JFK 'was a bedroom bore', said Jackie

Published on Wednesday 7 April 2004 01:00

JOHN F Kennedy may have had a reputation as a virile president with a wandering eye, even having a fling with Marilyn Monroe - but his wife complained that he wasn’t up to much as a lover.

Jackie Kennedy once told to a friend that JFK "just goes too fast and falls asleep", according to a new book. But despite their marital problems - not least his unfaithfulness - Mrs Kennedy said that without her husband, her life would have "all been a wasteland, and I would have known it every step of the way".

The new details come in a book called Grace and Power, with excerpts published in Vanity Fair magazine.

Sally Bedell Smith, the author, told how Mrs Kennedy had intimate conversations with her friend Frank Finnerty, a cardiologist she met after spraining her ankle.

Dr Finnerty said that it was JFK’s affair with Monroe which "seemed to bother her the most". He said Mrs Kennedy told him her love life with her husband was unsatisfactory, saying "he just goes too fast and falls asleep".

He advised her on how to approach the subject with her husband - and said that the advice seemed to work.