Esquire has posted excerpts from Brian Abrams‘ “Party Like A President” that tell tales about about JFK bacchanalia. The reporting feels a bit sloppy here and there. I’m not aware that there were “occasions when JFK spent weekends at Frank Sinatra’s place in Palm Springs,” certainly not when he was President. Abrams includes that old story about Kennedy telling British Prime Minister Harold McMillan he got headaches if he went without a conquest for three days. (I’ve read a different version with JFK telling McMillan that he didn’t feel as if he’d “really had a woman unless I’ve had her three ways.”) The surprise is reading that Kennedy allegedly “smoked three marijuana cigarettes with Mary Pinchot Meyer, the ex-wife of a CIA official and a Kennedy mistress who often visited the White House when Jackie was out of town. When offered a fourth joint, the president begged off. ‘Suppose the Russians did something now,’ wondered the bloodshot-eyed leader of the free world.”

Wait a minute…even if you were smoking fairly weak pot you wouldn’t need any more than a few tokes on a joint to get seriously ripped. Why would Kennedy and Meyer have consumed three joints?

Mary Pinchot Meyer’s Wiki page says that she and JFK reportedly had “about 30 trysts.” At least one author has claimed she brought marijuana or LSD to almost all of these meetings. In January 1963 Philip Graham disclosed the Kennedy-Pinchot Meyer affair to a meeting of newspaper editors but his claim was not reported by the news media.” Now those were the good times! Source: Kennedy is allegedly having it off with dozens of women including one, an ex-wife of a CIA guy, I’ve been told of directly. Big-City Editors: Leave it alone. Not our business. Has nothing to do with political reporting.

“In 1983 former Harvard University psychology lecturer Timothy Leary claimed that in the spring of 1962, Pinchot Meyer told Leary she was taking part in a plan to avert worldwide nuclear war by convincing powerful male members of the Washington establishment to take mind-altering drugs, which would presumably lead them to conclude that the Cold War was meaningless. According to Leary, Meyer had sought him out for the purpose of learning how to conduct LSD sessions with these powerful men, including, she strongly implied, President John F. Kennedy, who was then her lover. According to Leary, Pinchot Meyer said she had shared in this plan with at least seven other Washington socialite friends who held similar political views and were trying to supply LSD to a small circle of high ranking government officials.”