Haunting new photo that raises terrifying President John F. Kennedy question: Did he help seal his own fate in Dallas? MAUREEN CALLAHAN pieces together an outrageous cover-up here 👇

Even if President John F. Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated in 1963 at age 46, the sad truth remains: He was never going to live for very long.

Not that the average American had any clue.

On paper, in photos and on television, JFK was a paragon of youthful vigor.

He was always tanned and athletic, looking like a movie star in his Ray-Ban sunglasses, his thick, chestnut hair tousled by the wind as he steered his yacht or strolled on the beach, exuding languid ease and luxury.

In reality, he was a hardcore drug addict and a very sick man, in more ways than one.

As I wrote in Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, JFK instructed his personal physician, Dr. Janet Travell, to lie to his wife, even if only by omission.

‘It’s best if you don’t go into my medical problems with Jackie,’ Kennedy told her. ‘I don’t want her to think she married an old man or a cripple.’

He also didn’t want Jackie to know about the multiple sexually transmitted diseases he was always catching and carrying — and passing on to his considerably younger, less sexually experienced wife, who couldn’t understand why she was having so much trouble carrying a pregnancy to term.

The STDs Jack gave Jackie were very likely why.

He slept with nearly every girl and woman in his orbit, from a teenage White House intern to hookers on the road to the most famous woman in the world – Marilyn Monroe.

‘Hello, kid,’ was his favorite greeting — so legion were his lovers that he often couldn’t recall their names.

Another of his oft-used phrases was, ‘slam, bam, thank you ma’am.’

One woman in his circle is recorded as calling him ‘compulsive as Mussolini. “Up against the wall, Signora, if you have five minutes” — that sort of thing.’

Once he was in the White House, he threw sex parties when Jackie was away, and had orgies in hotels around the country.

Kennedy men, by nature and nurture, were compulsive womanizers, though JFK never seemed to actually enjoy sex. It was an itch to scratch, another addiction over which he had zero control.

‘If I don’t have sex every day,’ he once told British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, ‘I get a headache.’

Macmillan was underwhelmed by this most unstatesmanlike disclosure.

JFK’s many dissatisfied lovers — including his wife — all had the same complaint: He never kissed them, never engaged in foreplay, was never sensual.

As Jackie told one confidante, Jack was simply terrible in bed.

‘He just goes too fast and falls asleep,’ she said.

Sex with him was often a matter of three minutes. His back, which caused him severe pain for most of his life, was his way of escaping blame for his lack of effort.

Priscilla Johnson, who worked for him when he was a Senator in the 1950s and was one of the few women to decline his overtures, later spoke of asking him why he was so promiscuous.

Why so many women and no real relationships? Why risk major scandals that could destroy his political career — let alone his chances of making it to the White House?

‘He took a while trying to formulate an answer,’ Johnson recalled. ‘Finally, he shrugged and said, “I don’t know, really. I guess I just can’t help it.” He had this sad expression on his face. He looked like a little boy about to cry.’

It’s quite possible that Jack’s poor health was an animating factor.

He was in and out of the hospital his entire life, with doctors often struggling to diagnose him. It wasn’t until 1947, when Jack was 30 years old and travelling through Ireland, that his Addison’s disease — a potentially fatal disorder of the adrenal glands — was finally discovered.

Once he felt strong enough to return home, he boarded the Queen Mary but fell so quickly ill again that he was given last rites.

Another biographer, Garry Wills, theorized that Jack’s ‘continual, almost heroic sexual performance’ was him ‘cackling at the gods of body disability who plagued him’.

Among those ailments: Colitis, ulcers, upper respiratory infections, prostatitis, frequent headaches, stomachaches, urinary tract infections (doubtless from his extraordinary sexual promiscuity), and such severe Addison’s that he kept medications locked in safety deposit boxes throughout Europe, in case of an emergency while travelling abroad.

His back was so bad that he underwent life-threatening surgery in 1954.

Jackie was with him then, visiting the hospital every day as Jack lay underneath a poster of Marilyn Monroe that had been turned upside down on the wall so he could look at her nether regions. He also had a secret visit from movie star Grace Kelly.

But Jackie quietly tolerated it all, knowing that he might not recover.

When he slipped into a coma, she was there. And when a priest was again summoned to give Jack last rites, Jackie never left his side.

Yet Jack, as he had so many times before, pulled through, while Jackie nursed him back to health, spoon-feeding him, bringing him stacks of newspapers and magazines, turning down public appearances that would have taken her away from her recovering husband.

To the organizer of a charity fashion show she was due to attend, Jackie wrote: ‘I just wouldn’t want to leave Jack for the day or so as he’s not allowed any other visitors — that would mean he’d spend a whole day alone, which in that morbid hospital might really lower his morale… Even if I did come it wouldn’t make any sense because I’d just be worrying about Jack.’

In the end, however, that back surgery did little to ameliorate his pain.

Jack’s medical records from 1955 revealed that he still found it difficult to reach down and pull up his socks, turn over in bed, or sit in low chairs.

His frustration was compounded by the fact he had no idea what was causing his agony. He had no recollection of a specific injury or precipitating illness that could explain why his back was such a mess. If anything, his multiple surgeries were making things worse.

After years of being turfed through the medical establishment, JFK spent his presidency in the care of rogue physician Max Jacobson, nicknamed by the Secret Service as ‘Dr. Feelgood’.

Jacobson shot up Jack (and Jackie) with frequent and varied concoctions of liquid meth, steroids and painkillers — including, most disastrously, before Kennedy’s 1961 meeting with Nikita Khrushchev.

The Soviet Premier came away from the lengthy summit with one impression of the young President Kennedy: ‘Weak,’ he said.

Kennedy’s drug-addled performance that afternoon emboldened Khrushchev to deploy nuclear weapons to Cuba in October 1962.

Americans have long been told that Kennedy’s leadership, through what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis, was heroic. In fact, it was a catastrophe of his own making, bringing the world closer to nuclear war than ever before or since.

That same year, after a visit from Dr. Feelgood at New York City’s famed Carlyle Hotel, President Kennedy experienced meth-induced mania. Stripping off his clothes, running up and down the hallway nude wile waving his arms, it was really more akin to a full-on psychotic break.

Struggling to control him, the Secret Service quietly but urgently summoned one of Manhattan’s top psychiatrists to administer an anti-psychotic to the drug-addled president of the United States — who, the next day, remembered nothing.

Of course, the DC press corps knew all about JFK’s addictions to drugs and sex and how little work got done in the Oval Office.

Just as they knew about the 19-year-old whose virginity he took in Jackie’s bed, about Marilyn, and about the sex parties he hosted in the White House swimming pool.

But the press loved JFK and all he stood for politically, so they covered it up.

And when he was assassinated in November 1963, the nation’s trauma was so great that the thinking went: Why bring any of that up, ever? Let the slain president go out as an American hero, an icon, a liberal legend.

That collective decision by the media to protect power, rather than prosecute it, has not been without consequence.

We saw its direct effects in last year’s presidential election, as large swaths of the American media fell all over itself in faux outrage, pretending it had little to no knowledge that President Joe Biden, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden and the whole White House apparatus had spent years covering up his physical and cognitive decline.

Such is the living legacy of the Kennedy White House, and a media that continues to valorize JFK — an abuser of women and drugs who should never have been president, who brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, a liar who hid his life-threatening illnesses from the electorate.

Had JFK been a politician in the modern era, he’d be lucky to make city council — or become a sideshow on social media.

When he was president, JFK often didn’t even know what drugs Dr. Feelgood was administering, nor did it matter to him.

‘I don’t care if it’s horse piss,’ he once said. ‘It makes me feel good.’

But there was only so much Jacobsen could do for the president.

In fact, on that fateful day in Dallas in 1963, JFK was wearing a back brace, which kept him upright after that first shot and, quite literally, a sitting target for the second, fatal one.

For all of JFK’s brushes with death — and the sexual rampaging that hedged against his mortality — he had been sure he would serve out one full term and quite likely a second.

As he campaigned in 1960, Kennedy told his close aide and friend Kenny O’Donnell that there was nothing to worry about.

‘I’m forty-three years old,’ he said, ‘and I’m the healthiest candidate for President of the United States… I’m not going to die in office.’