EXCLUSIVE: 'There was no monogamy in the Kennedy clan.' Ethel Kennedy knew husband Bobby was a serial cheater who had affairs with actresses Kim Novak and Lee Remick - AND widow Jackie Kennedy
- Bobby Kennedy's first sexual experience was at a w**rehouse in Harlem, at 21 after his father paid for him to have sex with a black woman
- Bobby's verdict afterwards was that it 'wasn't bad, but it wasn't fabulous either,' according to a new biography of RFK
- Outside of his marriage Bobby's list of conquests included stars like Kim Novak, Lee Remick and the singer Claudine Longet
- He was having an affair with Marilyn Monroe too - possibly at the same time as JFK
- Ethel 'knew he always came home, not just to the kids but her'
- FBI files claimed RFK was sleeping with Jackie Kennedy between 1964 and 1968 - their relationship based on grief and on a long-standing affection
- After JFK assassination Bobby wore his brother's bomber jacket with the Presidential seal
- He drove past Arlington cemetery twice a day to 'visit the President' as if he were still alive
- Friends said he chewed his nails to the quick, lost weight, couldn't sleep
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- June 16th, 2016
Ethel Kennedy put up with her husband Bobby’s affairs because she knew there was ‘no tradition of monogamy in the Kennedy clan’.
Bobby’s widow understood the Kennedys better than anyone who wasn't born into the family and was fully aware of what she was getting herself into, a new biography claims.
She knew that infidelity was the price to pay for being married to a Kennedy man and that she had to keep her mouth shut under an unspoken contract.
The book says that Ethel loved her husband ‘more completely than she dreamed possible’ - and this meant she was able to look the other way.
A new book ‘Bobby Kennedy: The Making of A Liberal Icon’ by Larry Tye also claims that Bobby suffered what would today be called a nervous breakdown after JFK's assassination in 1963.
Jackie Kennedy, the widow of President Kennedy exchanges a secret glance with brother-in-law, Robert Kennedy behind the back of his wife, Ethel as they leave Jackie's new home in Georgetown in 1963, a month after JFK's assassination
FBI files claimed RFK was sleeping with Jackie Kennedy between 1964 and 1968 - their relationship based on grief and on a long-standing affection. they are pictured together above in an undated photo
In the months following, Bobby built a shrine to his dead brother in his office with photographs, books and other mementos.
He wore his brother’s bomber jacket with the Presidential seal on it and drove past Arlington cemetery twice a day to ‘visit the President’ as if he were still alive.
Friends said that Bobby chewed his nails to the quick, lost weight, couldn’t sleep - and was haunted by ‘an amputation that never healed’.
Bobby was seen as the most puritanical of his eight siblings and he was the one who was asked to be Attorney General by his brother when he became President.
Bobby’s tough, bare knuckle political style was just like their wealthy father Joseph P Kennedy
And according to Tye, he also learned his wandering eye from his father as Joseph had a mistress, silent film star Gloria Swanson, and flings with numerous other women.
Tye writes that Joseph passed down to his sons the idea that ‘when it came so sexual mores, boys play while girls pray’.
Bobby’s first sexual experience was at a whorehouse in Harlem, New York, at 21 after his father paid for him to have sex with a black woman - Bobby’s verdict afterwards was that it ‘wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t fabulous either’.
He married Ethel in 1950 when she was 22 and the following year the first of their 11 children was born.
RFK, pictured with Ethel at their home in 1968, married Ethel in 1950 when she was 22 and the following year the first of their 11 children was born
But outside of his marriage Bobby’s list of conquests supposedly included stars like Kim Novak, Lee Remick and the singer Claudine Longet.
He supposedly was having an affair with Marilyn Monroe too - possibly at the same time as his brother.
Tye interviewed Ethel, who is now 88, extensively for the book and gave one of the frankest accounts so far of her late husband’s dalliances.
The book says: ‘Ethel has lived with the rumors for fifty years and she says she long ago stopped listening to or reading them.
‘She tried to block them out then too, although they must have hurt.
‘She never disclosed any suspicions.
‘She also understood Bobby’s family better than anyone else who wasn’t born into it, and she knew what whatever her church and their said about sex outside marriage, there was no tradition of monogamy in the Kennedy clan.
‘She loved her husband more completely than she dreamed possible and still does.
‘And she knew he always came home, not just to the kids but her’.
Richard Goodwin, a friend of Bobby’s who traveled with him extensively, was more blunt and said that it was a ‘Kennedy family tradition’ to sleep around, though Bobby was ‘much more selective and limited’ than his brother Jack.
The other woman Bobby was rumored to have had an affair with was Jackie Kennedy, his brother’s widow.
John F. Kennedy, left, is shown with his brother, Robert Kennedy, and his dog, Mo, in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts in 1946 They were so close RFK fell apart when his brother was assassinated
FBI files have claimed that the two were sleeping together between 1964 and 1968 built their relationship on grief and on a long-standing affection between the two.
According to Tye, the night of Jack’s funeral Bobby asked her: ‘Shall we go visit our friend’ and the two got down on their knees in silence prayer at his headstone.
Tye writes: ‘They had been close friends before, but not intimate confidants like this.
‘While Ethel had always had issues with Jackie, until now they hadn’t included jealousy’.
FBI files have revealed that Ethel was so concerned about the affair that at one point she
confronted David Ormsby-Gore, British ambassador to the United States during the Kennedy administration, and asked what, if anything, he knew about the relationship.
Tye says that whether or not Bobby was having an affair with Jackie is something ‘nobody can say for sure’.
But what is clear is that they were both ‘devastated by their loss and each was determined to help the other through’.
Speaking to Tye, Ethel did not comment directly on the speculation.
However looking back she admitted that Jackie may not have been entirely bad for her husband and that it may have been she who finally lifted Bobby from his deep despair after Jack’s death.
That despair began on that awful day, November 22 1963.
Bobby was at Hickory Hill, the Kennedy family estate in McLean, Virginia, and was having a lunch of tuna sandwiches and creamy clam chowder when the green phone box that is a direct line to the White House rang.
It was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who said: ‘I have news for you. The President’s been shot’.
Bobby asked: ‘Is it serious?’
Hoover replied: ‘I think it’s serious. I am endeavoring to get details. I’ll call you back when I find out more’.
Bobby had a list of conquests including stars like Kim Novak (top), Lee Remick (bottom) and the singer Claudine Longet
Hoover had delivered the news with his characteristic monotone which made it all the more ghastly.
And for Bobby it was ‘cataclysmic’, Tyre writes.
His hand automatically went to his face, unable to hide his anguish, which Ethel saw from the other side of the pool.
He told her: ‘Jack’s been shot. It may be fatal’.
Thirty minutes later another phone call informed Bobby his brother was dead.
Another thirty minutes later he received a tone-deaf phone call from Lyndon Johnson asking if he had any objections to him being sworn in as President immediately.
Bobby made sure he was at Andrews Air Force base to meet Jackie and his brother’s body.
Bobby was the one who inspected his brother’s casket in the East Room and told them to close the coffin because it did not resemble Jack.
As Tye writes, even though the entire nation was in mourning: ‘Nobody, not even Jackie would grieve as ‘deeply or as long as Bobby did’.
The book says: ‘The two were closer than any brothers had been at high levels of government, talking in a private code, perpetually interrupting each other and finishing each other’s sentences.
‘Gone now were the dreams of what they could accomplish side by side..
‘The sniper’s bullet that had penetrated Jack’s skull shattered Bobby’s own vision even as it broke his heart’.
Standing outside the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House Bobby told Charles Spalding, a scriptwriter who knew both brothers: ‘It’s such an awful shame. The country was going so well. We really had it going’.
Jackie Kennedy stands with bloodstains on her clothes next to the then attorney general as the coffin (unseen) carrying the body of President John F Kennedy is placed in an ambulance after arriving at Andrews Air Force base in Washington, DC
During a party at the home of movie executive Arthur Krim, American actress Marilyn Monroe stands between Bobby (left) and JFK in New York in 1962. Both brothers had affairs with Monroe, possible at the same time
Spalding later recalled that when he shut the door Bobby ‘gave way completely and was just racked with sobs’.
Journalist Haynes Johnson said that after the funeral Bobby had eyes that were ‘haunted’ as if he were in a ‘deep, deep deep, black despair’.
After the burial John Seigenthaler, a former journalist now working at the Justice Department, recalled how Bobby was at Hickory Hill and told him: ‘Come in, somebody shot my brother and we’re watching his funeral on television’.
Seigenthaler told Bobby that his trademark sardonic humor was ‘not funny’. He said: ‘And he looked me dead in the eye and said: ‘Don’t you think I know that’’.
Bobby spiraled into what Tye calls a ‘deeper, darker stage of mourning’ in the months later when he would stare out of the window during meetings at the Department of Justice and could not focus on even reading legal documents.
He could not even refer to his brother’s death directly and instead called it the ‘events of November 22 1963’.
As Tye writes, Jack’s assassination came after Joe Kennedy Jr died during World War II in 1944 and four years before a plane crash would claim Bobby’s older sister Kathleen.
By then their father had had a stroke and was in a wheelchair and Bobby’s sister Rosemary was in an institution in Wisconsin due to failed lobotomy.
On June 6 1968 the ‘Curse of the Kennedys’ would claim Bobby too when he was assassinated, just like his brother.
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