Jackie Kennedy had sex with JFK on Air Force One the day before he was assassinated — a “last hour of serenity,” according to historian William Manchester.
But Manchester camouflaged the encounter in his 1967 book, “The Death of a President,” out of discretion, he admitted to me in the mid-1970s.
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At the time, I was researching a book on JFK’s Don Juanism for Delacorte Press. We shared a literary agent, Don Congdon, who arranged a rendezvous at Wesleyan University, where Manchester was writer-in-residence.
I filled him in on JFK’s teen-lover intern, Mimi Beardsley, who slept over frequently when Mrs. Kennedy was out of town. She confirmed their yearlong liaison in a 2012 memoir, “Once Upon a Secret.”
Manchester promoted the good-husband line in his book; JFK’s dolce vita was not his beat. But trumping my news, he said the description of separate bedrooms in Houston’s Rice Hotel on the eve of Dallas was misleading. It left the mournful impression that the couple was no longer intimate.
He asked that I not attribute the tale to him, at least not while he was alive. Manchester, who died in 2004, revealed JFK made love to Jackie on Air Force One during the short flight from San Antonio to Houston on the afternoon of the 21st, the day before he was assassinated.
“It’s in the book,” Manchester said, referring me to the gauzy coded passage on Pages 77 and 78:
“Their life together now had nearly a full day to run. Yet this was to be their last hour of serenity. The tyranny of events and exhaustion would begin to close in when they finished the two-hundred-mile lap to Houston. Actually, they hadn’t even an hour. In this plane the hop took only forty-five minutes. Privacy was that limited, confined to a tiny blue cabin racing 30,000 feet above the tessellated green and brown plains of central Texas . . . Their time was up. The President emerged in a fresh shirt.”
On Page 665, Manchester doubled down on his sexual allusion in the “Chronology” for Thursday, Nov. 21:
“4:52 p.m. AF1 leaves Kelly Field. Last hour of serenity for JFK and JBK.”
Jackie, who sat with Manchester for many daiquiri-fueled hours, revealed countless intimate details in 1964 about the assassination — including the mile-high encounter.
Manchester admitted to couching the lovemaking in euphemisms in order to include this most sensitive material in his book. Yet Jackie still strongly objected to several passages in “The Death of a President,” calling them “tasteless and distorted,” and sued him in 1966 for breach of contract.
According to the legal settlement, which gave her and Bobby Kennedy final text approval, extra copies of the original manuscript were destroyed and Manchester agreed to lock up all research materials bearing on Jackie’s objections and return 10 hours of taped interviews to be sealed at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.
The judgment would remain “in full force and effect until the expiration of 100 years.” The public won’t see them until 2067.
As for my uncompleted Don Juan JFK book, Jackie was a discouraging factor. In 1978, she went to work for Doubleday, which bought my publisher, Delacorte. They were content to drop the project without seeking a return on the advance.
Philip Nobile is a former staff writer for Esquire, New York magazine and the Village Voice and currently a New York City high-school teacher