'No-Kidding-Around Situation': Alleged JFK Mistress Comes Out After Years of Silence

The 35th US president, John F. Kennedy, not only expressed romantic affection towards his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy. In May, two love letters from JFK to a young Swedish aristocrat, Gunilla von Post, were put up for auction, containing expressions of eagerness from Kennedy to meet his crush again.

Diana de Vegh, 83 and legally blind, claimed during an interview to the New York Post that she and John F. Kennedy, the 35th US president, had an affair.

According to de Vegh, the relationship between her and Kennedy began when she was a junior at Radcliffe College, and JFK, then a Democratic presidential candidate, was in the middle of his campaign.

“Give me your seat, so a tired old man can sit next to a pretty girl", JFK told her when initiating their first meeting at an event scheduled a week later.

Their relations purportedly evolved into an on-and-off affair that lasted for the next four years, de Vegh said, saying that she was madly in love.

“I was 20 years old, with a full supply of hormones and madly in love with this compelling man", she detailed.

De Vegh revealed that she and JFK would meet regularly, with his staff calling her "sweetheart" and a driver picking her up from an off-campus residence and taking her to wherever the president-to-be was campaigning.

“It was easy, and emotionally convenient,” De Vegh said, “because Mrs. [Jacqueline] Kennedy did not participate at this level of suburban campaigning.”

According to de Vegh, she did not know that Kennedy was married, since he, according to de Vegh, apparently preferred not to elaborate on his private life.

Their relationship changed dramatically after JFK discovered who her father was: the same Hungarian economist he’d recently begun consulting with on political affairs.

“He had nothing against me, but he realized it could really be a problem because a lot of people knew my dad, but he couldn’t just drop me, so we had to kind of dwindle,” de Vegh said.“I didn’t realize quite what was going on, but then things shifted radically."

She revealed that, soon after, JFK began to put her  “back on the shelf" and call her "cold", even though she believed it was him who began turning cold.

De Vegh said that she last met JFK a year before his 1963 assassination - a world-shaking event that left her "completely numb".

“I was having dinner in a bistro in my neighborhood and it came on the news and I thought, this can’t be true. I went home and went to bed and the next day I got every copy of every newspaper", she told The Post.

She never discussed it, because, as she explained, "back then, nice girls didn't have sex, that was a no-kidding-around situation, so I did not talk about it." De Vegh would share the story off-the-record with those who asked but never felt the urge to deliver it publicly. 

Now the 83-year-old woman believes that her revelation could help young women, who, despite the surfacing of the #MeToo movement and feminism, may still continue to value older men rather than respect and love themselves.

“The whole idea of conferred specialness — ‘You go to bed with me, I’ll make you special’ — we’ve seen a lot of that with Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, show business,” De Vegh noted to The Post.

There are other tales of JFK's affairs, as in May several love letters signed from him, penned on United States Senate letterhead, emerged at auction. In the letters, the young lawmaker who would later become the 35th US president expressed his affection towards a young Swedish aristocrat, Gunilla von Post, saying that he missed her and commenting on her marriage.

JFK is also theorized to have had sex with the iconic mid-20th-century Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe, with some reports going so far as to suggest that she aborted a baby procreated by the two.