“Camelot’s Architect,” a new memoir published after Warnecke’s 2010 death, reveals new details about his relationship with the Kennedy family

NEED TO KNOW

• A new memoir, Camelot’s Architect by Jack Warnecke, reveals how he found out that he and JFK were involved with the same woman, one of the president’s mistresses
• Warnecke shares the strange moment when the president asked him about her on Air Force One
• Soon after that conversation, the unnamed woman broke it off with Warnecke

There was no one quite like architect Jack Warnecke in the world of the Kennedy White House. The former Stanford University football star met JFK in 1956 through a mutual friend. The president called him “Rose Bowl” after his team’s 1941 win and the two men shared an interest in architecture, preservation — and beautiful women.

After Warnecke got the commission to preserve the historic buildings around Washington D.C.’s Lafayette Square in 1962, he met Jackie Kennedy.  As he writes in a new posthumous memoir, Camelot’s Architect: The Untold Story of Jackie Kennedy, Lafayette Square, and a Secret Romance, excerpted in this week’s PEOPLE, he was soon brought into their inner circle: private film screenings at the White House, dinner dances, (he taught Jackie “the twist”) glamorous parties and unique access to the first couple.

In early 1963, he was asked by the president to help review sites for the proposed JFK Library in the Boston area. On the trip back on Air Force One, JFK showed an acute interest in architecture but then began asking about Warnecke’s personal life, specifically a young woman whom he was then dating. 

At the time, Warnecke had invited the woman (who’s unnamed in the book) for a week’s vacation in the Caribbean. She’d said yes. “This was a trip we had both been looking forward to,” he writes.

But after he returned to D.C., Warnecke learned her plans had changed.

As he writes, “When I reached her on the telephone, she told me something had happened while I was away and, as a result, she could no longer take the trip. “

They soon met for dinner at his D.C. home. “About halfway through the meal, she felt she couldn’t put off any longer what she needed to tell me — why our trip had to be canceled,” he writes. “The reason, she admitted, was the president had entered into her life. She was now romantically involved with Jack and felt she could no longer go on the trip with me.”

“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, especially after my recent discussion with the president about her. I shrugged and said ‘Okay, I’ll cancel our vacation.’ After all, I told myself this is the leader of the free world. What could I do?”

He also learned that the woman would often see the president on the weekends, while Jackie and her two kids, Caroline and John, were in Virginia, where Jackie kept her horses. 

In the days following JFK’s assassination, Jackie and RFK asked Warnecke to design the president’s gravesite on a hillside plateau at Arlington National Cemetery. In the year that followed, he and Jackie fell deeply in love.

Sixteen years after her father’ s death in 2010 at age 91, Warnecke’s daughter Margo Warnecke Merck, who oversees the Warnecke Archives, says it wasn’t a story her father spoke about. Nor does she know if he ever told it to Jackie, with whom he remained close in her final years.  

“They kind of shared all kinds of things. Maybe they did,” she says. “He never told me about it. And I only learned about it after, by reading the memoir.”

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Nor does she know what the former first lady told Warneke about her husband’s numerous affairs. What she does know is, “They shared a lot.”

Camelot’s Architect by John Carl Warnecke will be published on Nov. 10 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

PEOPLE VIPs can read the full story on Jackie Kennedy and John Warnecke in this week’s issue, available right now in the app

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