“I was madly in love with this compelling man.” These are the words of Diana de Vegh, an 83-year-old grandmother who recently opened up about her alleged affair with former President John F. Kennedy.
In a heartfelt essay published in Air Mail, de Vegh recounts the whirlwind romance that began when she was just a 20-year-old college student at Radcliffe in 1958.
It all started at a political benefit where de Vegh found herself seated next to the charismatic senator.
“Give me your seat, so a tired old man can sit next to a pretty girl,” Kennedy reportedly said to her date, initiating what would become a four-year on-and-off relationship.
Despite the 20-year age gap and Kennedy’s marital status, de Vegh fell head over heels.
“I didn’t realize then that I’d simply been netted, separated from the other students,” she wrote.
“I was 20 years old, with a full supply of hormones and madly in love.”
According to de Vegh, the affair was marked by clandestine meetings arranged by Kennedy’s staff.
A driver would pick her up and bring her to campaign events, where she was tended to by aides who made sure she stayed inconspicuous.
Afterward, she and JFK would steal moments alone, making love in his Boston apartment and at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City.
“You know I’m working pretty hard for just one vote here,” he would teasingly say to her.
As Kennedy’s star rose, the relationship became more strained.
De Vegh moved to Washington D.C. to be closer to him after his election, but felt increasingly isolated and overlooked.
The turning point came when JFK realized de Vegh’s father was a Hungarian economist he had recently started consulting with.
Fearing the potential fallout, Kennedy began to distance himself.
“He couldn’t just drop me, so we had to kind of dwindle,” de Vegh explained.
“I didn’t realize quite what was going on, but then things shifted radically.”
Their final meeting took place sometime in 1962, though de Vegh can’t recall the exact location.
It was the last time she would ever see him before his assassination the following year. The news left her completely numb.
“I just went completely numb,” she told The Post. “I was having dinner in a bistro in my neighborhood and it came on the news and I thought, this can’t be true.”
In the decades that followed, de Vegh rarely spoke of the affair, seeing it as “a pocket of dead energy” she carried with her.
She moved on with her life – getting married, having children, pursuing a career in social work. But the experience had a profound impact.
Looking back, she realizes how the unequal power dynamic and her own idolization of Kennedy blinded her to the toxicity of the situation.
“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,” she noted.
While the relationship was consensual, de Vegh feels it epitomized the way many young women get seduced by powerful men to their own detriment.
By sharing her story now, in the era of #MeToo, de Vegh hopes to prompt other women to reevaluate unbalanced, unhealthy romantic entanglements and invest that energy in themselves instead.
“I never thought he would be engaged with me, I hoped that he would ‘love’ me,” she said of her own misplaced respect for JFK above herself.
Had she known her own worth, “I firmly believe I would never have let my heart be broken by a man so ready to cast me aside.”
It’s a poignant, bittersweet tale – one of youthful passion, disillusionment, and hard-earned wisdom.
And while some may question de Vegh’s motivations in coming forward after so many years, her message of empowerment and self-love is both timely and necessary.
As she wrote in her moving essay, “I don’t regret [the affair] because in the long run it taught me something I needed to know.”
For that knowledge, and her courage in sharing it, we owe Diana de Vegh our thanks.
