The World

What looked like glamour to the Americans appeared to Khrushchev to be callowness. The Kennedy takeover of Washington was compared to a family of condottieri seizing a small town in Renaissance Italy. But they were better than that, bringing Camelot – the father’s vulgarity refined by one generation at Harvard into American class spangled with showbusiness – to Eisenhower’s dull Washington. It was very much a macho family business with brother Bobby as attorney-general and chief henchman, and an entourage of family retainers and friendly stars led by Sinatra, champion of civil rights, Mafia intermediary and Inaugural Gala organizer, who arranged lovers. ‘If I don’t have sex every day,’ he told the cerebral, asexual Macmillan, ‘I get a headache.’ His lovers varied from a courtesan, Judith Exner, introduced by Sinatra, and pop singer Phyllis McGuire, both shared with Sinatra’s friend, Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana, to Marilyn Monroe, shared with his brother Bobby, as well as his two secretaries nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle and a tall posh intern, Mimi Alford.

On her fourth day in the White House, Mimi was invited by the First Friend and presidential procurer Dave Powers to a swimming party, which led to cocktails and then to a euphemistic invitation: ‘Would you like a tour of the residence, Mimi?’ A tour of the residence usually included a tour of JFK. Mimi ‘cannot describe what happened that night as making love’ – she called him ‘Mister President’ even when naked in Jackie’s bed – but it was ‘sexual, intimate, passionate’, and later he introduced amyl nitrite poppers into their assignations.

JFK displayed his nastier side when, at the White House pool, he ordered her to give oral sex to Powers: ‘I don’t think the president thought I’d do it, but I’m ashamed to say that I did. The president silently watched.’ Calling himself ‘Michael Carter’ when he phoned her, she called him ‘the Great Compartmentaliser’, a quality essential for any leader. Indeed, ‘There was always a layer of reserve.’

Kennedy’s court was tightly controlled. JFK’s confidence allowed him to appoint the most gifted advisers and aim high at the essential reforms. A century after the civil war, racial apartheid still ruled the south, where African-Americans were segregated and could not vote. JFK was no liberal on race but he gingerly embraced long-overdue civil rights, pushed by a rising movement led by Martin Luther King, the son of the Atlanta pastor who had visited Berlin in 1934.

The pastor had often thrashed Martin junior, but ‘Whenever you whipped him, he’d stand there, and the tears would run down, and he’d never cry.’ His father had joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, committed to campaigning against ‘the ridiculous nature of segregation in the south’, telling a rally, ‘I ain’t gonna plow no more mules. I’ll never step off the road again to let white folks pass.’ His son recalled how when a policeman stopped him for a traffic offence and called him ‘boy’, his father pointed at Martin junior: ‘This is a boy. I’m a man and until you call me one I will not listen to you.’ So dapper he was nicknamed Tweedy, Martin junior studied in Boston, attending classes at Harvard and showed off his resonant eloquence on a musical student, Coretta Scott, with whom he was set up.

‘I’m like Napoleon at Waterloo,’ he said on the phone, ‘before your charms.’

‘You haven’t even met me yet,’ she laughed. When they were married, he tried to keep her out of the campaign, looking after their children. Serving as co-pastor of their Atlanta church with his father, he campaigned with him, in 1955 looking for a case to challenge segregation laws: when Rosa Parks, an African-American woman in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person and was arrested, the case sparked a campaign against Jim Crow. MLK organized a bus boycott; his house was bombed, but he emerged as the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, pushing JFK to cancel the Jim Crow laws. When MLK was arrested during the presidential election campaign, the Kennedys rang to support Coretta and got him released. But once in power the Kennedys allowed the FBI to bug King’s phones to discover any Communist connections – and to chronicle his adulterous affairs. Repeatedly arrested, during the spring of 1963 King moved his campaign to Birmingham, Alabama, where the police brutally crushed protests. From a Birmingham jail, King argued that only lawbreaking would bring change: ‘The Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is … the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice’; he added, ‘Everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.’