JOIN US In fact, their relationship was so intense that when Bobby was gunned down during his 1968 presidential campaign, it was Jackie — and not his wife Ethel — who had instructed doctors to turn off his life support machine.
Ethel was aware of the affair but chose to ignore it, the book, titled Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story, by C David Heymann, has claimed.
The book will be published in the United States next week.
“Everybody knew about the affair. The two of them carried on like a pair of lovesick teenagers. I suspect Bobby would’ve liked to dump Ethel and marry Jackie, but, of course, that wasn’t possible,” the late Franklin Roosevelt Jr, who had served in JFK’s White House, was quoted as saying.
According to Heymann, who has trawled through FBI and US Secret Service records as well as talked to family and friends, Bobby was the former first lady’s “true love”. He has said their romance grew from their shared grief over the assassination of JFK in 1963.
“It was the coming together of a man and a woman as a result of his bereavement and her mental suffering at the hands of her late lecherous husband. It was passionate but it was doomed,” Jackie’s close confidant, writer Truman Capote, says in the book.
The book contains an account of a close encounter on a yacht in 1964, six months after JFK’s death. Bobby and Jackie “exchanged poignant glances” before disappearing below deck, leaving Ethel upstairs.