Killing Kennedy

the world. The first duty of a soldier is to obey the commander-in-chief. He says do that, you do it.” The attorney general has caught her attention, as well. “It’s like the Navy—the president is the captain and Bobby is his executive officer,” she will tell her therapist. “Bobby would do anything for his country, and so would I. I will never embarrass him. As long as I have memory, I have John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”
    Yet despite her passion and beauty, Marilyn Monroe is damaged goods. Her three marriages aren’t socially acceptable in the Kennedys’ Catholic world, nor is her affair with Frank Sinatra. JFK knows that she broke up Arthur Miller’s previous marriage so that she could marry the playwright. More ominously, the president suspects that Monroe has visions of moving into the White House sometime soon. He has even made a point of telling her that she’s “not First Lady material.”
    No, Marilyn is not going to replace Jackie, no matter what the movie star might believe during the two nights she spends with the president in Palm Springs. Marilyn gives JFK a chrome Ronson Adonis cigarette lighter as a gift to remind him of their special time together, although the president certainly needs no reminder of his time with the world’s leading sex symbol.
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    News of the Kennedy-Monroe liaison would be about as explosive as it gets. The question lingering in the minds of Kennedy’s Secret Service detail and the president’s close-knit Irish Mafia cronies is why the president continues to take such risks. Some believe it’s a carryover from the old days of the Kennedy heritage in Ireland, where the leader of a clan commonly had free rein to sleep with women outside of marriage. Until his recent stroke, the president’s father, Joseph Kennedy, behaved in just such a manner.
    In addition, some believe that John Kennedy’s personal tragedies—the death of his brother and of his infant child, and his own brushes with death—have given him a fatalistic attitude. All the sex is his carpe diem way of living life to the utmost.
    And then there is the issue of his chronic physical pain. John Kennedy’s appearance may be robust, but he suffers from a nervous stomach, back pain, and Addison’s disease. His physical activity is limited to walking, sailing, and the occasional nine holes of golf. He can barely ride a horse. And the Kennedy family’s legendary games of touch football don’t include him as much as they used to.
    Sex is the president’s physical release of choice. He’s an adrenaline junkie, and his psyche requires illicit excitement. As he told a family friend, “The chase is more fun than the kill.”
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    “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”
    Two months after their weekend in Palm Springs, Marilyn Monroe stands before a dazzled crowd in New York’s Madison Square Garden, singing the traditional birthday song in the most salacious manner possible. Her skintight dress leaves little to the imagination, both front and back, even as her breathless words inspire a thousand questions. Marilyn, still stung by JFK’s blunt assessment that she is not First Lady material, is desperately trying to rekindle the Palm Springs nights of romance.
    “Happy Birthday to you,” she purrs into the microphone.
    The date is May 19, 1962, ten days before JFK’s actual birthday. Jackie, once again, is not in attendance, but she knows all about Marilyn. She’s not so much hurt as disgusted, correctly sensing that the president is taking advantage of an emotionally troubled woman who is easy prey for such a powerful man.
    The president never comes in contact with the seemingly tipsy Marilyn as he climbs to the lectern at Madison Square Garden. But he does favor her with a lupine gaze that one journalist will later remember as “quite a sight to behold, and if I ever saw an appreciation of feminine beauty in the eyes of a man, it was in John F. Kennedy’s at that moment.”
    Marilyn Monroe has become so obsessed with JFK that she calls the White House constantly, but her singing performance falls on deaf ears. The president has moved on, putting as much distance between himself and Marilyn as he did between himself and Frank Sinatra.

    “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Marilyn Monroe serenaded JFK at his birthday gala in 1962. (Getty Images)
    Like Sinatra, Marilyn is a snare that could easily entangle Kennedy and bring down his presidency. This is where the pragmatist in