Harvard Crimson Book Review: Morrow probes dirty details of White House occupants’ tactics—and sex lives…
He goes to great length to find similarities among the three main characters. Both Kennedy and Nixon had siblings who died young, for example. JFK and Johnson both had voracious sexual appetites—as Morrow reminds us time and time again. Kennedy said he could not sleep without having had sex. While his wife Jacqueline was delivering their first child stillborn, JFK and a fellow senator were entertaining women on a yacht in the Mediterranean.
Johnson too had many affairs, but he stands out more for his trademark crudeness. “[H]e liked to discomfit ‘the Harvards’… by forcing them to confer with him while he sat on the toilet, and he was a lifelong exhibitionist who in college had dubbed his penis ‘Jumbo,’” Morrow relates.
Nixon, like Johnson, had a habit for making those around him uncomfortable. While drinking cocktails with the owners of the Los Angeles Times in 1967, Nixon blurted: “I probably shouldn’t tell this…But…Why did the farmer keep a bucket of shit in his living room?”
The punch line: “Because he wanted to keep the flies out of the kitchen!” A shocked silence ensued. The hostess said: “You’re right, Dick, you shouldn’t have told that.”
