Rumors about President John F. Kennedy's many alleged affairs are nothing new.
Most famous among these stories is Kennedy's supposed ongoing romance
with icon Marilyn Monroe, but they certainly don't stop there.
Kennedy reportedly had brief romances with Marlene Dietrich,
Swedish socialite Gunilla Von Post, Blaze Starr, and many others.
"Was he exploiting you?"
"Well, it certainly was an incredibly imbalanced relationship,
and not a good relationship in hindsight, looking back."
However, it is worth noting that the Kennedy family has never acknowledged these liaisons,
and many of the women remained tight-lipped about
their rumored relationships with the late president.
However, there has been a recent rupture in this long silence,
as one of Kennedy's alleged mistresses has spoken out about her supposed relationship
with the president. Diana de Vegh, a New York-based psychotherapist,
shared her story in Air Mail for a groundbreaking article published on August 28th, 2021.
Diana de Vegh first explained how she allegedly met John F. Kennedy.
As she told Air Mail, she was 20 and was a junior at Radcliffe College. It was 1958,
and Kennedy was a senator. De Vegh met Kennedy at a political event when she
was surrounded by other students. She recalled the event, saying:
"We all stood up. He gestured to us to sit back down.
'This is the table I need to be at. You young people will set me straight;
the rest of these guys just tell me what I want to hear [...]' We glowed. We mattered."
Next, De Vegh recalled how Kennedy came over and
put his hand on her date's shoulder and said to him:
"Give me your seat, so a tired old man can sit next to a pretty girl."
The affair took off soon after. De Vegh remembered:
"I went to one rally, and then another, giddy with the knowledge of my special place.
In the car after a rally, the senator would tease me:
'You know I'm working pretty hard for just one vote here [...] ' But underneath the teasing,
our connection was tapping into a vein of possibility."
But de Vegh also noted how quickly she got wrapped up in Kennedy's sphere. She said:
"It wasn't just [him] who paid attention to me; I was entirely surrounded by his
circle. They were so attentive, always someone to talk to or bring me a cup of coffee,
call me 'sweetheart.' I thought it was grand."
When things reportedly took an intimate turn,
de Vegh described her conflicting emotions. She recalled:
"His hand on mine. Mine were icy cold. Oddly, my impulse was to flinch away. I didn't, but
what was the matter with me? This was love [...] love not spoken,
not the explicit words, but silently conveyed in so many ways. So why the confusion?"
Their affair allegedly continued for four years. Kennedy was married by that point,
of course, having wed Jackie Kennedy in 1953. So why did de Vegh choose now to speak out? Well,
Diana de Vegh explained in her Air Mail essay why she wanted to speak
about her alleged relationship with John F. Kennedy years after. She said:
"#MeToo has provided a specific context for needed re-evaluation.
Then there is the broader context of a world still obsessed with stargazing.
Inequality and idealization as the component parts of celebrity glamour."
De Vegh also explained how time has given her greater perspective, saying:
"I'm also writing because I am old. Old enough that I can look candidly and with
compassion at why I was so easily hooked. Why, all these decades later, for so many people,
it is still an ongoing project not to get hooked by a passing supernova."
She concluded with a moment of retrospection, writing:
"​​When I was 20, John Kennedy had all the markers of a romantic hero. But this
is not a romantic story. Back then I thought it was. Was I a dope? For sure,
so what? Twenty-year-olds are not supposed to be wise."
De Vegh concluded her essay by saying that she has since forgiven her younger
self for falling for Kennedy. And while it seems unlikely that her
essay will shift public perception towards America's 35th president,
it is very clear that many of the details of his affairs are yet to be revealed.
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