Jack and Lem: John F. Kennedy and Lem Billings: The Untold Story of an Extraordinary Friendship - Paperback

by David Pitts (Author)

I'm not that kind of boy," Jack angrily wrote to Lem after his friend made a sexual advance. But Jack didn't end the relationship. From the time John F. Kennedy and Kirk LeMoyne "Lem" Billings met at Choate, until the President's assassination thirty years later, Jack and Lem remained best friends. Lem was a virtual fixture in the Kennedy family who even had his own room at the White House. Drawing on hundreds of letters and telegrams between the two, plus Lem Billings's oral history and interviews with family and friends like Ben Bradlee, Gore Vidal, and Ted Sorensen, award-winning Kennedy scholar David Pitts tells the story of an unusual friendship that endured despite an era of rampant homophobia.

Author Biography

David Pitts has been senior writer at the U.S. Information Agency/Voice of America, and has written for publications including the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Christian Science Monitor. He lives in Washington, D.C.