Historian Mark White spoke on the HistoryExtra podcast about grappling with conflicting pictures of Kennedy in his biography of the president, Icon, Libertine, Leader.

While he credits Kennedy as a capable and, at times, transformational leader, in contrast, the president’s personal conduct was “like looking at the life of an early Roman emperor.”

His “sexual waywardness”, says White, was not a footnote but a defining feature of his private life – and it was carried out with breathtaking audacity.

Kennedy’s riskiest affairs

As historians in the 1970s and ‘80s sought to unpick the image of Kennedy as a president of impeccable character – an image shored up by JFK’s wife Jackie in the wake of his assassination in 1963 – a “slew of revelations” emerged.

“It became clear that he’d been a philanderer of spectacular proportions and had affairs with lots of people,” White explains. And it wasn’t just the volume of his affairs – it was Kennedy’s choices of companions that had dangerous implications.

One example is Judith Campbell, who from 1960 to 1962, was simultaneously seeing Kennedy and Sam Giancana, the head of the Chicago Mafia.

Such a close connection to a significant criminal outfit is “obviously a real concern,” says White, calling the Campbell affair “a major misjudgement on his part.”

Another of Kennedy’s affairs, with a woman called Ellen Rometsch in 1963, also courted huge risk.

Rometsch was a model seemingly from West Germany, who was married to a West German air force sergeant. In a twist that could be lifted from a Cold War-era spy novel, says White, “what Kennedy didn’t know when he was sleeping with her was that she was originally from communist East Germany.”

“She wasn’t a spy, but she could have been,” White notes, “and sexual compromise blackmail is a standard espionage technique.” Speculation has swirled in the decades since about Rometsch’s motives.

The most famous example of Kennedy’s extra-marital affairs is a romance with the Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe, says White. “Some biographies disagree on this in terms of timing and so on, but it seems pretty clear he had an affair with her.” Given the profile of Monroe in ’60s America, Kennedy’s attitude seems brazen.

These episodes have to be considered as more than salacious anecdotes, says White, acknowledging how they expose Kennedy’s casual willingness to take risks that could have compromised national security. They also, he says, raise serious ethical questions.

“You could make the argument that this is a presidential private life, we should just be concerned about his policies,” says White. “But I think one does have to consider it. His presidency wasn’t damaged. But those were risks he should never have taken.”

How has history regarded Kennedy’s philandering?

Many historians and biographers have struggled with how to square Kennedy’s personal flaws with his political legacy, says White.

Tracing the generational shift in scholarship, he highlights the early “Camelot School”, which lionised Kennedy, bolstered by Jackie Kennedy’s savvy comparison of her husband to King Arthur in the week after his assassination. “It was deliberate and strategic,” says White. “The implication was that JFK had been so great as a president, it was appropriate to think of him in mythical terms.”

But by the 1970s and ’80s, revelations of Kennedy’s private behaviour and the disaster of the Vietnam War had shattered the Camelot illusion. “A whole slew of revelations emerged,” influencing a new school of thought “which I call the ‘Counter-Camelot’,” White explains.

These revisionists – including Seymour Hersh and Thomas Reeves – branded Kennedy as a reckless Cold Warrior with a dangerously flawed character.

Reeves, one of the harshest critics, argued that “the foundation of all exceptional leadership is a strong sense of character… and JFK just didn’t have that.”

Did Kennedy’s affairs affect his leadership?

White does agree that Kennedy’s character in private life was “extraordinary” in its recklessness, but insists that defining him solely by his sexual behaviour is reductive.

“Character is a complex thing, comprising a multiplicity of traits,” he counters. “When you look at Kennedy in the round, you also can see that he was courageous… he had the capacity to change and grow.”

White credits Kennedy with a significant evolution during his presidency – from a stance as a Cold War ‘hawk’ to a more cautious statesman.

The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, White argues, profoundly changed him, instilling a sobering awareness of nuclear brinkmanship. In civil rights, too, Kennedy grew: “He was sickened by what he’d seen” in Birmingham, Alabama in the fight to end racial segregation, and delivered “the great speech of his life” on civil rights in June 1963, introducing legislation that would later become the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

It’s also of note that, in the context of the modern presidency, the behaviour isn’t unique, White says. “We know Warren Harding had affairs. Franklin Roosevelt had affairs. Dwight Eisenhower, prior to his presidency; Lyndon Johnson, a lot of affairs. George Bush Senior. Bill Clinton, certainly.”

“They can’t get me while I’m alive”

Why have the private affairs of many other presidents not attracted the same levels of attention? White speculates that “people are more drawn to that side of JFK’s behaviour because of his perceived glamour.”

But none of this negates the astonishing double life that JFK maintained. While crafting a sophisticated image of a devoted family man – complete with glamorous First Lady and his children regularly featuring in press photographs – Kennedy conducted affairs even within the White House itself.

“There were at least four women in the White House – administrators, secretaries – that he was sleeping with throughout his time there,” White reveals.

This duplicity was enabled by the media culture of the time. Kennedy “understood that responsible journalists didn’t report on politicians’ private lives,” says White. “He wasn’t taking a political risk, for instance, in the same way that Bill Clinton was in the 1990s.”

Kennedy is said to have quipped something to the effect of: ‘They can’t get me while I’m alive, and when I’m dead, it’s not something I’m really bothered about.’

It’s a remark that can be seen to show the recklessness with which Kennedy viewed his private actions. Yet, as White notes, “I don’t really think it has any impact on his presidency in terms of his policies.”

Indeed, says White, Kennedy’s political decision-making was remarkably cautious – at odds with the impulsiveness of his personal life. “If he’s that macho and reckless, why doesn’t he send in troops to overthrow Castro during the Bay of Pigs? Why didn’t he bomb Cuba during the Missile Crisis?”

For White, the paradox of Kennedy is essential to understanding him. He was a leader of enormous symbolic power with a meticulously cultivated image, yet the image hid profound moral complexities.

“You can’t understand why he’s elected president without reference to that image,” he says. “Kennedy develops the most powerful, seductive, mesmerising image of any leader in a western democratic context.”

Mark White is a professor of history at Queen Mary, University of London, and the author of Icon, Libertine, Leader (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). He was speaking to Elinor Evans on the HistoryExtra podcast, listen to the full conversation