Did Jackie Kennedy Have a Secret Love Affair with Bobby Kennedy?

Did Jackie Kennedy have a secret love affair with her brother-in-law Robert F. Kennedy? That is what Kennedy biographer C. David Heymann alleges in his new biography Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story.

The secret 4 year long love affair allegedly began a mere six months after President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963.

The romance between Jackie and Bobby apparently grew out of their shared grief over the loss President Kennedy. As Truman Capote is quoted as saying in the book "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."

Their steamy love affair occurred while Robert F. Kennedy was the United States Senator from New York, a father of 11 and was married to his wife Ethel. That however did not stop them from having late night tryst at Jackie's Fifth Avenue apartment in New York or from engaging in fervent embraces at the Kennedy estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

C. David Heymann's book quotes Kennedy family friends and confidants like Franklin Roosevelt Jr. who claims that "Everybody knew about the affair. The two of them carried on like a pair of lovesick teenagers" and that "Bobby would've liked to dump [his wife] Ethel and marry Jackie, but, of course, that wasn't possible."

In the end it was politics that really got in the way of their love. With Robert F. Kennedy making plans to run for the Democratic nomination for President in 1968 Bobby and Jackie knew they had to end the affair.

However their relationship still remained close. After Bobby Kennedy was shot while campaigning for the Presidency, Jackie flew to Los Angles to be by his side. While Bobby was lying in the hospital brain-dead a distraught Ethel refused to pull the plug. So in the end it was Jackie and not Bobby's wife Ethel who gave the doctors instructions to turn off his life support machine.

Bobby Kennedy's assassination had such a profound effect on Jackie that after his death all she wanted was safety and security. With her last chance at love once again murdered by an assassins bullet Jackie agreed to marry Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis in October of 1968. She felt that only someone with Onassis' wealth could give her and her children the comfort and protection she needed after all the tragedy she experienced.