When it comes to John F. Kennedy’s personal life, history often focuses on his most publicized relationships. But beyond the famous names, there were many others who claimed—or were alleged—to have had intimate relationships with the 35th president.
One of the most detailed accounts came from Mimi Alford, a former White House intern. In her 2013 memoir, *Once Upon a Secret*, Alford wrote that she was only 19 when the 45-year-old president pursued her. She came from an upper-crust East Coast background and got her position through connections with the affluent Bouvier family.
Alford met Kennedy and his best friend, Dave Powers, by the White House pool during her first week on the job. In her memoir, she wrote that the president "just couldn't resist a girl with a little bit of social register in her." He then invited her back to his suite for a drink. What followed was a year-and-a-half-long affair.
Alford claimed she lost her virginity to JFK, writing that she was "blinded by the president's power and charisma." She said she was fully committed to keeping the affair secret and never referred to him as "Jack"—he was always "Mr. President." She also alleged that the president introduced her to drugs, asked her to perform sexual favors for Dave Powers, and continued to pursue her even after her engagement, up until his assassination in 1963.
It took 50 years for Alford to tell her story. She summed up the relationship by writing, "I can't say our relationship was romantic. It was sexual, it was intimate, it was passionate."
During the Kennedy presidency, two White House secretaries—Priscilla Wear and Jill Cowan—were given the code names "Fiddle" and "Faddle" by the Secret Service due to their regular involvement with the president. According to accounts from coworkers, they would skinny dip in the pool with JFK when he wasn't dealing with Cold War tensions.
Much effort was put into ensuring First Lady Jackie Kennedy was none the wiser. Teams would clean up after JFK and his various mistresses, picking up anything incriminating before Jackie returned from her travels. But Mrs. Kennedy wasn't fooled. Rumor has it that while giving a French reporter a tour of the White House, she passed by Priscilla Wear's typing station and said in French, "And there is the woman that my husband is supposed to be sleeping with."
Kennedy also reportedly had a relationship with Pamela Turnure, Jackie's personal secretary, although Turnure's family insisted there was no truth to those claims.
In her 1977 memoir, *My Story*, Judith Exner alleged that she had a two-year affair with John F. Kennedy. Exner, who was married to actor William Campbell in the early 1950s, was friendly with several Hollywood A-listers. After her divorce, she began a casual relationship with Frank Sinatra, who introduced her to JFK in 1960.
Through Sinatra, she also got to know Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. Contrary to what she told the Senate under oath in 1975, Exner served as a link between the president and the boss of the Chicago crime syndicate. In a 1988 interview with *People*, Exner confessed, "I lied when I said I was not a conduit between President Kennedy and the mafia. I lied when I said that President Kennedy was unaware of my friendships with mobsters. He knew everything about my dealings with Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli because I was seeing them for him."
According to Exner, she would put two parties together, and JFK allegedly asked Giancana for support on the campaign trail. In 1962, Exner was pregnant with Kennedy's child, and he, along with Giancana, helped arrange an abortion, which was illegal at the time.
Hollywood icon Marlene Dietrich, then over 60, also slept with JFK while performing at the White House. As her longtime friend Gore Vidal recounted years later, Dietrich responded to the president's proposition by saying, "You know, Mr. President, I am not very young." A relatively brief encounter followed, after which JFK asked, "Did you ever go to bed with my old man?" Dietrich had most definitely been involved with Joe Kennedy, JFK's father, over two decades before—but she lied and said she hadn't.
While Dietrich may be one of the most legendary women JFK bedded, East German model Ellen Rometsch may have been the most dangerous. Rometsch met Kennedy while working as a hostess at a private hideaway called the Quorum Club, but her real job was allegedly spying for East Germany.
According to Washington insider Robert Gene Baker, she looked like Elizabeth Taylor and sparked the interest of many men. Baker recalled a conversation with lobbyist Bill Thompson that started it all. Thompson asked, "You think if I invited her to my apartment, she'll go to the White House and see President Kennedy?" Baker was sure she would. Rometsch went to the White House several times.
Where sex was concerned, John F. Kennedy thought he was untouchable, invulnerable. JFK's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, eventually deported Rometsch back to Germany. He was worried the relationship would be discovered, which would have been a disaster in light of the FBI's investigation into her communist ties.
Mary Pinchot Meyer's relationship with JFK, like Marilyn Monroe's, ends in tragedy. Meyer ranked high on the social ladder. She grew up wealthy, attended New York's best schools, where she first met the president-to-be, and married a CIA official in the mid-1950s, years before JFK became president.
The Meyers and the Kennedys lived next door to one another in Washington, D.C., and she and Jackie Kennedy became friends. After her divorce in 1958, Meyer began an affair with JFK. They had a years-long relationship, allegedly experimenting with psychedelics and discussing top-secret politics. White House gate logs from that period show her being signed in on at least 15 occasions, always around dinner time.
In 1964, the year after JFK's assassination, Meyer was murdered. Despite an overwhelming lack of evidence, a young Black day laborer named Ray Crump Jr. was arrested for the crime but was eventually acquitted. Speaking about Crump, author Leo Damore theorized, "He was the perfect patsy—even better than Lee Harvey Oswald. Mary Meyer was killed by a well-trained professional hitman, very likely somebody connected to the CIA."
Meyer's murder remains one of Washington's biggest unsolved mysteries.