President John F. Kennedy was always good at spinning a story. For the public, sure, but also for himself. He didn’t only justify his bad behavior in his marriage; he told himself a version of events that made it all easier to live with.
By the early 1960s, his internal storyline had grown fairly elaborate: in his mind, the reason he cheated on Jackie was because his father had forced him to marry the wrong woman. He’d been in love with a Danish beauty named Inga Arvad, a girl with a reputation for being a Nazi spy. Joe Kennedy got rid of her, and then pushed Jackie on him.
Also in Jack’s head, he pursued a woman named Joan Lundberg because Jackie had abandoned him after he was a no-show when she suffered a stillbirth. Years later, he paraded the socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer around the White House. He told himself it was no different than when his mother had looked the other way while his father carried on. Now Jackie was doing the same.
These weren’t just excuses. They became a whole belief system, a way of organizing blame so that it always landed somewhere else. In the end, I think it was designed to protect Jack from the one thing he didn’t know how to live with: his own guilt.
But as I discovered in writing JFK: Public, Private, Secret, something had shifted in Jack by 1963. The Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the beginnings of the Vietnam War, or maybe just the sheer existential weight of the presidency had caused him to begin to turn his twisted reasoning inward—and he started to find it pretty unconvincing.
His close friend Senator George Smathers noticed the difference. When I interviewed Smathers, in the 1990s, he told me he’d asked Jack if he ever worried about how his behavior with other women might affect Jackie. Jack got impatient and snapped, “What other women? There are no other women. I have never told any other woman I love her. Not one. There is only Jackie.” Then he added, more quietly, “Jackie knows I’m not perfect, and she loves me anyway. Scars and all.”
Jack, maybe for the first time, was trying to believe in something that couldn’t be spun, scars and all. He’d spent a lifetime being “a chip off the old block”—meaning his father—and now it was as if he wanted to break the block apart.
There’s a raw moment in the book when Jack confesses to his sister-in-law Joan Kennedy about his conduct in his marriage: “It’s very painful. And by painful, I mean shameful.” That’s not the language of a man polishing his legacy. Those are the words of a man holding a mirror.
Jackie was going through her own reckoning. Shortly before the assassination, she told her mother, bluntly and without self-pity, “He’s Jack because of us. It’s we who made him.” What a chilling line. Not romantic, not forgiving … just honest.
The people in Jack’s life had protected and propped him up for so long, the man himself got lost in the scaffolding. When it started to fall, what was left wasn’t Camelot. It was something quieter, sadder, and a lot more real. Whereas for years Jack had said his father was to blame for the worst of him, near the end he started to say something very different: “Every bad decision I’ve ever made has been my own fault.”
That’s a hard thing for anyone to say. For Jack? It was revolutionary, and maybe that’s the real tragedy of his death—not just that a young president was taken too soon, but that a man on the verge of becoming whole was cut down just before his personal redemption.
It’s tempting, even all these years later, to wrap J.F.K. in mythology or cast him as a martyr. But as I finished the story of his life, I realized that the more interesting version, and certainly the more honest version, is that Jack was a man who’d stopped lying to himself. He was a man who finally grasped that love without accountability isn’t really love. And he was a man who came to understand that legacy, no matter how carefully constructed, will never fix what you refuse to face while you’re alive.
That’s the version of J.F.K. that stays with me—the one who was finally trying to get it right.
J. Randy Taraborrelli is the author of several books, including Jackie: Public, Private, Secret
