Real Talk: JFK and Jackie Had Sex on Air Force One a Day Before Dallas

There are tasteful ways to talk about the looming anniversary of the JFK assassination, and then there’s the New York Post‘s way, which involves mentioning the little-known-fact that JFK and Jackie totally boned on Air Force One during a short flight from San Antonio to Houston on Nov. 21, just 24 hours before the assassination.

According to Philip Nobile, a would-be chronicler of JFK’s “Don Juanism” (yes, that is how Nobile describes his star-crossed JFK book project), an innuendo-laced version of the supposed Air Force One encounter appears in the 1967 book The Death of a President, by historian William Manchester. Manchester met Nobile through their mutual literary agent back in the mid-70s, and told him (after making Nobile promise to not attribute the story to him until after his death) that JFK and Jackie had sex on the eve of the assassination, and that tales of their separate beds in Dallas were “misleading.” Of course, Manchester had to play down the sexiness of the Air Force One sexcapade because audiences in the late 60s weren’t ready to see the president and first lady thus scandalized (the only appropriate scandals involved the president and movie stars, obviously), but if you read between the lines, you can see what Manchester was getting at in his book:

Their life together now had nearly a full day to run. Yet this was to be their last hour of serenity. The tyranny of events and exhaustion would begin to close in when they finished the two-hundred-mile lap to Houston. Actually, they hadn’t even an hour. In this plane the hop took only forty-five minutes. Privacy was that limited, confined to a tiny blue cabin racing 30,000 feet above the tessellated green and brown plains of central Texas . . . Their time was up. The President emerged in a fresh shirt.

STEAMY. We have a few days yet until the 22nd, so expect many more stories about JFK’s pre-assassination, foreshadowing activities, like his consulting with psychics in the Air Force One toilet, or receiving a heretofore unknown visit from the X-Men’s Kitty Pryde during which she warned him how his impending assassination will spark a public backlash against mutants that culminates with Manhattan being turned into a mutant internment camp.