Jackie,Jack & Joan

IN 1956 JFK MET FIERY JOAN LUNDBERGAND THEY EMBARKED ON A TWO-YEAR AFFAIR WITH A SHOCKING END, A BOMBSHELL NEW BOOK REVEALS

- LIZ MCNEIL

Ties That Bind "Jackie once told a friend, 'Jack didn't have to lie to me about Joan. I was already lying to myself,'" says author J. Randy Taraborrelli of JFK's affairs, including one with Joan Lundberg (at right, ca. 1973).

Joan Lundberg “was one of a kind,” says her son Zachary Hitchcock. “She was unconventional and independent—a voluptuous beauty with a great smile.”

A spirited flight attendant with working-class roots, she married six times and died in 1982 at age 49 of cirrhosis of the liver. She left behind an unpublished memoir, Lovers Don’t Snore, about her adventurous life, including an affair with John F. Kennedy in the late 1950s. It’s a little-known chapter in the life of the 35th President—one that might have remained that way were it not for her family, who shared her unfinished manuscript with author J. Randy Taraborrelli. He tells her story for the first time in a new biography, JFK: Public, Private, Secret, excerpted exclusively here. “Joan was unique because she acted as JFK’s therapist in many ways,” says Taraborrelli. In Jack’s world, feelings were a liability, and power was paramount. “Joan got him to open up emotionally in a way he never did with Jackie,” says Taraborrelli. “She was not connected to his circle so he trusted she wouldn’t say anything.” As a result, the author says, “He began to reckon with his flaws and, ironically, became a better husband.” Toward the end of his life, Taraborrelli notes, “JFK confided in Joan Kennedy, his sister-in-law, that the way he'd treated Jackie was ‘painful,’ and he said, ‘By painful I mean shameful.’ He was trying to be a better man—and then his life is cut short.”