Kennedy’s infidelity literally drove Jackie mad: book

Published June 5, 2014
John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. — File photo
John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. — File photo

NEW YORK: Jacqueline Kennedy was poised to be the first sitting First Lady to divorce a president when he was assassinated, New York Daily News reported on Wednesday.

Fed up with John F. Kennedy’s blatant philandering, she saw no other way out but to dump the Camelot prince, reveals an explosive unauthorised biography, “Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Life Beyond Her Wildest Dreams”, the newspaper said.

Capitalising on American obsession with the Kennedy clan, the new book reveals Jackie confided that actress Marilyn Monroe’s sexy serenade to the president at his 1962 Madison Square Garden birthday bash was the straw that broke her marriage’s back. The book is set to be released on Saturday.

‘Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Life Beyond Her Wildest Dreams,’ penned by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, reports the former First Lady’s unhappiness with JFK stretched back years before he became President.

“I just can’t see myself spending the rest of my life with Jack Kennedy. It’s not going to happen,” she confessed to her mother as far back as 1956, the book claims.

Kennedy’s father, Joe, interceded to save the marriage as his son, then a Massachusetts senator, set his sights on the White House.

Joe Kennedy father of JFK summoned his daughter-in-law to the Le Pevillon restaurant in the Ritz Tower Hotel in Manhattan and offered her a $1 million check to stay in the marriage, authors Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince write.

Jackie responded that it would cost him $20 million if her husband “brings home any venereal disease from any of his sluts,” claims the book.

One night when JFK returned home from a hotel romp with a mistress, he and Jackie got into an ugly fight that spilled into the street. Following the domestic blowup, Kennedy had his wife committed to the Valley Head Clinic in Carlisle, Mass., where she underwent three electroshock treatments, the book recounts.

“From the beginning of her relationship with Jack, she knew about his other women,” Paul Mathias, a former Paris-Match correspondent, is quoted in the book. “It pained her a great deal.”

Published in Dawn, June 5th, 2014

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