Inside Jackie Kennedy’s affair with JFK’s married brother Bobby

A new book lifts the lid on Jackie Kennedy’s ‘years-long affair’ with JFK’s married brother Bobby.

DailyMail.com columnist Maureen Callahan’s new biography of the Kennedys – which is being published exclusively by the Mail – reveals how Jackie found solace in an extramarital relationship with Bobby after the president’s assassination in 1963.

They ‘shared trauma’ and a ‘terrible bond’, Callahan writes in ‘Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed’.

After JFK’s funeral on November 25, 1963, Jackie ‘lit the eternal flame at her husband’s grave’ at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, before returning to the White House with Bobby.

Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s wife of 13 years and mother to his seven children, was left behind. A ‘years-long’ sexual relationship soon followed.

‘As she said more than once, Bobby was the only person keeping [Jackie] from killing herself,’ Callahan writes. But Bobby also relied on Jackie, ‘spending more time with her two children than his own.’

Had the story of their scandalous affair been revealed by the press, it would have been ‘cataclysmic’, but ‘because it was the Kennedys – because of what happened to [JFK] – the secret was kept,’ despite it being ‘whispered about in their social circles,’ Callahan writes.

And so, the pair carelessly flaunted their relationship, dining out in New York City, openly kissing and cuddling.

The affair is thought to have come to an end when Bobby ran for president in 1968. Jackie struck up a relationship with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and married him in October that year.

Bobby ‘hated’ Onassis, and ‘had long suspected that Jackie enjoyed a fling with [him] while [JFK] was still alive,’ Callahan writes.

It is not clear if Bobby’s wife Ethel was aware of the affair, but after Bobby was assassinated in LA on June 5, 1968, Jackie flew from New York to comfort her.

Jackie helped Ethel make the decision to turn off Bobby’s life-support machines.