, and his sister Rosemary, whose institutionalization deeply scarred Jack. 'I think what really surprised me, which I really didn't understand, was his torment and his conscience,' Taraborrelli says of JFK. 'For me, that was the surprise—the torment that he went through in his own psychology and trying to be a better person, and then the work he put into trying to be a better person.' Three years after winning the presidency in 1960, by the end of 1963, that work was beginning to pay dividends. Jack and Jackie were never closer after the 1963 death of their fourth child, Patrick, who died that August and whose loss 'cut him to the bone,' Taraborrelli wrote of JFK. Seven years had passed between the loss of their first child and the loss of their last, and the change in Jack was starkly evident. 'He was going through this transition, this big change, and when Patrick died, it was like the floodgates opened and he realized how wrong he had been,' Taraborelli tells me. 'He wished that he could apologize to Arabella. There's a point in the book where he tells somebody 'I wish that I could meet her to apologize for the way that I treated her and her mother.' So he was taking full accountability for his actions, and for not just Arabella, but for everything that had happened in the last seven years. And it's really an incredible story of an incredible journey.' John F. Kennedy, here as a presidential candidate, relaxes in his Boston apartment. (Photo by © ... More CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) Those last three months of their marriage were their best. Jack had actually never proposed marriage to Jackie; when they became engaged, 'it was just more like an agreement that they made in an airport lounge,' Taraborrelli says. He finally proposed—getting down on one knee and all—and they agreed to renew their wedding vows for their 11th wedding anniversary in 1964 at Hammersmith Farm, where they'd married in 1953. For their 10th anniversary in September 1963, Jack and Jackie returned to Hammersmith and were walking on the beach when Jackie's mother Janet spotted the couple, holding hands as they walked and lost in their own little world together. Janet turned to her husband (and Jackie's stepfather) Hugh Auchincloss and 'it was clear that their feelings for each other had grown,' Taraborrelli tells me. 'And Janet turned to Hugh and she said, 'My, my, it's finally happened.'' Ten years later, Jack and Jackie fell in love—and two months later, Jack was killed by an assassin's bullet in Dallas, Texas. John F. Kennedy and wife Jacqueline Kennedy arrive with advisors for split-screen telecast of the ... More presidential debate with Richard Nixon and panelists in Los Angeles and Kennedy in New York City on October 13, 1960. (Photo by) As Jackie and Janet planned the vow renewal, Janet turned to Jackie and said, 'My gosh, after everything that you've been through, you really do love him, don't you?' Taraborelli tells me he was incredibly moved by Jackie's response: 'Mummy, it's we who made him.' 'In other words, she's taking accountability, too,' he tells me. 'I mean, the book is really about taking accountability. It's about not blaming people for our messed up lives. I mean, Jackie had a bad marriage and she took accountability. My interpretation of this is that she's saying, 'I allowed him to have these other women, and you allowed me to marry him, and we allowed him to do all of this because he is JFK. And we loved him so much that we let him get away with a lot.'' 'I think that she [Jackie] would never have been able to take this next step with him if she was going to hold onto anger and blame and the past,' Taraborrelli says of the planned vow renewal. 'They really wanted to let it all go. They wanted to not hold his past behavior against him for the rest of their lives. Janet says at one point in the book, 'We are a family, and families endure. And that's what we do. We endure.'' Jack and Jackie sailing in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. (Photo by) Their renewed commitment to one another was why Jackie was there in Dallas with him on that fateful November 22, 1963. 'I think they were on such a great track, and that's why it is so tragic,' Taraborrelli says. In writing JFK: Public, Private, Secret, Taraborrelli tells me he didn't want to just write a presidential biography of JFK—that has been done. 'I wanted to give people not just the history, but the human emotions attached,' he says. After a journey through such emotional upheaval, as Jack arrives in Dallas, he truly seems a man on the precipice of real change—which makes what happened on that day in November even more painful. 'This is a story of a man who realized that he could be a better person and then worked toward that,' Taraborrelli says. 'This is a story of a person who was lacking in empathy, lacking in emotion—and finally figured it out. With the help of a good woman at his side, he did figure it out.' Taking accountability 'changed him, not only as a man, but as a leader—the kind of accountability we want in our leaders, too,' Taraborrelli says. President John F. Kennedy and Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy on the White House lawn. Who would JFK have been in 1964? No one will ever know for sure. 'What I would love to have happened would be that he would serve a second term, he would be a great president,' Taraborrelli says. 'Toward the end of his life, he and Jackie would've been happy because now he had the coping skills in place and he understood who he was, and he would've spent the rest of his life trying to make it up to his wife, and they would've had more children, and it would've been great. That's what I would love to think. But the devil's advocate version of it is do people change? Really, we don't know if Jack would have reverted back to his former self. We don't know the rest of the story because he's cut off at the redemption. And sometimes, like they say, a leopard doesn't change his spots.' 'My feeling is that we can only know what we know, and what we know is the journey to get to this point was hard-earned,' he continues. 'And that at the end of the book, there is redemption. And I like to think, just because I grew to love these characters so much in telling their stories, I like to think that they would've lived happily ever after. But life is hard, and marriage is hard. So who knows what was going to happen in the years to come, but I would love to think that they would have just continued to be happy together.' President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy stand together at the National Guard ... More Armory on November 29, 1962. Taraborrelli tells me that someone recently told him that JFK: Public, Private, Secret reads like fiction—but adds that, if it were fiction, the ending would be different. In the fictional version of Jack and Jackie's story, he says, they would renew their wedding vows, have a second term in office, and, after that term ended, move to New York City, where he would be a statesman and she would begin working for a publishing company. There would be a happily ever after. 'That's fiction,' he says. 'Real life is what really happened, which was just when he was figuring out who he was as a man, and just when she had forgiven him for all of his transgressions in the past and took accountability for them, for her participation in it, for her culpability in their bad marriage—just when they had really figured all this out, his life was taken. And it's such a terrible, terrible ending.' Beyond the Kennedys, Taraborrelli tells me that he hopes his latest book—which came out on July 15—can be a larger message for all of us still here. 'I guess what I want people to take from this book is that it's not too late to change,' he says. 'It's not too late to forgive, and it's not too late to take responsibility for your own life. And I hope that's the message that people take away from this book.'
The Guardian
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘He didn't think he was a good man': new book reveals unseen portrait of JFK
J Randy Taraborrelli has already written five books on the Kennedy family but his sixth, JFK: Public, Private, Secret, is his first that's directly about John F Kennedy, 35th US president from 1961 until his assassination in Dallas two years later. 'I have been writing about the Kennedys from Jackie's perspective for 25 years,' Taraborrelli said, referring to Jacqueline Kennedy, the first lady who lived for another 30 years after he was shot, a figure of worldwide fascination. Taraborrelli's first book about the Kennedys 'was Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot, and that was in 2000. And then I did After Camelot, which was a lot about Jackie and her marriage to [Aristotle] Onassis,' the Greek shipping tycoon, 'Camelot' the name given to the Kennedys' apparently charmed circle, in reference to the legendary court of King Arthur. 'I also did Jackie, Janet and Lee, which was about Jackie and her mom [Janet Auchincloss] and her sister [Lee Radziwill]. Two years ago, I did Jackie: Public, Private, Secret, which was Jackie, cradle to grave. When that was successful, I thought, 'It's time to tell JFK's side of the story.'' Evidently, Kennedy books sell. So do books by Taraborrelli, whose subjects have also included Diana Ross, Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Cher and Elizabeth Taylor. For JFK, he turned to the vast Kennedy archives but also his own extensive interviews, looked at anew, and new sources including Monroe's publicist, Patricia Newcomb, now 95, and Janet Des Rosiers Fontaine, once secretary and girlfriend to JFK's father, Joseph Kennedy, now 100 years old. Readers 'know what they're going to get when they read one of my books,' Taraborrelli said. 'It's not going to be … a blow-by-blow of every moment in JFK's political history. I wanted to do more of a human portrait, something people can [use to] really sort of understand this man and like him or hate him, at least.' Taraborrelli's central theme is JFK's treatment of women. 'We've always looked at JFK as this unconscionable cheating husband,' he said. 'I wanted to maybe not defend him as much as explain him, try to get into his head and tell his side of the story. This book is really a companion to Jackie: Public, Private, Secret. When you read them both, you really get a full picture of that marriage.' It's a sympathetic picture. Taraborrelli's JFK is a relentless adulterer but one who came to some realization of his weakness, through the painful consequences of his behavior, through a belatedly deepening connection to his wife, and through the trials of office. Taraborrelli said: 'The thing about JFK is that as unconscionable as his actions were, he still had a conscience, which made it even more difficult for him, because if you have no conscience, then you can just be a crappy person and you're OK with it. It's when you have a conscience that it causes problems for you internally.' JFK's behavior has certainly caused problems for his reputation. As Taraborrelli was writing, Maureen Callahan published Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, a lacerating account, ceding nothing to the trappings of glamor and power. Taraborrelli did not read it: 'If it had come out at a different time, I might have. But when books start coming out while I'm working on a book, I don't even want to know what's in them, because I don't want to inadvertently repeat the same material or be in some way influenced. 'I also made a decision early on with JFK that I did not want [the book] to be a compendium of all of his affairs … an A-through-Z list of every woman he ever slept with, because these women, many of them have written books of their own, and many of them have been interviewed for books. Their stories have been told. 'I wanted to find women that made a difference, like Joan Lundberg actually made a difference in his life. Judith Exner made a difference, though I don't believe anything she ever said about anything. She was there, you know. Mary Meyer made a difference. Marilyn Monroe makes a difference, historically if not personally.' Whether JFK had an affair with Monroe is part of a conspiracy-laced legacy fueled by Kennedy's policies and presidency, his proximity to organized crime (in part through Exner, also involved with a Chicago mobster), and his assassination, all of it fuel for a thriving publishing industry of labyrinthine what-ifs. Taraborrelli says he has no wish to join it. He deals with the assassination in a few final pages, pointedly ignoring old questions: did killer Lee Harvey Oswald act alone, what did the CIA know. Releases of government files came and went. Taraborrelli stayed focused on his man. He thinks there was no Monroe affair – chiefly, though Jackie expressed concern, because no evidence exists. But Taraborrelli does say JFK had a previously unknown affair with Lundberg, a Californian air hostess, in the 1950s, when he was an ambitious senator from Massachusetts. It ended for Lundberg with Kennedy paying for an abortion. Taraborrelli said: 'JFK met Joan when he was on the outs with his family. Jackie had a stillbirth in 1956 and JFK did not return from a vacation to be with his wife. It took him a week to get back. And when he got back, everybody in the family, both sides of the family, wanted nothing to do with him. In fact, Jackie's mom was so upset that she made him sleep in the servants' quarters over the garage. 'And so he went to Los Angeles, and he met [Lundberg], and she didn't know anything about him, other than that he was a famous senator, but she didn't know him personally, and she didn't know anybody in his life. And he was able to open up to her honestly and use her as sort of a pseudo-therapist to try to work out some of his issues. And he was trying to grapple with how could he have done this to his wife?' As Callahan shows, Kennedy men doing unconscionable things to women has never been rare. JFK's nephew, Robert F Kennedy Jr, is now US health secretary, after extensive coverage of his philandering and its tragic consequences. Of JFK, Taraborrelli said: 'At one point, Joan said to him, 'I think that you're a good person.' And he said, 'No, I'm really not.' He did not even think he was a good man. He said he felt like he was stuck in himself and he couldn't figure out a way to get out.' Nor could Kennedy's sister, Rosemary, who endured developmental difficulties and whose father arranged in 1941 'for brain surgery that went terribly wrong, turned her into an invalid, and then he institutionalized her and told the family they needed to forget she existed, and they all did, but JFK held this shame that he let this happen to the sister he loved. 'In the book, you realize that if he was able to disassociate himself from his own sister, who he loved, then how was he to feel about a baby Jackie had that died, who he didn't know? It's like he didn't have empathy. Jackie realized that, so she found Rosemary, the sister [JFK] had not seen in 15 years, and she encouraged him to go to and reconnect with his sister, because she knew he could not be a fully realized man, holding this dark secret and feeling ashamed. 'And so that was another building block. And then when their son Patrick died [living less than two days in August 1963] that was another building block.' As Taraborrelli sees it, such experiences helped bring 'Kennedy out of himself' on the brink of his death, 'turn[ing] him into a different man, a man with good character … and so in this book, you see JFK take accountability for his mistakes. He says, 'The way that I was was painful, and by painful, I mean shameful.' 'He also takes accountability as a president when the Bay of Pigs [the 1961 invasion of Cuba], for instance, is a disaster. It was something he inherited from [President Dwight D] Eisenhower but he didn't blame the other administration, 'I have to clean up that guy's mess,' all that stuff. JFK went to the American people and said, 'I'm the president. This is my responsibility. I did this, and I'm sorry.' And guess what? His approval rating went up to 85%, because people want a president who takes accountability. 'But he had to become a man who could take accountability first, and he did. That's a great story, and I think it's a really hopeful story to tell, especially in these days when we question what is leadership and what do we expect from our leaders.' JFK: Public, Private, Secret is out now
The Independent
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
New JFK book reveals he got flight attendant Joan Lundberg pregnant during affair
Former president John F Kennedy once got a flight attendant pregnant during an affair, then paid for an abortion without the knowledge of his wife Jackie, a new book has claimed. Kennedy first met Joan Lundberg in 1956 in California, when she worked for Frontier Airlines and as a cocktail waitress, according to a new tell-all biography by J. Randy Taraborrelli. At the time the former president was a 39-year-old married U.S senator and Lundberg was 23, Taraborrelli writes. In August that year, Kennedy's wife Jackie experienced a stillbirth of their daughter Arabella. Two years later – and shortly after the birth of the Kennedys' daughter Caroline – Lundberg called JFK to share her own pregnancy news, according to an exclusive excerpt of the upcoming book JFK: Public, Private, Secret, shared with People. 'Joan would recall that her news about the baby was 'like a knife to Jack's heart,' reads the excerpt. 'While it was a shock, Joan wrote that they shouldn't have been so surprised: 'I didn't like wearing a diaphragm, and Jack wouldn't wear a rubber,'' she wrote. 'Jack couldn't help but wonder if Joan had purposely planned the pregnancy given that she'd seen his devotion to Jackie after Caroline's birth. He also wondered if he was really the father, and Joan assured him he was.' Taraborrelli's book also uses excerpts from Lundberg's own, unpublished memoir, which she had shared with her family. After their phone call revelation, Kennedy then told Lundberg he would mail her $400, telling her 'you'll know what to do' – in apparent reference to getting an abortion. ''Being a politician is who I am,' he told her. 'Politics is all I know. If you take that away . . .' His voice trailed off. Before she could respond, he disconnected the line,' the excerpt states. When the envelope arrived one week later, it reportedly contained no money. According to the biography, when JFK learned this he became 'positively unhinged.' He wired more money and Lundberg 'took care of things' a day later. 'Jack was very clear; he didn't want Joan to have the baby… She was angry and disappointed, but also realistic,' Taraborrelli writes. Speaking to People, Tarraborrelli said he wanted 'not to defend JFK' but to 'explain him.' He added that Lundberg was 'a big revelation' to him, describing her as having acted as the former president's 'therapist in many ways.'
