BUSY IN BED, BUT ALSO IN BERLIN

By Hugh Sidey

The gifted and naturally charming John Kennedy was born into a wealthy family with a gnawing ambition to be embraced by the American elite. It cast him in torment between his open instincts for sex and power and his refined grasp of honorable service in a dangerous world.

Kennedy never resolved the conflict--nor have we, nor will we. He was a driven philanderer at one moment. In the next he was a grand romantic who, with insight, eloquence and wit, sought a place among the legends Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Franklin Roosevelt.

Perhaps he found his text for this compartmentalized life in the book The Young Melbourne, which he once told me was his favorite. It is the story of William Lamb, Queen Victoria's early Prime Minister, who presided at the height of the British Empire. It describes a world in which the young British aristocracy served brilliantly in Parliament, finance and the military during the weekdays but then romped through each other's bedrooms on the weekends. They seized what they wanted--women, land and office.

We recently got the transcripts of the Kennedy tapes from the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, and there Kennedy is the serene leader who guides the nation away from nuclear conflict. He is the man with the best grasp of how wars arise from miscalculation and weakness, the man who turns aside his bellicose warriors. Now we have Seymour Hersh and his book The Dark Side of Camelot, an exhausting catalog of Kennedy's alleged sexual indulgences, cover-ups and unlicensed use of family wealth to buy his office. But there has been--and there is in the Hersh account--something incomplete and unsettling. Kennedy was President in a dangerous time, and while there was plenty of circumstantial evidence that he was busy with extramarital adventures, he was also busy with Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam, nuclear disarmament, the moon shot, racial upheavals and the American economy. Hersh and his fraternity of investigative reporters have served this nation well. But there is a dark side even in their business, particularly in our age of star-driven, megabuck contracts in books and television.

Too often these days, investigators come to act like and resemble those they investigate--people who are swayed by money, willing to use any means to their ends, secretive and conspiratorial, convinced of their superior intelligence and rectitude, unable to see anything around them but evil. It all seems to swell and consume everything before them. Can the presidency be that depraved and it go unnoticed?

I recall during the Kennedy years, when the first stories of his sexual exploits began to surface, that Milton Berle's wife arrived in Washington from Hollywood and asked what in the world was going on in the White House. "If all of the women who claim to have slept with Kennedy are telling the truth, he would not have strength enough to lift a teacup, let alone deal with Khrushchev." Women or not, Kennedy dealt pretty well with Khrushchev, and that may be the larger reason why Camelot will not fade away.