One Brief Shining Moment

𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐞

Everyone has a secret. This is mine.

It was 1963, and the world was on the brink of unforeesable change. The civil rights movement was on the presipice of history, and the beatles had yet to become the iconic legends they are today. It was the height of the decade, the tip of the bell curve, progress and change looming over all of our heads. And yet things seemed still, people were so niave to it then. The calm after the second world war had placed people into a prolonged sense of security, that this eden or paradise that was their lives would last forever. I, on the other hand, yearned for change. I was twenty one years old, still learning what it meant to live and what it meant to feel complete. And though I was young and inexperienced about what change really meant, I craved it.  I was restless and hungry for something, something more. I wanted to escape the mundain life of social parties and husband hunting that had been lain before me. I wanted something scandalous and new. Most importantly, I wanted to feel in control of my own destiny.

And then I met him.

Whatever I wanted he procured for me, whatever my desire was, he would make it a reality. The earth moved to the beat of his drum, and in my eyes he was perfect. And it made me feel alive, to have the affection of one of the most powerful man on Earth right at my finger tips. I could be a mover and a shaker too, with him opening doors for me and holding my hand in dim lit rooms. It gave me power and influences, and he asked so little of me in return. At the time, I felt for the first time the control of getting the change you desired.

And I craved it desperately.

So during that summer, and for the three months that followed until his tragic death in November, I had an passionate and illicit relationship with President John F. Kennedy. With him I had allies and ways to make my dreams come true, with him I had affection and attention that I had never recieve before. With him, I had everything. And for one brief shining moment, I too could feel apart of that Camelot era. I too reaped it's rewards.

Until Camelot finally crumbled, and the world halted. Change had come, and then I was alone, left to make sense of what happened and pick up the pieces of my life. And then everything lost it's glammer, and I realized what i had sacrificed.

For the thrill of being with him.

There is quite a bit of damning evidence against me, evidence I thought would dissapear into time. The only memory of that time I kept was a Polaroid photo of me, lounging on a small white ottoman in a hotel room in Dallas, my young face glowing with serene delight, his nightshirt hanging loosely on my body, unaware of what was to come. Underneath it, in looping permanent ink, where the words:

"My Lizzie"

I had not written them.

I kept this secret of mine, and my only piece of evidence, with near-criminal clandestineness for more than fifty years. I confided only in a handful of people. I never told my Father, my brothers, or even my children. I assumed it would stay my secret until I the day I died.

But as it happens, it didn't.

So here I am, and here is my story. Un-doctored, unedited, and exactly the way it happened that year in 1963. This account includes that late summer and the season that followed, the gripping details of our secret affair, and how John F. Kennedy and the Camelot era would shape the remainder of my life.

I only ask one thing of you as a reader, and that is to not judge me so harshly for my actions. It is easy to condemn what I did from the other side, but as you read my tale, ask yourself this: 

What would you have done?

If you had been me, you would have done it too.