Philanderer in Chief

Bettmann / Corbis American Adulterer, Jed Mercurio’s libido-fueled novel about JFK, tackles the big question: What was he thinking? Caryn James on scheming pols and their suffering spouses.

Did John F. Kennedy’s sexual frustration lead to the Bay of Pigs invasion, the low point of his presidency? That’s one of the loonier possibilities in British novelist Jed Mercurio’s American Adulterer, which puts us inside JFK’s obsessively womanizing thoughts during his White House years. This fictionalized but thoroughly researched account has the president believing that not having enough sex clouds his judgment. And he was so trying to be good during his early months in office that his sex-deprived mind wandered while he was being briefed on whether U.S.-backed forces should enter Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, as “delirium fogs his perception of the generals.”

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He did order that disastrous invasion, of course. Well, he wouldn’t let brain-fogging marital fidelity ruin foreign policy again. After a night with Marilyn Monroe, he finds that he is “lucid and decisive” once more, and feels free to screw around in the White House. He did it for the country!

American Adulterer is a more serious novel than the character’s silly justification makes it seem. Mercurio, who trained as a doctor, takes a medical approach to Kennedy, whom he refers to throughout the book as “the subject.” It’s a useless strategy, because no doctor’s voice separates JFK’s weird wishful thinking from what might be plausible. But with political sex scandals erupting all around us—John Edwards, John Ensign, Mark Sanford, it’s hard to keep track—American Adulterer holds its own fascination as it tackles the question we want answered most: What was he thinking? And what was she thinking, the suffering wife by his side?

The real Kennedy, the granddaddy of all hound-dog politicians, displayed the self-indulgence that leads to a classic chicken-egg question: What comes first, the outsized ego that makes someone think he can do anything (cheat, run the free world), or the power that deludes him into believing he can get away with it? The pre-presidential escapades of Kennedy and Bill Clinton suggest the former, but you never know. Mercurio’s Kennedy can’t shed much light on this because he’s already in power as the novel begins.

American Adulterer. By Jed Mercurio. 352 pages. Simon& Schuster. $25. He’s also in constant physical pain. The clunky novel includes page-long excerpts from Kennedy’s speeches and alarming lists of his medical ailments. As recent historians have revealed, Kennedy’s illnesses were so debilitating it’s a wonder he could function at all: His back was a nightmare; he had Addison’s disease, an adrenal deficiency whose drug treatments created a host of side effects; he supplemented those prescriptions with amphetamine shots from a physician nicknamed “Dr. Feelgood.” As Mercurio puts it, Kennedy suffers from “Addison’s disease, thyroid deficiency, gastric reflux, gastritis, peptic ulcer, ulcerative colitis, prostatitis...” The list goes on for four more lines, and it’s only one of many such lists in the book.

Such clotted writing makes American Adulterer more interesting to talk about than to read. Mercurio himself (he turned an earlier novel into a sharp hospital drama) discusses the novel quite smartly in a video interview in which he flat-out says what the book leaves us to guess: that he regards his character’s belief that he needs sex to be a good president as medical nonsense.