His reputation was as a virile love-cheat, but JFK was a ‘lousy lover’

JOHN F KENNEDY had a reputation as a virile love-cheat president, even having a fling with Marilyn Monroe, but his wife complained that he was a lousy lover.

Jackie Kennedy once told a friend that JFK “just goes too fast and falls asleep”, according to a new book.

But despite their marital problems, not least his unfaithfulness, Jackie said that without JFK her life would have “all been a wasteland, and I would have known it every step of the way”.

The new details come in a book called Grace and Power, with excerpts printed in Vanity Fair magazine.

Author Sally Bedell Smith told how Jackie had intimate conversations with friend and cardiologist Frank Finnerty.

Dr Finnerty said it was JFK’s affair with Marilyn Monroe which “seemed to bother her the most”.

Dr Finnerty said he advised her on how to approach the subject with her husband.

The advice seemed to work. “Kennedy never thought she would go to that much trouble to enjoy sex. This impressed him,” Dr Finnerty said.

But JFK’s womanising continued.

On one occasion he made a pass at Tony Bradlee, the ex-wife of former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, during a dinner cruise on the Potomac for the president’s 46th birthday.

“Jack was always so complimentary to me, putting his hands around my waist,” Bradlee said.

“I thought, Hmmmm, he likes me. I think it surprised him I would not succumb. If I hadn’t been married, maybe I would have.”

The book explains that Jackie was well aware of her husband’s dalliances.

But a week after her 10th wedding anniversary, two months prior to JFK’s assassination, Jackie wrote to her friend Charley Bartlett, who introduced the couple, that without Jack as her husband, her life would have “all been a wasteland, and I would have known it every step of the way”.

JFK had his own concerns. Following the death of the Kennedys’ infant son Patrick, in 1963, he begged Jackie not to go on a cruise with Aristotle Onassis.

He feared she might have an affair with the Greek shipping tycoon.

JFK arranged for Franklin Roosevelt Jr and his wife, Sue, to go along on the trip to “give an air of respect”, according to Ms Roosevelt.