The sickening extent of JFKs philandering is fully exposed in a new book including his affair with a teenage White House intern

“There are no secrets,” writer Nora Ephron once opined.Perhaps she should have added a corollary: “Kennedy secrets always sell books.” Fresh case in point is “Ladies’ Man: The Careless Heart of John F.

Kennedy,” a compendium of the love affairs of the 35th President, beginning when he was 17 and attending Choate, a Connecticut prep school.Author Laurence Leamer, who previously penned “Capote’s Women,” and “Hitchcock’s Blondes” inevitably goes over old ground in this new book, but the vast number of women and incidents he includes makes “Ladies’ Man,” if not edifying, certainly astonishing for sheer scope.It’s a wonder that Kennedy accomplished as much as he did, so frequently was he jumping in and out of bed.

His secret? Keep the encounters brief, and the affairs — if you want to call them that — short-lived. Those around Kennedy were aware of his brazen promiscuity, but the general public remained oblivious during his lifetime.He never suffered any consequences for behavior that was not merely unbecoming, but downright scuzzy. Did Kennedy love any of his paramours? Leamer makes the case that two Scandinavians captured his heart — at least for a time.

The first, Inga Arvad, was a sophisticated older woman whom Kennedy met in November 1941 through his sister Kathleen, her colleague at the Washington Times-Herald.Then 24 and a naval ensign, Kennedy fell hard for the 28-year-old Danish journalist, and their letters reveal a passionate and confiding intimacy.

“She came to understand him in ways no one else in his life ever had, to see him in all his flawed and fractured glory,” Leamer writes of Arvad.“As for Jack, he opened himself up to Arvad, exposing every emotion and concern.”Arvad was married, although estranged, from her second husband, movie director Paul Fejos.

More problematic were her links to Adolf Hitler, whom she had met and interviewed while working in Berlin.The German leader praised her as the perf...