[Marxism] The hidden costs of promiscuity

[Louis Proyect]

Seymour Hersh, "The Dark Side Of Camelot":

John F. Kennedy's recklessness may finally have caught up with him in the 
last weeks of his life. One of his casual paramours in Washington, the wife 
of a military attache at the West German Embassy, was believed by a group 
of Republican senators to be a possible agent of East German intelligence. 
In the ensuing panic, the woman and her husband were quickly flown out of 
Washington, and Robert Kennedy used all of his powers as attorney general, 
with the help of J. Edgar Hoover, to quash investigations by the Congress 
and the FBI. The potential damage of the presidential liaison was 
heightened, as the worried Kennedy brothers understood, by the ongoing sex 
scandal involving John Profumo, the British secretary of state for war, 
that was riveting London - and the British tabloids - throughout the summer 
of 1963. The government of Prime Minister Harold Macmil-lan barely survived 
the scandal.

Kennedy may have paid the ultimate price, nonetheless, for his sexual 
excesses and compulsiveness. He severely tore a groin muscle while 
frolicking poolside with one of his sexual partners during a West Coast 
trip in the last week of September 1963. The pain was so intense that the 
White House medical staff prescribed a stiff canvas shoulder-to-groin brace 
that locked his body in a rigid upright position. It was far more 
constraining than his usual back brace, which he also continued to wear. 
The two braces were meant to keep him as comfortable as possible during the 
strenuous days of campaigning, including that day in Dallas.

Those braces also made it impossible for the president to bend in reflex 
when he was struck in the neck by the bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. 
Oswald's first successful shot was not necessarily fatal, but the president 
remained erect - and an excellent target for the second, fatal blow to the 
head. Kennedy's groin brace, which is now in the possession of the National 
Archives in Washington, was not mentioned in the public autopsy report, nor 
was the injury that had led to his need for it.

November 22,1963, would remain a day of family secrets, carefully kept, for 
decades to come.


Louis Proyect
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