Remembering JFK's Bond with His Boyhood Best Friend, Who Never Got Over the Assassination

John F. Kennedy and Lem Billings.Photo: Corbis via Getty

Though his name isn’t as well-known as that of his boyhood best friend, Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings was an important confidante for one of America’s presidents and lived a life no less full of its own twists and turns. Sixty years afterJohn F. Kennedy’s death, the relationship sheds light on a different facet of the former president’s character.

“Sixty years later one of the little known stories is how JFK’s death had such a profound impact on his friend Lem Billings," historian Steven M. Gillon — the author ofThe Kennedy Assassination–24 Hours After— tells PEOPLE. “The two men not only shared a close personal relationship, they came of age at a critical time in history.”

Billings was a longtime Kennedy family friend, working to preserve the slain president’s legacy even after death. “Because of him,” Billings once said. “I was never lonely.”

As a younger man, he also served as something of a “go-between” for a young Jack Kennedy and the woman who would become Kennedy’s wife,Jackie Bouvier, in 1950s Washington, D.C.

But even before then, Billings was a Kennedy fixture. That he is believed to have been gay at a time when homosexuality was still illegal — even being somewhat open about his sexuality, including within the powerful Kennedy clan — exemplifies the strength of his ties to the family.

“Traveling around Europe in the summer of 1937 they witnessed the rise of fascism — an experience that would shape JFK’s views of the world and mark the beginning of his break from his father’s isolationism,” Gillon, host of the History Channel podcast24 Hours After: The JFK Assassination, says.

But their friendship reveals more than Kennedy’s political leanings — it offers insight into his character, as well.

“The very fact that these men were friends reveals a hidden dimension of JFK’s character,” Gillon tells PEOPLE. “At a time when homosexuality was taboo, Kennedy accepted and loved Billings who he knew was gay. With JFK’s death Billings lost a friend and a soulmate. He never recovered.”

Those close to him say that Billings never, ever got over how his friend was assassinated one sunny day in Dallas 60 years ago.

The bond between Billings and JFK continues to be of interest to many, with a new wave of attention cresting on social media apps like TikTok, where users have pored back over candid photos of the young men together. In recent years, there has also been talk of a movie adaptation.

As Billings told researchers for anoral history interview for the John F. Kennedy Library, the two met as teenagers at Choate Preparatory School for boys in Wallingford, Connecticut, in 1933, while working on the student yearbook.

John F. Kennedy (right) and Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings sit in a wicker chair outside the Kennedy family home in Palm Beach.John F. Kennedy Library Foundation

The two grew so close over the following months that Billings was invited to the Kennedy family home in Palm Beach, Florida, for the holiday season and, months later, to their Hyannis Port compound, where he was badly burned in a defective shower and hospitalized for three weeks.

During that time, he told researchers, “All the kids came over to see me. I really got to know them well.”

Matriarch Rose Kennedy wrote in her biography that Billings was “one of ‘Jack’s surprises,'” and soon found a place for himself: “He has really been part of ‘our family’ since that first time he showed up at our house.”

So frequent a presence was he that Ted Kennedy, more than a decade younger than his brother Jack,saidhe “was 3 years old before it dawned on me that Lem wasn’t one more older brother.”

Later accounts detailed how Billings had found himself adrift as a student at Choate in the wake of his father’s death: “The Kennedys provided family and support and so forth,” his nephew told Princeton University’s alumni magazine in 2017.

Describing his friend as a “very normal, regular boy,” Billings said his favorite of Jack’s characteristics was his light spirit: “I’ve never known anyone in my life with such a wonderful humor and the wonderful ability to make one laugh and to have a good time. He never lost this.”

When Jack discovered that Billings was gay — once declining an amorous overture from Billings — the friendship is thought to have gone on unharmed.

“At Choate, boys who were interested in sexual involvement with other boys were courteous and discreet, writing notes on toilet paper so they could be easily swallowed or flushed,” David Pitts writes in his 2007 bookJack and Lem: The Untold Story of an Extraordinary Friendship. “Early on in their friendship, Lem sent Jack such a note and Jack replied in their usual jocular way, adding in parentheses, ‘Please don’t write to me on toilet paper any more. I’m not that kind of boy.’ With that out of the way, their relationship continued essentially unchanged until JFK’s assassination thirty years later.”

As Pitts writes, Jack “wasn’t going to let anyone control his life, and he certainly wasn’t going to let anyone choose his friends.”

According to the book, a gift from Billings — a whale’s-tooth scrimshaw — was buried with him.

Kirk LeMoyne Billings and John F. Kennedy.Getty Images

Billings, for his part, never married and eventually became a marketing executive whoworked onthe John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He remained in the closet until his death in 1981 at the age of 65, according to Pitts.

“Jack made a big difference in my life,” Billings said in his oral history for the Kennedy library, adding, “He may have been the reason I never got married.”

Collier and Horowitz described Billings, later in life, as invariably enmeshed in his late friend’s larger family.

Billings’ family could chafe at his adoration: “My uncle was not someone you could have a reasonable conversation with about what was going on with the Kennedys,” his nephew said in Princeton’s alumni magazine. “He did not want to hear one negative syllable, and there were a lot of negatives going along.”

For Billings' funeral, some of the younger Kennedys served as pallbearers (as Billings himself had done for some of their own, like the slain Sen.Robert F. Kennedy).

“I’m sure he’s already organizing everything in heaven so it will be completely ready for us — with just the right Early American furniture, the right curtains, the right rugs, the right paintings,” Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the president’s sister, said in a eulogy. “And everything ready for a big, big party.”

Pitts' 2007 book helped spur renewed interest in the friendship between President Kennedy and Billings. Deadlinereported in 2018that it was to be the basis for a forthcoming biopic as well.

“[Billings] was a witness to so much of what was going on. But as I began to research him, I realized he was also very good friends with Jackie. And he also played a very important role in the courtship between Jackie Bouvier and Jack Kennedy,” Bayard told PEOPLE in an earlier interview about his book.

But even more than that, the author said that Billings was intimate friends with the Kennedys despite societal norms of the time — ingratiating himself with a most powerful family.

“I just became fascinated with Lem because he was a closeted but as they used to say ‘practicing homosexual,’ and he was very much part of the inner Kennedy circle from very early in his life,” Bayard said.

John and Jackie Kennedy ride in a golf cart with JFK Jr. and Lem Billings.Cecil Stoughton/White House Photographs/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum Boston

According to Pitts, Billings never recovered from the death of his friend, suffering from a “deep depression” in the weeks and months after President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

Though Billings — who was working as a New York City advertising executive at the time of the assassination — continued on at his firm for another decade, his life was never the same.

“He was in a very deep depression; sometimes didn’t want to live,” Pitts told theNew Haven Registerin 2007. “He never really came out of it.”

Still, he was well aware of his proximity to history. At one point, he is said to have remarked: “After I go, there’ll be no more Kennedys.”

source: people.com