The FBI discovered Kennedy's affair with Judith Campbell Exner, who was also romancing mob boss Sam Giancana. J. Edgar Hoover confronted Kennedy with his knowledge of it in March 1962, and shortly afterward Kennedy stopped seeing Exner. But it wasn't until 12 years after Kennedy's death that her activities became public as the result of a leak from a staffer on the Senate committee that was looking into intelligence wrongdoing. Her subsequent testimony smashed Camelot.

Former Washington Post executive editor and JFK pal Benjamin Bradlee posits that if Kennedy were president today and this story came out, "no matter how the public learned it," Kennedy would be impeached. (Bradlee, however, denies contemporaneous knowledge of Kennedy's philandering. He says that no one was more surprised than himself to discover, upon reading the diary of his sister-in-law, Mary Meyer, who was murdered in 1964, that she had been Kennedy's lover. But as Bradlee wrote in his autobiography, despite the gossip at the time he "knew of no evidence, none." Bradlee has a legitimate point: It's extremely difficult to turn suspicion into confirmation, especially if you don't want to.)