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What Lincoln’s Pockets Held When he Died and Other Presidential Oddities

Khalid Elhassan July 15, 2021 36 min

Secret Service agents bust counterfeiters in 1879. United States Secret Service

2. The President, His Brother, and a Blond Bombshell

Of all of President John F. Kennedy’s numerous affairs, none would probably produce as massive a media frenzy today as his affair with Marilyn Monroe. It would make the media circus that surrounded Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, or Trump and Stormy Daniels, look tame. The blond bombshell caught Kennedy’s eye after she made a spectacular entrance at a New York dinner party held in his honor in early 1962. 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 was not discreet. Her sultry “Happy Birthday” performance for JFK during a fundraiser in Madison Square Garden – in the presence of his wife, no less – fueled the rumor machines.

Tongues wagged about the barely concealed affair between the president and the actress, but fortunately for JFK, his era’s media was nothing like that of today. Nonetheless, the gossip caused Kennedy to back away from Monroe and end things – to him, she was just one among dozens of pretty women he had slept with. To Monroe, he was the only president she had slept with, and she was not about to give up that easy. She repeatedly called the White House and tried to rekindle the affair, until JFK sent somebody 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.