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Quirks and Oddities of Influential People in History

Khalid Elhassan August 17, 2019 24 min

Ulysses S. Grant - Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site

John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. Niagra Falls Reporter

6. JFK’s Affair With Marilyn Monroe

JFK was lucky that the media back then was way more discreet than today. In 1962, Marilyn Monroe caught Kennedy’s eye after she made a spectacular entrance at a New York dinner party held in his honor. He was immediately attracted to her, and they hooked up in Palm Springs soon thereafter. However, she took it more seriously than he did, and did little to hide what was going on. Her sultry “Happy Birthday” performance for JFK during a fundraising event in Madison Square Garden – in the presence of his wife, no less – got tongues wagging.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqolSvoWNck&t=39s

Gossip about the barely concealed affair between the president and the blond bombshell eventually caused Kennedy to back away from Monroe, and end things. To JFK, Monroe was just one among dozens of pretty women he had slept with. To Monroe, JFK was the only president she had slept with, and she was not about to give up that easy. She kept calling the White House, trying to rekindle the affair, until Kennedy sent somebody over to convince her that it was over, and that she needed to stop.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.