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February 3 - February 19, 2025
On October 17, 1968, he and Jackie Kennedy, thirty-nine years old to his sixty-two, announced they would marry in three days’ time.
Bobby had not died instantly, as Jack had. He was conscious after he was shot.
It had been Jackie who persuaded Ethel to turn off the machines. She had been the strong one that day, too.
But in the weeks to follow, Jackie was experiencing epis...
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She told Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. that she couldn’t find slumber at night despite all the sleeping pills she took, that her medications did nothing to stop her mind from obsessively replaying the assassination. She told Roosevelt that Bobby Kennedy was the only person keeping her from killing herself.
Jackie and Bobby’s affair, which was on-and-off from 1964 to 1968,
Ari, this much older man, this garden gnome, a divorced Greek who would now become Caroline and John’s stepfather. What was Jackie thinking?
Her financial adviser, André Meyer, proposed that Ari pay $20 million to make the marriage happen.
Jackie wound up getting $3 million up front from Ari, $1 million for each of her children, $600,000 a year for travel, millions more in the event of divorce or Ari’s death, and stipulations as to how many times a year she would be required to have sex with Ari. She also insisted on separate bedrooms at shared residences, though theirs would be a marriage in every sense, save children. On that they agreed.
She was a middle-aged icon who had rewritten her first husband’s problematic history and had just negotiated a marriage contract containing 170 clauses. Most importantly, she had successfully killed off her former incarnation.
She was modern now in her tight white capris and tissue-thin black tees, her nipples poking through. She strolled the streets of Greece and Italy barefoot. She wore her hair long and loose or parted down the middle, wrapped in a chic low ballet bun. She adopted two accessories that would be named after her: a slouchy Gucci horsebit handbag and enormous black sunglasses that obscured half her face. The effect was pure Garbo: Look-at-me-don’t-look-at-me-I-can’t-bear-it-if-you-don’t-look-at-me.
This Jackie O was a dominatrix. She was entering the most openly sexual chapter of her life. She was no longer the woman Jack Kennedy had humiliated. In marrying Ari, she had publicly triumphed. If only she felt that way in private.
She suffered excruciating, pulsating pain in her neck, which she believed was permanent nerve damage from clutching Jack’s shattered head in her lap. The horrors of that day lived in her body, on her face, and in her nightmares.
Nor did anyone accuse Ari of behaving badly when he began cheating on Jackie, two weeks after their wedding, with Maria Callas. No one reported Ari’s betrayal when he gave paparazzi the day, date, and time that Jackie regularly sunbathed on his private island, nude, and allowed them to shoot her with their long lenses.
No one at the time reported Ari’s sinister machinations, the rumors that he had his enemies, including Bobby Kennedy, killed.
Onassis had been among those who knew about Marilyn Monroe’s house having been bugged shortly before her death.
Years after Ari and Jackie died, an esteemed biographer who had worked with Ari reported that Onassis had paid a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization—which regularly extorted Onassis and other airlines in exchange for not hijacking their planes—to kill Bobby.
“His death really robbed me of my chance to be angry with him,” Jackie told Dr. Kris. “He really went out in a blaze of glory.”
Even her therapy offered no escape from Jack’s other women: Jackie’s stepbrother, Yusha Auchincloss, upon meeting Dr. Kris, recognized her name and did some digging. As it turned out, Dr. Kris had also treated another iconic, troubled woman: Marilyn Monroe. It was Dr. Kris who had forcibly institutionalized Marilyn in 1961, and once Marilyn’s ex-husband Joe DiMaggio secured her release, Marilyn moved on to Dr. Greenson.
As Ari was making his affair with Callas exceedingly public, Jackie was reliving Jack’s humiliation of her on a global scale.
When Monica Lewinsky, then a twenty-two-year-old former White House intern, was thrust into the national spotlight for having had a sexual relationship with then-president Bill Clinton, she became suicidal. Clinton publicly denied ever having sex with Lewinsky, a claim that even his most ardent supporters didn’t believe—but one that John did.
At a druggy party in Palm Springs at the famous entertainer Bing Crosby’s house, the president asked Mimi if she would like to try amyl nitrate, a medication sometimes used recreationally to enhance sex.
And Dave, seated poolside in his suit with his feet in the water, laughed as Mimi made her way to him, stood up, and performed oral sex on him. The president watched avidly, never saying a word.
herself: “I’m… a bunch of nerves, but I take advantage of it… You have to be yourself and you have to forget yourself… The world is being created every minute and the world is falling to pieces every minute… It is these tensions I am always moved by… I love life, I love human beings, I hate people also… I enjoy shooting a picture, being present. It’s a way of saying ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’… And there’s no maybe.”
The launch party for the first book she acquired, In the Russian Style, was held at the Carlyle Hotel—where Jack had kept a residential suite—and the event was covered by the New York Times.
And not that the media cared, but her brother-in-law Steve Smith, Ted’s presumptive campaign manager for the 1980 presidential election, had been given an advance copy of the book. As had Ted himself.
They have survived and built new lives for themselves, among them the brave Patricia Bowman, who came forward to tell her story after William Kennedy Smith was acquitted of raping her. Bowman gave her exclusive interview to Diane Sawyer of ABC News. It aired on December 19, 1991.
But when her movie-star husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger—himself an admitted serial sexual harasser and groper of women—became governor of California in 2003, Shriver was forced to retire from journalism. Her career, went the thinking, would have been a conflict of interest. For this sacrifice, Shriver was rewarded with the public revelation, in 2011, that her husband had been involved with the family’s longtime housekeeper, who had secretly given birth to his then-thirteen-year-old son.
Any woman who comes forward, especially against a machine that rivals the Kennedys—think Clinton, Cosby, Weinstein, Trump—is likely to have her reputation shredded and her entire sexual history plastered in the public square.
When a life-size bronze statue of JFK was unveiled in DC in 2021, not one bit of news coverage addressed his treatment of women. Not one journalist, essayist, political writer, or cultural critic asked whether this was a man deserving, in our new era, of such a memorial. Not one asked what kind of message his continued celebration sends to women and girls, now and in the future.
As of this writing, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running for president as an independent. Again, he is taken to task for his anti-vax stance, his trafficking in conspiracy theories, his antisemitism—but not for his lifelong mistreatment of women. Not for helping to free his cousin Michael Skakel, once convicted in the brutal sexual assault and murder of fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley. All the evidence used to convict Skakel, including the murder weapon, is now sealed in perpetuity. This is a catastrophic outcome for future journalists and historians. Nor has RFK Jr. been confronted about falsely
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Every July, Lisa reportedly leaves the country to escape anniversary coverage of the crash.
Mimi Beardsley Alford’s memoir, Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath, was published in 2012.
Diana de Vegh published her own account in Air Mail in 2021, having reevaluated her relationship with JFK thanks to the #MeToo movement.
Marilyn died on August 4, 1962, at her home in Brentwood, California. The official cause was “probable suicide,” but suspicion has forever hung over John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. Earlier that day, Marilyn had told her friend Jeanne Carmen that she’d gotten harassing phone calls the night before, a familiar woman’s voice telling her to “leave Bobby alone.” The FBI was dispatched to Marilyn’s home immediately after her death; former senior FBI agent James Doyle later went public, saying the Bureau had been ordered to eliminate certain phone records.
Her final call got through and lasted eight minutes. She had reportedly had an abortion at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in LA on July 20, 1962, and in recent years it’s been theorized that this was Bobby’s baby. That would explain why Marilyn was so desperate to reach him in that time frame.
Audiotapes from Marilyn’s surveillance system also went missing, as did her diary, which Bobby Kennedy had reportedly told her to “get rid of” in the months before her death.
He wrote that her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, had spoken to him at length and had let Miner listen to a forty-minute tape of Monroe sharing plans for the immediate future. “As a result of what Dr. Greenson told me,” Miner wrote in part, “and from what I heard on tape recordings, I believe I can say definitely that it was not suicide.”
Marilyn not suicidal
Rosemary Kennedy spent the rest of her life post-lobotomy at St. Coletta’s, a private Catholic facility in Jefferson, Wisconsin.
Seventeen years after her death, the cottage in Wisconsin was closed, with no plaque or memorial to Rosemary Kennedy or her life there. The indoor pool that Rose and Joe Kennedy installed so that Rosie could stay fit and do her laps—even though she could no longer swim—remains the only sign of her existence.
The first draft of “Camelot,” Jackie’s largely fabricated account of her husband and his administration, just one week after the assassination. She summoned presidential historian Theodore White to interview her for LIFE magazine with the caveat that she would have final edit. Her strikethroughs and notes are testament to a woman sick of history as told by men; an underestimated mind with a keen understanding of mythology; and the savvy New York City book editor she would become.
The diaries Bobby kept and discovered by Mary, containing his multiple sexual conquests listed by name and rankings, destroyed her.
A craven Ted Kennedy wears a neck brace he didn’t need to Mary Jo’s funeral. He conscripted his pregnant wife, Joan, to accompany him, despite doctor’s orders that she stay on bed rest. One month later, she miscarried.
