A new biography about the former First Lady reveals that she was on the verge of divorce after John F. Kennedy's infidelities
The bullet that exploded in his head that November 22 in Dallas prevented a sc-ndal in the making. It was a cruel and unexpected end for a man who, perhaps without fully knowing it, had a high-profile divorce with a strong historical burden awaiting him. If the assassination had not occurred, John Fitzgerald Kennedy would have gone down in the annals of memory as the first American president to have been left without his partner due to his constant infidelities, according to a new book about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that is about to see the light.
Not only was his affair with Marilyn Monroe, undoubtedly his most publicized affair, but also his multiple dalliances with other women in those years of the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis that marked his presidency, a career sufficient for the elegant First Lady I said enough.
This is reflected in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Life Beyond Her Wildest Dreams, written by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, a fascinating stage in American history that not only had profound implications for a world divided between the egos of the two superpowers, but who experienced very compromising matters for the White House behind the scenes.
Even Joe Kennedy, the president's father, had to intervene to stop what he saw as inevitable. "There is a danger that you will become a divorced Catholic woman," he told his daughter-in-law. "I suggest you get the idea of divorce out of your mind." head". The matter went far beyond simple advice, since he offered him a million dollars in exchange for giving up his intentions and up to 20 million if his son decided to return home with a venereal disease for sleeping with the wrong person.
It is a situation that could have happened even before Kennedy became president after defeating Richard Nixon in the 1960 elections. Already a senator, the ambitious Mrs. Kennedy wanted to break up with that marriage full of deceit and deception, which undoubtedly It would have ruined the dream of the Massachusetts clan of having one of its members sitting in the chair of the Oval Office of the White House.
Furthermore, it would have truncated the hopes of Kennedy herself, an ambitious woman who managed to get her first husband to make her First Lady of the country and her second to make her one of the richest women in the world, wife of Aristotle Onassis.
Her biography of Washington's wife describes the beginnings of that ambition, which transported her to the highest levels of the social class, while she was previously a modest press photographer for the now defunct Washington Times-Herald. It is known that she was writing a script about the fourth first lady of the United States, Dolley Madison, and that she was addicted to chewing tobacco, all while plotting how to get to a rich man to dedicate herself to a better life than that of a journalist salary. street
"I have no plans to marry a reporter, but perhaps, through connections, I may meet a man who is rich," she once said, something that would come soon after meeting the brilliant politician through a colleague, Charles Bartlett, the man who not only introduced him to Kennedy, but could boast of having previously dated Jacqueline Lee Bouvier.
"She was very cute, very sweet and impeccable, or at least that's what I thought at the time," says Bartlett, one of the characters who helped build a profile of a woman who wanted to be a personality and who, despite the continuous humiliations of her first husband, managed to fulfill her ambitions, exposing to the world her kind of great lady.
