15 Weird Facts About What Really Happened Inside the Kennedy White House HT

The world saw the perfectly composed couple, the state [music] dinners, the children playing on the Oval Office floor, the glamour, the culture, the promise of a new American era. What the world did not see was the doctor who came through the back door 34 times in 2 years carrying injections that contained methamphetamine.

[music] Or the two secretaries the Secret Service had to warn every time Jackie was coming home unexpectedly. [music] Or the hidden microphones underneath the president’s desk recording everything said in the Oval Office, [music] including conversations the people in the room did not know were being captured, or the panties Jackie found in her bedroom that were not her size, and exactly what she said to her husband about them.

or the White House visitor log that the chief usher quietly handed to Bobby Kennedy [music] instead of Jackie when the administration ended. The most carefully managed image in American political history was being sustained from inside a building where things were happening every single day that the image was specifically designed to hide.

Here are 15 weird facts about what really happened inside the Kennedy White House. Fact one, JFK had a doctor who injected him with methamphetamine up to four times a week in September [music] of 1960. Just before the first televised presidential debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, [music] a German American physician named Max Jacobson traveled to Kennedy’s suite and gave him an injection.

The injection was described by Jacobson as a vitamin and hormone formula. What it actually contained, as a New York Times investigation, eventually confirmed in 1972, [music] was methamphetamine. Kennedy’s voice was restored, his energy surged, and he walked into that debate and by every measure demolished his opponent.

Nixon reportedly commented afterward that he had never seen Kennedy looking so healthy. After Kennedy won the presidency, Jacobson became a White House regular. Secret Service gate logs show he visited 34 times in the first 20 months of the administration, coming to see both the president and Jackie. He was given the code name Dr.

>> [music] >> feelgood by the secret service agents who admitted him, a nickname that eventually became public [music] decades later. He traveled with the Kennedys to Paris and to Vienna, where JFK met Kruef. He flew with the president on Air Force One. [music] He was a guest at the inauguration and at JFK’s birthday party at Madison Square Garden.

His injections contained a mixture that included amphetamines, steroids, [music] vitamins, enzymes, human placenta, animal hormones, and other substances that he rarely disclosed to his patients in full. When patients asked what [music] was in them, his standard reply was that they were feeling better and that was all they needed to know.

Robert Kennedy eventually delivered a warning to his brother, telling him he could not receive treatments from irresponsible doctors. JFK’s response became famous. He said he did not care if it was horse piss as long as it worked. Jacobson’s license was eventually revoked in 1975 by the New York State Medical Board.

The last injection he gave President Kennedy was 2 weeks before Dallas. Fact two, JFK secretly recorded over 260 hours of conversations in the White House. In July of 1962, President Kennedy had a Secret Service agent named Robert Bu install a hidden recording system in the White House. Microphones were concealed in the knee well of the oval office [music] desk and in a table across the room.

Additional microphones were installed in the cabinet room, hidden in the wall directly behind where JFK sat. A separate dictaphone system was also connected to record telephone calls. The whole apparatus was activated by a button the president controlled himself, though on multiple occasions he left it running after he left the room.

According to the JFK library, [music] Kennedy recorded over 265 hours of meetings and telephone conversations between July 1962 and November of 1963. The system was so closely held that Caroline Kennedy later said the only people who knew it existed with certainty were her father, his personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, and the agent who installed it.

The existence of the tapes shocked many Kennedy intimates when it eventually became public after Nixon’s own taping scandal [music] made White House recording systems a matter of general awareness. The tapes captured extraordinary history. They recorded the internal deliberations of the Cuban missile crisis in real time, including the moment Kennedy left the room after a tense meeting with his generals during the October 1962 standoff.

and the generals, [music] not knowing the recorder was still running, began discussing how badly they felt the president had handled the situation. They recorded Kennedy negotiating with the governor of Mississippi over [music] the desegregation of the state university. They also captured Kennedy alone in the Oval Office, dictating personal reflections [music] and jokes and off-the- cuff observations that were never intended for any audience at all.

Fact three, two White House secretaries were given code names by the Secret Service for their role in JFK’s personal life. Priscilla and Jill Cowan were secretaries in the Kennedy White House press office. They were given code names by the Secret Service. Fiddle [music] and Fat.

The code names were assigned because the agents needed a way to reference the two women in communications related to the president’s personal activities and they needed language that was not self-explanatory if overheard. According to Seymour Hersh’s 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot, and multiple subsequent historical accounts, Wear and Cowan regularly joined JFK for swimming sessions in the White House pool, and the Secret Service stood guard outside during these sessions.

On at least one occasion, agents received advanced warning that Jackie was returning to the White House unexpectedly while the president was in the pool. The warning allowed the situation to be cleared before she arrived. Newsweek’s account of Hersh’s book described a secret serviceman recalling that afterward you could see one big pair of footprints and two smaller pairs of wet footprints leading from the pool toward the Oval Office.

Both where and Cowan accompanied JFK on international trips including visits to Berlin, Rome, Ireland, and Costa Rica. Neither has ever publicly commented on the nature of their relationship with the president. [music] their joint interview for the JFK libraryies oral history project conducted after the assassination [music] contained multiple references to trips they had taken with Kennedy that the interviewer noted without directly addressing what their role on those trips had been.

Jackie [music] Kennedy was apparently aware of at least one of the women when she was giving a Paris match reporter a tour of the White House and past Wear’s desk. She said in French and apparently without breaking her stride that this was the girl who was supposedly sleeping with her husband. Fact four.

Jackie found a pair of panties in her bedroom that were not hers. Among the most frequently cited details in the historical record of the Kennedy marriage is an account reported in multiple biographical sources, including a Quora entry from a Washington insider who lived in the capital during the Kennedy years and in several books about JFK’s private life in which Jackie Kennedy found a pair of women’s underwear in her White House bedroom.

The underwear did not belong to her. Jackie’s response was documented in a way that captured both her intelligence and her characteristic composure under circumstances that would have destabilized most people. She picked them up, went to find her husband, and presented them to him calmly. She told him she hoped he could find out where they came from [music] because they were not her size.

The delivery was ice cold by the account of the person who described the moment. She was not hysterical. [music] She was not tearful. She handed him the evidence and told him with total  precision what the problem with it was. The anecdote was consistent with how Jackie handled JFK’s infidelities more broadly.

She was not unaware of what was happening. Multiple biographers documented that she had known about his pattern before they married and had continued to learn about specific instances during the marriage. She had the information she needed through the informal intelligence arrangement she had established within the White House.

The underwear incident was not a revelation. It was simply a moment when the evidence presented itself in a form that could not be entirely ignored, and she chose to deal with it in the manner most consistent with who she was, quietly, directly, [music] and with a precision that left no room for misunderstanding.

Fact  five, the White House visitor log was given to Bobby Kennedy instead of Jackie. When the administration ended by long-standing tradition at the White House, when an administration ended, the chief usher gave the departing first lady a copy of the visitor log for her husband’s entire presidency.

The log contained the name of every person who had entered the White House during that time, and it was understood to be a momento of the administration, a record of the historical figures and ordinary people who had passed through during those years.  When the Kennedy administration ended after the assassination in November of 1963, the chief usher did not give the log to Jacqueline Kennedy.

He gave it to Robert Kennedy. The decision was quiet and was not publicly announced or explained. The implication understood by everyone involved was not subtle. The log contained the names of women who had visited the White House in circumstances that would have been painful for Jackie to see documented [music] in detail.

The person who made the decision to redirect the log understood exactly what it contained and made a judgment call that the widow of the slain president did not need to receive it. The detail was passed on through the accounts of Washington insiders who were familiar with the customs and practices of the executive household.

It was a small act of protection carried out in silence by someone who had worked closely with the Kennedy family [music] and understood the situation well enough to act without being asked. Bobby Kennedy received [music] the log. What he did with it afterward has never been documented publicly. Fact six.

JFK had an affair with a woman who was also connected to the mob and the CIA. Judith Campbell, who later took the surname Exner after her marriage, met John Kennedy in February of 1960 through Frank Sinatra, who introduced them at a party at the Sans Hotel in Las Vegas. She and Kennedy began an affair that continued after he became president.

She visited the White House multiple [music] times. White House staff facilitated the meetings. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was aware of the relationship and monitored it closely because Campbell had simultaneous connections to Sam Gene Kana, the boss of the Chicago organized crime family. The situation was precisely the kind of national security risk that presidents are specifically warned against.

[music] Kennedy was having a personal relationship with a woman who was simultaneously in a relationship with one of the most powerful organized crime figures in the country at a time when the Kennedy administration and the CIA were separately attempting to use mob assets to assassinate Fidel Castro. The web of connections meant that Gian Kana potentially had a line of personal access through Campbell to the president of the United States.

[music] Robert Kennedy, who as attorney general, was simultaneously prosecuting organized crime figures including Gian Kana, [music] was eventually made aware of the situation and advised his brother to end the relationship. The FBI’s surveillance of the affair gave Hoover material he could use to ensure [music] the Kennedy administration did not push too hard against the bureau’s independence.

Campbell told the Senate in 1975 that she had been a courier between Kennedy and Gianana, [music] carrying packages between the two men. She later said that she had lied to the Senate when she said Kennedy was unaware of her connections to the mob and that in fact he had known everything.

The relationship ended in early 1963. Campbell died of cancer in 1999. Fact seven. JFK [music] had an affair with an intern on Jackie’s bed on her fourth day in the building. Mimi Beardsley arrived at the White House in June of 1962 [music] as a 19-year-old summer intern in the press office. She had attended Miss Porter School in Connecticut, the same boarding school Jackie Kennedy had attended, which had been the entry point for her introduction to the White House.

On her fourth day working there, presidential special assistant Dave Powers asked her if she would like to join a group at the swimming pool. When she arrived at the pool, the president was there. That [music] evening, Kennedy invited her to a cocktail party and then gave her a tour of the private residence.

He led her into Jackie’s bedroom. According to the memoir Beardsley, later published under her married name, Mimi Alfred, in 2011. What followed was her first sexual encounter. The affair lasted 18 months, during which time she was brought back for a second summer internship and traveled with the White House party on multiple occasions.

Beardsley kept the affair secret for 40 years. >> [music] >> The story began to emerge in 2003 when a historian researching a JFK biography came across a sealed oral history interview from 1964 in which a Kennedy press aid had described in careful but recognizable language a tall, slender, beautiful intern with a special relationship with the president.

The sealed portion of the interview was leaked from the JFK library days before the biography’s publication. Beardsley confirmed the affair in a statement that year and published her full account 8 years later. She said she never heard from any member of the Kennedy family after the book came out. Fact 8.

JFK’s personal physician wrote him a letter warning that his drug treatments could cause nuclear war. In November of 1961, Dr. Eugene Cohen, who treated Kennedy for Addison’s disease, wrote the president a letter that is one of the more remarkable documents in the medical history of the American presidency.

Cohen had become aware that Kennedy was receiving injections from Max Jacobson, and he was alarmed. The letter [music] warned that Kennedy could not be permitted to receive therapy from irresponsible doctors who offered stimulating injections as a form of treatment, describing the approach as one that conditions needs, almost like a narcotic.

Cohen’s warning was followed by one from Dr. Hans Krauss, [music] who was treating the president’s back condition and who put the concern in terms that could not have been more direct. Krauss told Kennedy that no president with his finger on the red button had any business taking substances like those Jacobson was administering.

The phrase the finger on the red button was not rhetorical flourish. It was a clinical judgment about the relationship between pharmacological impairment and the specific responsibility of a president to make rational decisions about nuclear weapons. Kennedy ignored both warnings. [music] He continued to see Jacobson.

By May of 1962, Jacobson had visited the White House 34 times. The treatments were eventually stopped when his orthopedic surgeon threatened to expose the arrangement [music] publicly if they continued. Historian Dr. Nasir Ga, who studied Kennedy’s medical records in detail, noted a correlation between the period when Jacobson’s treatments were discontinued [music] and a measurable improvement in Kennedy’s decision-making and leadership during 1963, including during the critical period of negotiations over the nuclear test ban treaty. Fact NFK reportedly had a psychotic episode at a New York hotel after an overdose [music] in the spring of 1962. counts documented in multiple sources, including the Avenue magazine investigation into Jacobson’s career and the book doctor feelgood by Richard Lertzman and William Burns described an incident at a New York hotel understood to be the Carile where Kennedy was staying after receiving one of

Jacobson’s injections. The president allegedly experienced what a psychiatrist who was brought in to evaluate him described as a manic condition [music] involving disorientation and erratic behavior. The Secret Service intervened. Jacobson was called back and an anti-csychotic was administered to bring the president back to a functioning state.

The incident, if it occurred as documented, [music] was kept entirely out of the public record at the time. No reports of unusual activity at the hotel appeared in the press. No member of the Secret Service details spoke about it publicly during the Kennedy years or for decades afterward.

The story emerged through the subsequent accounts of people who had been in Jacobson’s orbit, including documentary filmmaker Martin Cassandorf, who produced a film about Jacobson’s career and through the biographical research of authors who interviewed people from that period. The account has to be treated with appropriate caution as it comes primarily from sources within Jacobson’s circle rather than from government records.

But it is [music] consistent with what is medically documented about the effects of methamphetamine overdose. [music] And it is consistent with the broader picture of the Kennedy Jacobson relationship that has been assembled from multiple independent sources over the decades since the administration ended.

The treatments were genuinely dangerous. [music] The doctors who warned Kennedy about them were right. Fact 10. JFK had an affair with a woman who was later murdered in an unsolved case. Mary Pinshot Meyer was an artist, a Washington socialite, [music] and the sister-in-law of Ben Bradley, the Washington Post editor, who would later become famous for [music] his role in the Watergate coverage.

She and JFK began a relationship that lasted for more than 2 years. [music] A relationship that those close to both of them described as genuinely personal and intellectually engaged in a way that distinguished it from many of the president’s other liaison. A handwritten letter from Kennedy to Meyer, discovered decades after both their deaths, asked her to come and see him, acknowledging that the request was unwise and irrational, but expressing his desire to see her anyway.

Meer was shot and killed in Georgetown on October 12th, 1964, 11 months after the assassination of JFK. She was walking alone on the tow path of the C and O canal when she was attacked. A man named Ray Crump was charged with the murder [music] but acquitted for insufficient evidence. The case has never been solved.

In the immediate aftermath of the murder, James Jesus Angleton, the chief of counter intelligence for the CIA, went to Meyer’s home and studio reportedly looking for her personal diary. Meyer had told friends about the diary and about its contents. Angleton denied finding it. The diary was later said to have been found by Ben Bradley, who burned it.

Meyer’s death generated decades of speculation about whether it was connected to her relationship with Kennedy and to the contents of the diary. [music] The speculation has never produced conclusive evidence. What is documented is that a woman who had a close personal relationship with the president of the United States was murdered less than a year after his assassination.

That the CIA’s counter intelligence chief sought her personal diary within hours of her death, and that the diary no longer [music] exists. Fact 11. Jackie knew about her husband’s press secretary who resembled her. Pamela Turner was Jaclyn Kennedy’s own press secretary during the White House years.

She was 21 years old when the Kennedy administration began. And she was according to multiple biographical sources including Larry Sabato’s book, The Kennedy Half Century, widely noted for bearing a striking physical resemblance to Jackie herself. Turner had previously worked as a secretary for JFK when he was in the Senate. an alleged [music] two-year affair between JFK and Turnure beginning in 1961 was documented [music] in Sabado’s research.

The story was complicated by an additional detail that had preceded the White House years in the late 1950s. The woman who owned the building where Turner was living at the time had become so alarmed by what she witnessed regarding Turner’s relationship with the then Senator Kennedy [music] that she attempted to expose it publicly, going so far as to contact the Vatican and J.

Edgar Hoover with documentation. [music] The effort went nowhere. Kennedy was elected president and when it came time to staff the new administration, JFK was said by multiple sources to have encouraged Jackie to hire Turner as her press secretary. Jackie was not unaware of the situation.

The arrangement of having her husband’s alleged girlfriend on her own personal staff in the role of the person who managed her public communications was one of the more extraordinary domestic accommodations documented in the Kennedy White House. Jackie managed it the same way she managed everything she chose, not to confront directly, with composure, with information, and without any public indication that anything was wrong.

Fact 12. JFK’s affairs were an open secret among the entire White House press corps. In the early 1960s, [music] the rules governing what journalists could and could not report about the private lives of political figures were fundamentally different from what they became after Watergate.

A broad informal [music] agreement existed among the White House press corps that the personal behavior of the president was simply not reported [music] regardless of what reporters personally witnessed or knew. This was not a written policy. It was a professional culture that had developed during the Franklin Roosevelt years when [music] the press had collectively agreed not to photograph or report on the president’s disability and it persisted into the Kennedy [music] era.

The result was that virtually every member of the White House press corps during the Kennedy years was aware to varying [music] degrees and of what was happening in the president’s personal life and none of them reported it. A Secret Service agent quoted in Seymour Hirs’s reporting noted with evident [music] frustration that the agents sometimes joked that they could not even protect the president from contracting veneerial disease.

The knowledge was that widespread within the building. The press culture of that era was not a conspiracy in the legal sense. It was a shared understanding about the boundaries of what journalism was supposed to cover. And that understanding was applied consistently across the entire institution. It did not survive the 1960s intact.

The countercultural shift of that decade followed by the revelations of Vietnam and Watergate permanently changed the relationship between the press [music] and the private lives of public figures. But during the thousand days of the Kennedy administration, the things that were happening inside the White House stayed inside the White House, [music] and the image the world saw remained intact. Fact 13.

The White House had a cleanup operation that ran before Jackie returned. Multiple sources who documented the Kennedy White House from the inside described an informal but practice system in which the private areas of the residents were put in order before Jacqueline Kennedy returned from any absence.

Jackie traveled frequently during the Kennedy years, both on official trips and on private vacations at the family’s Virginia and Massachusetts properties. The periods of her absence were apparently understood within the household as periods of greater latitude for certain activities, [music] and her return required certain preparations.

The pool incident described in connection with the fiddle and fatal [music] situation was one documented example of the advanced warning system in operation. A member of the household had warned the president that Jackie was returning ahead of schedule, allowing the pool to be cleared before she arrived. The wet footprints leading from the pool to the Oval Office were what remained [music] after the hasty departure.

The warning system itself implied an infrastructure of people who were paid attention to Jackie’s movements and who understood what notification was required when those movements changed. The scale of the effort required to maintain the gap between the public image and the private reality of the Kennedy White House was when viewed [music] in total considerable.

It involved the Secret Service, the Household staff, the press corps, [music] the political team, and the president’s personal aids. Everyone had a role in sustaining what the outside world was allowed to see. Jackie, who was not unaware of the general nature of what was being sustained, [music] managed her own awareness with the same strategic intelligence she brought to everything else.

She knew what she needed to know. She controlled what she could control. And she [music] kept what she could not control entirely out of the public record for as long as she lived. Fact 14. JFK had a liazison with a woman the FBI suspected was an East German spy. Ellen Romesh was a West German woman who had come to the United States with her husband, a military aid at the West German embassy.

She worked as a hostess at a private social club called the Quorum Club in Washington, which was operated by Bobby Baker, the secretary to the Senate Democratic Majority, and a well-connected political fixer. Washington lobbyist Robert Gene Baker later described Romesh as looking like Elizabeth Taylor and said she quickly attracted the interest of powerful men in the capital.

The FBI under J Edgar Hoover was monitoring the quorum club and developed concerns about Rome. Specifically, her background included a period in East Germany before the construction of the Berlin Wall, and Hoover’s agent suspected she might be an intelligence asset [music] working for East German or Soviet intelligence.

She had met Kennedy through the quorum club connection and had reportedly visited the White House. The combination of a personal relationship between the president and a woman suspected of being a foreign spy constituted precisely the kind of blackmail vulnerability that the FBI and the Secret Service existed to prevent.

Robert Kennedy moved quickly once the situation was brought to his attention. [music] Ramich was quietly deported from the United States in August of 1963. To prevent the story from becoming public, [music] the Kennedy administration arranged for Senate leaders to be briefed by Hoover on the extrammarital activities of various senators.

[music] An implicit message that any public discussion of the Rome matter would open a wider conversation that nobody in Washington particularly wanted to have. The deportation and the suppression of the story were both successful. The details did not become widely known until congressional hearings on executive power in 1975.

Fact 15. JFK committed his first adultery as president on the night of his inauguration. [music] The night of January 20th, 1961, the night of John Kennedy’s inauguration as the 35th president of the United States, was one of the most celebrated evenings in Washington’s social history. There were multiple inaugural balls across the city.

The Kennedys attended several and photographs from the evening showed JFK and Jackie in [music] formal dress. The perfect image of the new administration at its most luminous moment. According to a detail recorded in the notes of journalist and Kennedy confidant Theodore White [music] and later referenced in a review of Kennedy biographies by Elizabeth Hardwick in the New York Review of Books, JFK committed his first adultery as president on the night of that inauguration at the home of columnist Joe Alup in whose house the encounter took place. Jackie, according to the account, received a phone call from Alop’s wife on the night before Kennedy’s funeral years later when the connection between the inauguration night location and what had happened there became part of what was being recalled in the aftermath of the assassination. [music] The detail had the quality that many of the true facts about the Kennedy White House carried. It was specific. It was sourced to someone who had been close to the events and it placed the private reality of the marriage in immediate and

unmistakable contrast with the public image that surrounded it. The inauguration was the single most photographed day of the Kennedy presidency. The moment when the public myth was at its most perfectly constructed, it was also by this account the first day on which the president used his new position in the manner that would come to define the private texture of the entire administration that followed.

[music] The Kennedy White House presented one of the most carefully managed images in the history of American politics. Behind it was a building where a doctor came through a back entrance with a bag full of methamphetamine, where hidden microphones recorded everything said in the Oval Office, where two secretaries had secret service code names for purposes that had nothing to do with national security, and where a system of staff and aids worked quietly to keep what was happening from reaching the woman who lived in the same building. The gap [music] between the image and the reality was real, sustained, and enormous. History has been closing that gap ever since. If this video gave you something to think about, leave a like and subscribe. There is always more to the