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.
