the sex lives of dead people: JFK edition (emotions via britney)

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i mean, i had you at hello, right? you are like, holy moses, this woman is ambitious. for seriously, is there a more prodigious sex life of a dead person than that of JFK? haven’t we all of us, by this point, slept with JFK?

ok. so that’s taking it a step too far. but seriously. and i say this as a biographer. it is likely that JFK slept with a whole load of people. i’m not contesting that.

there seems to be a lot of compelling evidence that his sex life was extensive.

having written extensively about his wife, there seems to be compelling evidence that she knew his sex life was extensive.

what i would do is suggest that we not take every single claim about his extensive sex life as absolute truth.

given what we know about how the sex lives of dead people work.

(new life goal: to some day teach a master class on the sex lives of dead people. just fyi.)

so here we are with the man of the hour:

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a gentle reminder re: Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversation on Life with John F. Kennedy (the book i’ve not yet read/the tapes i’ve not yet heard)

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there’s an account of jackie that stands out to me among all the others, if only because it’s irreconcilable with the woman the media portrays.

it comes from an old female acquaintance, who complained of jacqueline during the 1940s: “she had so many sides. she behaved very capriciously. she’d be very seductive to a man at a party, sitting next to him, and then stub her cigarette on his hand.”

this is the jackie i love. the ballsy bitch beneath the breathy voice. this is also, from the sound of it, the jackie that the world will be meeting through the jackie tapes. a woman both cuttingly perceptive and astonishingly catty.

the jackie tapes are fascinating, yes (i assume). they teach us many things we did not know (jackie disliked mlk! and degaulle! and lbj! and ted sorenson!) and remind us of others (she love loved andré malraux).

my one concern about these tapes is this: they represent jackie at one point in time. and, if jackie teaches us anything, it is that it’s dangerous to reduce anyone to a single story. we are all more complex, more nuanced than any interview or anecdote could ever convey.