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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteJohn F. Kennedy and Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings met as teenagers at prep school and stayed close for decades. Letters they exchanged, diaries from a 1937 European trip, and later accounts of Billings’s grief help explain why people say he never got over Kennedy’s assassination. They show profound loss and lasting remembrance—not a clinical verdict about how he felt for the rest of his life.
How JFK and Lem Billings became lifelong friends
Kennedy and Billings met at the Choate School in Connecticut as teenagers. Their friendship continued as their lives diverged: Kennedy entered politics and became president, while Billings remained a trusted personal friend. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum holds letters Billings preserved from Kennedy, written between 1934 and 1939. Billings donated his papers to the Library in the 1970s, and the collection has since been digitized. The Library’s account of the digitized papers describes the records and their provenance.
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The letters are especially useful because they are contemporaneous evidence of the relationship, rather than memories reconstructed years later. They do not, by themselves, reveal every dimension of a private friendship; they document that the two remained in contact and that Billings kept Kennedy’s correspondence for decades.
What their 1937 trip reveals
On June 30, 1937, Kennedy and Billings set off on a European tour that lasted two and a half months. Both kept diaries. The entries record their observations and shared experiences, giving a closer-in-time view of the young men than a later biography can provide. JFK Library audiovisual reference archivist Maryrose Grossman draws on those diaries in “Jack and Lem’s Excellent European Adventure, Summer 1937.”
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Read alongside the letters, the travel records make the friendship tangible: this was not simply a title Billings acquired after Kennedy became famous. They were companions before the presidency, with a shared history that stretched back to school.
Billings’s place in Kennedy’s White House years
A 1983 retrospective by David Michaelis describes Billings as a frequent visitor to the White House and says he had a guest room there. Michaelis also reports that Billings declined government jobs Kennedy offered because he wanted to preserve the personal friendship. That explanation is part of Michaelis’s account, not a conclusion established by the letters or diaries.
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Michaelis quotes Billings reflecting on Kennedy’s importance to him: “Jack made a big difference in my life,” and “Because of him, I was never lonely.” These are Billings’s words as quoted in the 1983 article, not statements in the Library’s contemporaneous correspondence. Michaelis also quotes Eunice Kennedy Shriver calling Billings “Number One” among the men close to the President; that, too, is Shriver’s retrospective assessment as reported by Michaelis.
What is known about Billings on November 22, 1963
Michaelis’s article, published twenty years after the assassination, recounts that Billings learned of Kennedy’s death in New York from an acquaintance. He left the building and eventually went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where, Michaelis writes, he sat and cried. This is a vivid later account of acute grief, not a contemporaneous transcript of Billings’s movements or feelings.
The phrase “never got over” is therefore best understood as an interpretation of the depth of the loss and the enduring significance of the friendship. The available accounts support profound immediate grief and continued remembrance; they cannot establish Billings’s private emotional state across the rest of his life. Michaelis also quotes Billings saying, “He may have been the reason I never got married.” That remark conveys how Billings himself described Kennedy’s influence, but it does not settle the broader meaning of their relationship.
What the records can—and cannot—tell us
The strongest evidence comes in different forms, with different limits:
- Letters from 1934 to 1939: Kennedy’s surviving correspondence with Billings, preserved by Billings and held by the JFK Library, provides contemporaneous evidence of their connection.
- Diaries from the 1937 trip: The friends’ own entries document a shared journey and their observations at the time.
- Oral histories: The JFK Library points readers to Billings’s and Dave Hackett’s interviews for memories of their early school years. As retrospective recollections, oral histories are valuable but differ from diaries written during the events. The Library discusses them in “History from Home.”
- Michaelis’s 1983 article: It supplies later recollections about the White House relationship and assassination day. Its account should be attributed to Michaelis, including the quotations he attributes to Billings and Shriver.
Together, these sources establish an unusually close, long-running friendship and a devastating response to Kennedy’s death. They do not justify diagnosing Billings or presenting speculation about the private emotional or sexual dimensions of the relationship as fact.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Where to read more
For an accessible account focused on the friendship, David Pitts’s Jack and Lem: John F. Kennedy and Lem Billings: The Untold Story of an Extraordinary Friendship is listed by its publisher as a 384-page trade paperback, ISBN 9780306816239, originally on sale March 25, 2008. The publisher’s catalog entry confirms those bibliographic details; current availability may vary.
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