The Kennedy Worship We Were Never Supposed to Question – HT
I have never understood the worship of the Kennedys. Not the grief of November 1963, that is entirely human. And the footage of a 3-year-old boy saluting a coffin will break your heart every time, regardless of what you think about the man inside it. Not the nostalgia for a moment in American history when things felt possible in a particular way.
But the worship, the reverence that treats the record as something that requires protective language, that insists on softer nouns and more forgiving verbs, that looks at 60 years of documented historical evidence and reaches, every single time, for the phrase that makes the audience feel less uncomfortable.
Watch a Kennedy documentary. There are dozens on YouTube, on streaming services, cycling through History Channel at 2:00 in the morning. And pay attention, not just to what is said, but to how it’s said. Track the vocabulary. Count the words. Notice the ones that don’t appear. He was fond of women. He had a complicated personal life.
He found diversion outside his marriage. His were the appetites of his era. The behavior of a certain kind of man in a certain kind of world. You have heard some version of this language your entire life if you have watched a Kennedy documentary. The words are designed to blur. They work because the audience doesn’t know, in the moment, exactly what word is being substituted or what it is being substituted for.
The blur feels like perspective. It feels like historical context. It feels like a mature understanding that powerful men of that generation operated under different social rules. What it actually is, a 60-year editorial choice. Active, consistent, and deliberate. Audiences have been noticing this for decades.
Not historians, not journalists, ordinary people watching these productions and feeling a low-grade discomfort they couldn’t fully name. The sense that the narrator’s vocabulary had been carefully curated, that the description they were hearing didn’t quite match the description they would give if asked what happened. Comment sections on Kennedy documentaries are filled with this.
The instinct that something is being managed. The frustration that the plain English word infidelities, adultery, betrayal is never the word that gets used. Those instincts were correct. The plain English word isn’t wrong, isn’t sensational, isn’t unfair. It’s what historians use. It’s what biographers use.
It’s what everyone uses except the documentarians who decided their audience requires something gentler. This is a prosecution of that choice. Begin with what the record shows. Not tabloids, not rumor, not contested allegations from a single anonymous source. The documented, sourced, cross-verified historical record that biographers, FBI files, Senate committee proceedings, White House gate logs, and participant memoirs have established across six decades.
Judith Campbell Exner met John F. Kennedy through Frank Sinatra at a dinner at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in 1960. This is confirmed across multiple independent sources. By the time Kennedy was in the White House, Exner was visiting. The FBI had her under surveillance. J. Edgar Hoover knew about the relationship and knew something else, that Exner was simultaneously in a relationship with Sam Giancana, the Chicago mob boss who had been involved in CIA-backed plots to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Telephone records document approximately 70 calls between Exner and the President of the United States. Hoover briefed Kennedy on what the surveillance files contained. The relationship ended. The secret held for 13 years. In 1975, the Church Committee, the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to intelligence activities, produced records confirming the relationship.
That’s not a tabloid. That’s a Senate investigation producing classified documentation. Exner published a memoir in 1977 claiming she served as a courier between Kennedy and Giancana, carrying packages between them. She claimed she had aborted Kennedy’s child. The parts of her account independently corroborated.
The FBI surveillance, the phone records, the Church Committee findings are in declassified government archives that anyone can request. In the summer of 1962, Marion Fay Beardsley, known publicly as Mimi Alford after her 1964 marriage, arrived at the White House to begin an internship. She was 19. Kennedy was 45.
The relationship began within days of her arrival and lasted 18 months. When Dallek’s 2003 biography, An Unfinished Life, brought the relationship to public attention, Alford confirmed it publicly saying she had been involved in a sexual relationship with the President from June 1962 to November 1963, a subject she had not discussed in more than four decades.
She [snorts] discussed it in full in her memoir. And what she described beyond the basic relationship is worse. At a White House pool gathering, she writes that Kennedy instructed her to perform a sexual act on his aide, Dave Powers. She describes Ted Kennedy making a similar request, which she refused. She characterizes Kennedy’s behavior in those moments as revealing a darker side, a display of power over a young woman who had no framework to name what was being done to her and no institutional protection to refuse it.
The man was the President of the United States. Mary Pinchot Meyer was an artist, a divorcee, a friend of Jackie Kennedy’s. The two women had been social acquaintances since the mid-1950s when Kennedy and his wife lived next door to Mary and her then husband in Washington. After Meyer’s 1958 divorce, she moved to Georgetown.
White House gate logs record her signing in on at least 15 occasions, always around dinner time. Kennedy intimate Charles Bartlett was direct about the seriousness of the relationship saying Kennedy was genuinely in love with Meyer, heavily smitten, and frank about it. Kennedy wrote Meyer a letter on White House stationery.
It went unsent and sold at auction in June 2016 for just under $89,000. Part of it reads, “Why don’t you leave suburbia for once? Why don’t you just say yes?” The letter is signed J. Meyer was shot dead on the Georgetown towpath on October 12th, 1964. Two bullet wounds, one in the left temple, one in the back, both fired at close range.
A suspect was arrested and acquitted. The murder remains unsolved. CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton reportedly seized her diary after her death and later told colleagues he had burned it. Then there were Priscilla Ware and Jill Cowan, White House secretaries given the code names Fiddle and Faddle by Secret Service agents. They were brought on presidential business trips to Berlin, Rome, Ireland, and Costa Rica.
Jackie Kennedy, conducting a tour of the White House for a Paris Match reporter, encountered Ware in a hallway and reportedly said, in French to the journalist at her side, “This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband.” That comment, documented in biographies across multiple decades, does something specific.
It tells you Jackie Kennedy knew who these women were and what was happening. It also tells you she had developed the capacity to perform composure in public under conditions that would have destroyed most people’s ability to function. She said it to a journalist in the White House on a tour she was conducting and then continued the tour.
Dallek, the author of the standard scholarly biography of Kennedy’s presidency, said it plainly in a May 2003 interview. “In the 1960s, John Kennedy wasn’t going to be found out,” he said. “Lots of journalists, reporters, knew about the womanizing. And if they didn’t, they had strong suspicions. But they weren’t going to publish it in their newspapers.
It just wasn’t part of the culture of the times.” The Secret Service facilitated arrangements. The press winked. J. Edgar Hoover held the files. And all of this, the FBI documentation, the Church Committee records, the sealed oral histories, the gate logs, the unsent letters sold at auction, gets described in documentaries as “fond of women.
” A diversion. A kind of male charisma. Understanding how the language got this soft requires going back to one specific evening in November 1963. One week after the assassination, Jackie Kennedy picked up a phone and called Theodore H. White. White was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who had favorably chronicled Kennedy’s campaign in the best-selling book The Making of a President 1960.
She invited him to the Kennedy family compound at Hyannis Port. Life magazine held its presses for the story. During a 4-hour interview, Jackie returned repeatedly to one image. Her husband’s love of the Broadway musical Camelot and its closing lyric. “There will be great presidents again,” she told White. “But there will never be another Camelot.
” As White drafted the piece overnight, in a striking departure from normal journalistic practice, he read the text aloud to his editors over the phone. The editors suggested toning down the Camelot imagery. Jackie insisted the references remain. The resulting essay, “For President Kennedy, an Epilogue,” ran in Life on December 6th, 1963, and fixed a mythology in the American imagination that hasn’t fully loosened in 60 years.
White later acknowledged he had allowed himself to become Kennedy’s instrument in labeling the myth. History.com’s description of what happened is unambiguous. Jackie Kennedy consciously shaped her husband’s legacy. She had called the journalist. She had introduced the Camelot framing. She had edited the copy.
And then, she required that White’s original interview notes be withheld from public access until after her own death. A condition he honored when he donated the notes to the JFK Library in 1969. Jackie died on May 19th, 1994. The notes were released that year. This isn’t conspiracy. It’s documented archival history, confirmed by the library’s own records. The notes exist.
The condition of their release is on record. Jackie Kennedy made calculated decisions in the week following her husband’s murder about how history would describe him. The myth she constructed served her children, protected her public image, and, incidentally, usefully, made any accounting of JFK’s actual conduct feel like an assault on a grieving widow.
That framing has been extraordinarily effective for 60 years. The apparatus she initiated wasn’t operated by her alone. She couldn’t have done it alone, and she wouldn’t have needed to. The press corps had been doing the protective work since Kennedy entered public life. The gentlemen’s agreement between the White House press corps and the Kennedy administration wasn’t metaphorical.
It was practiced and enforced. Bobby Kennedy regularly picked up the phone to get editors to kill unflattering stories. Biographer Smith documents that even when JFK’s conduct reached the level of documented national security risk, as it did with Judith Campbell Exner’s mob connections, the press still stayed quiet.
Hoover had to be the one to walk in with the files because the press wasn’t going to deliver them. When Seymour Hersh attempted a full reckoning in his 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot, the apparatus demonstrated how durable it had become. Hersh is the journalist who broke the My Lai massacre. He isn’t someone who flinches at difficult subjects.
His book’s reception was almost entirely about discrediting the messenger. NBC had been developing a connected documentary and walked away, citing concerns about forged documents that it entered Hersh’s research. Documents that don’t appear in the book itself, but whose existence was used to contaminate everything around them. On the Today show, Hersh submitted to two full days of questioning.
Matt Lauer asked him, “Do you think you were blinded by the desire to tell a sordid tale?” The framing of that question is the apparatus speaking. Not, “How do you respond to the documented FBI records?” Not, “What does the Church Committee evidence show?” But, “Were you blinded by your own desire to harm the Kennedy image?” Former Kennedy aide Theodore Sorensen called the book “a pathetic collection of wild stories.
” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. grouped Hersh with Oliver Stone. The claims independently corroborated by government documentation, the Exner affair, confirmed by the Church Committee and FBI files, the intern affair, confirmed by Dallek’s 2003 biography, were treated as equivalent to Hersh’s most speculative assertions.
And the whole package was labeled tabloid. That technique, contaminating documented fact with contested speculation so both become suspect, is standard apparatus operation. It doesn’t require a conspiracy. It just requires people with shared interests making the same editorial decisions. Before the hardest part of this argument, something worth separating out clearly.
A great many people genuinely love Jackie Kennedy. Not as a symbol of Kennedy mythology, but as a specific person who did specific things that deserve respect independent of her husband. Those people are right. And the apparatus exploits their affection by fusing it with something it doesn’t actually have to be fused with.
In 1961, as first lady, Jackie created the White House Fine Arts Committee, hired a professional curator, and initiated a congressional bill establishing that White House furnishings would become Smithsonian property rather than available for departing presidents to take home. She funded the entire restoration through private donations, not public funds.
She published the first White House guidebook, whose sales paid for additional acquisitions. She hosted poets, scientists, musicians, and artists at state dinners. Pablo Casals performed at the White House for the first time since Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency. She spoke French, not because it was decorative, but because it functioned diplomatically in ways that mattered.
When she visited Paris, Khrushchev asked to shake her hand before Kennedy’s. When she visited India, Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith noted in his journals a considerable disjunction between her widely noted interest in fashion and, in personal conversation, her considerable intellect. After leaving the White House, she built a second career as a book editor at Viking Press and then Doubleday, entirely on her own.
These are genuine, documented, independent achievements that belong to her and to no one else. Women who grew up watching their mothers cut out pictures of Jackie Kennedy were responding to something real. An intelligent, capable woman operating in public life during an era that expected women like her to be decorative furniture.
The admiration is earned. And it does not require defending Kennedy worship because it never had anything to do with Kennedy worship. The two things aren’t connected except by the mythology that deliberately connects them because conflating them makes honest accounting of JFK’s conduct feel like an attack on a widow.
That is the most effective feature of the Camelot apparatus, and recognizing it doesn’t require abandoning the admiration. It just requires seeing that the admiration was always hers, not his. The most visible example of the apparatus operating in real time with a named subject, a documented paper trail, and a clear contrast between the legal record and the editorial frame, is Ron Galella.
Galella was a paparazzi photographer who spent years pursuing Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and her children. The word pursuing is already a soft version of what the federal courts found. The courts called it harassment. The courts called his conduct assaults and attacks. Those are the words in the actual opinions used by actual federal judges examining actual documented incidents.
September 24th, 1969, Central Park. John Kennedy Jr. is riding his bicycle. Galella jumps into the boy’s path, forcing the child to swerve dangerously. Secret Service agents pursue Galella and arrest him. Galella’s response to this arrest was to sue. He filed a $1.3 million lawsuit against Jackie Onassis and three Secret Service agents for false arrest and malicious prosecution.
Jackie counterclaimed, seeking injunctive relief against Galella’s continuous efforts to photograph her and her children. The case went to District Court in 1972 as Galella versus Onassis. The court’s opinion explicitly distinguished Galella’s conduct from ordinary photojournalism. It noted he found out in advance about John Kennedy Jr.
‘s appearance in the school production of Oliver at Collegiate School and positioned himself to photograph the family at the entrance. It noted he interrupted Caroline during a tennis lesson. It noted he had been found guilty of violating a prior restraining order on October 8th, 1971 and again on December 2nd, 1971. Two separate convictions in the same year.
The District Court initially ordered Galella to maintain 100 yards from Onassis’s home, 75 yards from her children personally, 100 yards from the children’s schools, and 50 yards from Onassis herself. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals modified the distances in 1973, reducing them significantly to 25 feet from Onassis personally and 30 feet from her children.
While affirming the underlying finding that his conduct invaded Jackie Kennedy’s reasonable expectation of privacy and freedom from harassment. The court case summary, reproduced in legal textbooks, lists the specific incidents. Jumping in front of the bicycle, interrupting Caroline at tennis, invading children’s private schools, positioning himself to photograph at school events.
Jackie told the court she lived in dread fear of stepping onto a sidewalk and having Galella assault her again. That language, dread fear, assault is in the legal record. It isn’t characterization, it’s her testimony. Galella violated the injunction again. The Library of Congress holds the courtroom illustration from the 1982 contempt proceedings.
Jackie, in the same brown synthetic fiber blouse day after day, almost certainly chosen to make a point about the absence of the high fashion elegance Galella claimed to be celebrating. The presiding judge, Irving Ben Cooper, stated that Galella wasn’t going to change his behavior voluntarily and that it was necessary to positively and effectively stop Galella’s unbridled behavior.
One year before those proceedings, in 1981, Galella had been photographed standing feet away from Jackie holding a homemade measuring tape marked 25 feet and keep your distance. The man was taunting a federal court order in public. The contempt proceedings threatened him with a $120,000 fine and potential prison time.
He settled for a $10,000 fine and permanently surrendered his right to photograph Jackie or her children. The prohibition against photographing Caroline Kennedy remained in effect until Galella died in 2022. Along the way, June 12th, 1973, outside a Chinatown restaurant in New York, Marlon Brando punched Galella in the face, breaking his jaw and knocking out five teeth on the left side.
That is the documented record of one man’s conduct toward one woman and her children across more than a decade, producing multiple court orders, multiple contempt findings, a settled legal conclusion, and testimony describing dread fear. The federal judiciary examined it and called it harassment. The 2010 documentary Smash His Camera, directed by Leon Gast, asked audiences to see Galella as a complex artistic figure.
Vanity Fair’s coverage from the Sundance premiere described him as the original paparazzi, a lens through which celebrity culture could be examined. One reviewer framed the question as, Ron Galella, celebrity photographer, artist, pest, or deranged stalker? As with many things, the truth lies somewhere in between.
The court found no somewhere in between. The court found specific incidents, specific violations of specific court orders, and a woman who testified she lived in fear. Galella had been exhibited at the International Center of Photography. He had defenders who described his work as art. Those defenses don’t change what the federal record shows.
They just illustrate what happens when the apparatus is offered a man with a harassment conviction and a homemade measuring tape and decides the interesting story is about his artistic complexity. Jackie Kennedy herself resists both the myths built around her, the Camelot widow and the cynical social climber.
The honest version of her is more complicated than either and the complexity is worth examining without forcing it toward a verdict. Start with what she came from. Her father, John Vernou Bouvier III, went by Blackjack. He was a Wall Street stockbroker who went heavily into debt, did poorly in the markets, and in 1940 had a divorce that was anything but quiet.
The proceedings put his infidelities and financial irresponsibility on the society pages. Jackie grew up watching exactly what infidelity does to a family in public. The lesson embedded in that childhood wasn’t that infidelity was unusual among men of a certain class. The lesson was that it was routine and that women managed it or didn’t.
Her mother’s second marriage to Hugh D. Auchincloss, a wealthy stockbroker, provided stability that the Bouvier side of the family no longer had. Jackie, at the time she married John Kennedy in September 1953 at a large society wedding in Newport, Rhode Island, was the stepdaughter of comfortable money, not the daughter of her own.
Biographers note that the Bouvier family’s social position had outlasted its financial foundation. Whether she suspected before the wedding that JFK would replicate her father’s patterns isn’t fully documented. What is documented is that she knew during the marriage and she knew specifically. When she encountered intern Priscilla Ware in the White House, she reportedly turned to the Paris Match journalist beside her and said, “This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband.
” People who knew Jackie well told biographers she had concluded, before any particular incident, that marital infidelity was a fact of life she had decided in advance to absorb. She knew who the women were. She had made a calculation that staying served her children’s interests in ways that leaving couldn’t. The Onassis marriage is where the calculation becomes most visible and where the picture is genuinely complicated rather than falsely so.
Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 5th, 1968. Jackie announced her engagement to Aristotle Onassis on October 20th, 1968. Four and a half months later, she married him the same day of the announcement. Onassis was a Greek shipping magnate with a private island, private security, multiple homes on multiple continents, and more personal wealth than some nations.
“Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed in shadows,” she reportedly said. The two months that collapse in that explanation? She was a widow in America who had watched one husband die in a motorcade. The surviving Kennedy brother who had provided institutional stability for her and her children had just been shot in a hotel kitchen.
Her children were 8 and 10 years old and growing up as targets. She was surrounded by a family structure, the Kennedys, that was powerful and protective but that had its own claim on her identity, her image, and her public role. She married a man who could put her children on a private island. Whether that is romantic, pragmatic, or some combination both true at once, biographers have been arguing about it for 50 years.
And the argument generates more replies in a single comment section than almost any other Kennedy topic. That is evidence of something. She provokes genuine disagreement because she can’t be flattened into either the loyal wife betrayed or the scheming operator who knew exactly what she was doing. Both frames fail to account for the actual conditions of her life.
What is clear is that she wasn’t passive. She wasn’t simply acted upon. She was an intelligent person who, in the week after her husband’s murder, constructed a mythology that has served her children’s interests and shaped historical perception for 60 years. The same capacity for strategy that produced the Camelot interview was present throughout her marriage.
It was one of the few tools available to her in a world that didn’t offer her many. Honoring that doesn’t require excusing the mythology she built. It requires understanding that the mythology was built for specific reasons by a specific person in specific conditions and that the apparatus it enabled has since been operated by people with less personal stake and more institutional interest in keeping JFK’s records soft.
JFK has been dead since November 22nd, 1963. Jackie has been dead since May 19th, 1994. Judith Campbell Exner, who confirmed the mob-connected affair to a Senate committee in 1975, died in 1999. Mary Pinchot Meyer was murdered in 1964. The Secret Service agents who facilitated the arrangements, the reporters who sat on what they knew, the editors who took Bobby Kennedy’s calls, nearly all of them are gone.
The apparatus is still working. Every Kennedy documentary produced in the decades since the record was established makes editorial choices. Every narrator who describes JFK’s conduct toward the women around him reaches for language. The language they reach for still consistently tends toward the soft end of the available vocabulary.
Not universally. Robert Dallek in a May 2003 interview was plain and direct. Historians writing scholarly biographies used the accurate words without apparent difficulty. Journalist coverage of Mimi Alford’s memoir in 2012 named what happened clearly enough. But documentary narration as a genre, as a form, has maintained a particular attachment to gentler phrasing when the subject is Kennedy specifically.
Academic sources confirm the pattern goes back to the beginning. Kennedy’s personal conduct was described in contemporary media coverage with what one scholarly study called euphemisms about the eligible bachelor, language deployed even while he was a senator, before anyone was protecting a legacy, simply because it was the vocabulary a deferential press used for powerful men.
The euphemisms of 1960 became the template for the euphemisms of 2020. 60 years of Kennedy documentaries all reaching for the same dictionary, and nobody asking who originally wrote it. The people who maintain the apparatus aren’t necessarily conscious of maintaining it. Most of them are simply operating within genre conventions that feel like professional standards.
The instinct that documentary narration should be measured, that plain condemnation is tabloid territory. That the narrator’s job is to present complexity rather than reach for verdict. These conventions feel neutral. They’re not neutral. They are inherited from a specific historical relationship between the Kennedy family and the journalists who covered them, and they do specific work every time a narrator chooses fond of women over the accurate alternative.
Caroline Kennedy controls significant access to family archives. The JFK Presidential Library, operated by the National Archives, is the institutional repository for documents that include Theodore White’s original handwritten interview notes from the Camelot interview, held under Jackie’s embargo conditions until her death, then released.
Caroline unveiled the Access to a Legacy Digital Archive Initiative at the library in 2011. The family remains in the room when the story gets made, in ways that are legal and understandable, and nonetheless consequential for what gets included. Seymour Hersh tried to write a full account in 1997, and was subjected to two days of television questioning that treated his research as the problem.
NBC walked away from a connected documentary. The coverage of Kennedy’s conduct, when it surfaces, almost always ends up being about something adjacent, about press culture, about changing standards, about the complexity of historical judgment, rather than about what the record actually shows. The apparatus redirects.
The viewer who watches one of these productions and feels a low-level discomfort, the sense that something is being carefully managed in the narration, that the vocabulary has been chosen, that the plain English word is conspicuously absent, that viewer is reading the text correctly. The discomfort is the appropriate response to narration that is doing real editorial work in plain sight, using softened language to make a specific version of events feel like the only reasonable version.
The vocabulary that was always available, infidelities, adultery, serial, documented, confirmed. Historians have used those words for decades without controversy because they are accurate. What takes 60 years isn’t the arrival of the words. They were always there, in Dallek’s biography, in Alford’s memoir, in the Church Committee records, in the Galella versus Onassis court opinions, where a federal judge described a man’s conduct toward a woman and her children as assault.
What takes 60 years is the willingness to use plain English in the places where plain English has been deliberately avoided. The instinct that the worship was wrong, that it required language you weren’t being given, that something in the narration didn’t match the record, was never wrong. It just needed a framework. Now it has one.
The apparatus made it. The apparatus left its fingerprints on every soft word it chose, every plain word it avoided, every documentary it framed around complexity when the record wasn’t complex. The fingerprints are there for anyone who looks. Subscribe for more stories like this.