Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) by David Talbot Page A

which was banned in Britain for eight years after it was written in 1894. But after the play, the merry trio then went bar-hopping, ending up in a dimly lit watering hole whose upstairs bar was frequented by lesbians. “Jackie was fascinated but dared not look in,” Vidal noted.
    Bill Walton was very discreet about his sexual yearnings, which by this point in his life were decidedly homosexual. Friends like Vidal—who ran into him again that September in Provincetown “cruising the Atlantic House, very relaxed”—certainly knew, as did fellow JFK pals like Ben Bradlee, who assumed he was “gay as a goose.” Did JFK and Jackie know? The ever-discreet Walton, who died in 1994, never said whether he revealed his sexuality to the first couple. Walton’s son, Matthew, said he would “bet a thousand to one against it.” Still, the three shared sexual confidences and Jack was comfortable enough to ask Walton to squire his mistresses to White House events. If JFK was aware of his friend’s secret life, he was clearly self-assured enough about his own sexuality not to feel threatened by it. In fact, as Walton remarked to Vidal, he seemed to thrive on male, as well as female, adoration.
    Bobby, on the other hand, did not share his brother’s casual polymorphous perversity. Vidal, who carried on a notorious feud with the younger Kennedy through much of the 1960s, sensed homosexual panic in Bobby’s taut, angry attitude toward men such as himself. “I couldn’t stand Bobby,” said Vidal, recalling the two men’s poisoned relationship years later. “There are certain visceral dislikes that surface in people. It surfaced in me certainly—and in him.” Vidal thought Bobby had the blunt personality of an Irish cop. “The two people Bobby most hated (a rare distinction, because he hated so many people) were…Jimmy Hoffa and me,” the author remarked.
    Despite the whiff of homophobia in Vidal’s nostrils, Bobby never seemed discomfited by Walton. They had worked closely together in the 1960 presidential campaign. “Bill had everybody’s ear—he had direct access to Jack and Bobby,” said Justin Feldman, a Kennedy organizer who loaned space in his New York law office to Walton during the campaign. “They completely trusted him. Bobby talked to him several times a day during the campaign. The Kennedys trusted him with the tough assignments. At one point, Bobby didn’t like the stories being written about Jack by a reporter in the New York Post . I was sitting with Walton in our office when he got Bobby on the speaker phone to discuss the situation. Bill told him, ‘Mission accomplished.’ Bobby said, ‘How did you do that?’ Walton said, ‘[The reporter] is coming to work for us. You’ll be paying him $1,000 a week.’”
    Bobby, the driving engine behind his brother’s campaign, valued loyalty to his family’s political cause above all else. And he knew Walton was deeply devoted. “My father was a believer,” Matthew Walton recalled. “You might call him an idealist in the sense that there was nothing in it for him—certainly not money. He never really believed in a political movement before JFK.”
    “Bill was disinterested—he was not out to get glory for himself, nor was he feathering his nest in the current tradition,” added Vidal. “He wanted nothing for himself other than to be amused, which he was, by court life.”
    When his service to Jack came to a stunning end on November 22, 1963, Walton was overcome. He was leaving the West Wing lobby with Pat Moynihan shortly before JFK’s death was officially announced, when Moynihan pointed to the White House flag, which had just been lowered: “Bill, you might as well see that.” Walton visibly sagged.
    “Let’s walk out the way he would have expected us to,” said Walton, trying to hold himself together. But he couldn’t. Moynihan had to help him into a cab at the Northwest Gate.
    But there was still the family, Bobby and Jackie. And they