For Jackie, lazing away the days at Palm Beach, 1963 promised to be the best year yet. She had every cause for satisfaction. Her White House restoration project was well under way and would be almost complete by the end of the year; her life seemed under control and she knew she was pregnant.

She intended to cut off all outside activity and limit her engagements to only the most important things. She did not see enough of her children, she said, and felt she had done enough as First Lady. Jackie spent her days reading, painting, and resting for the birth of her baby.

On Wednesday 7 August, Jackie was rushed to the hospital of Otis Air Force Base. Her baby, due to arrive at the end of the month, was evidently on its way. Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, weighing only four pounds ten ounces, was born by Caesarean section at 12.52 a.m. The President, called from a meeting in the Cabinet Room about the ratification of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, was told of the birth and hurried down to Cape Cod, arriving at the hospital at 1.30 p.m.

There was tension and silence on the flight to Otis. ‘At that moment on the trip up really not knowing whether her life was in danger, he was very withdrawn,’ Nancy Tuckerman recalled. ‘He just kept sitting and staring out of the window.’ At the hospital baby Patrick was fighting for breath, having been born with hyaline membrane disease. He was transferred to Boston Children’s Hospital later that afternoon, accompanied by his anguished father.

Meanwhile Jackie had no idea how ill her baby was and remained in ignorance until well after he had died at 4.40 a.m. on 9 August. At the Boston hospital, the President had sobbed at the death of his son, and back at Otis, although Jack and Jackie put on a brave face for each other, there was a sadness beyond words. The next day a funeral Mass was held in the private chapel of Cardinal Cushing in Boston. A stricken Jack had to be prised away from the little white coffin containing his son’s body, before returning to Jackie. On the Sunday and Monday he brought the children to see her.

Afterwards, neither Jack nor Jackie spoke much about Patrick’s death, which had a profound effect on their relationship, bringing them closer together. While Jack once confessed to Paul Fay, ‘It would have been so nice to have had another son, but there’s nothing I can do about it,’ and never discussed it again, his concern was for Jackie. ‘It’s much harder on Jackie than it is on me,’ he said.

Jackie left hospital with Jack for Squaw Island on 14 August; unusually, for the non-tactile Kennedys, they were hand in hand as they walked out of the door. He flew down from Washington to be with her on the Cape several times each week. According to Evelyn Lincoln, ‘Each time he wanted to take her something that would let her know he had been thinking about her and to share with her something of his life in Washington. Sometimes he would ask that a bouquet of flowers be gathered from those blooming in his garden.’ After ten years of marriage, the Kennedys’ relationship was warm and obviously glowing.

Jack needed Jackie and his family more that autumn than ever before. Beneath the glamour of the Kennedys’ life the sands were shifting dangerously for him both in his public and his private life. His secret world was in danger of rising to the surface. The distinguished diplomat George Kennan saw him that autumn and found him ‘terribly alone with the loneliness that is known only to people in supreme position …’ On the political front the news was almost invariably bad, and fraught with danger as election year, 1964, grew closer. His great foreign policy triumph, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, threatened to be engulfed by domestic difficulties. On 18 May, his poignant appeal for civil rights at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, had been answered by the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Congress remained unmanageable, humiliating him with savage cuts in his foreign-aid programme. In Vietnam a crisis was threatening as his advisers quarrelled, divided over policy towards the unpopular regime. ‘My God, my government’s coming apart,’ he exploded to Charlie Bartlett. In late August the civil rights march on Washington alarmed white voters everywhere. He was in constant, agonising pain from his back. And, from the spring of 1963 an ever-increasing stream of reports about his entanglements with women began to surface, threatening to engulf him in a sex-and-spy scandal similar to the Profumo affair in England.

Through the summer of 1963 the Attorney-General’s office was flooded with allegations about Jack Kennedy’s behaviour with women, most of them concerning call-girls or former call-girls. In September the press began reporting stories of financial and sexual corruption in the Senate, centring on Bobby Baker, a protégé of Lyndon Johnson and genial operator of the Quorum Club on Capitol Hill. The Senate Rules Committee began investigations into every aspect of Baker’s operations and was planning to hear testimony about Ellen Rometsch, an East German who had been having ‘illicit relations with highly placed government officials’, and her deportation from the United States. Bobby Kennedy contacted J. Edgar Hoover for help in heading the committee away from Rometsch, and particularly from causing her return to the United States. Several days later, Hoover lunched with the President and the two speculated on ‘who might be the hidden Profumo in the Kennedy administration …’

Baker alleged that Rometsch had attended naked pool parties at the White House and estimated that she had gone to the President at least ten times that summer. If Baker was telling the truth, then Kennedy had been indulging in the most dangerous risk-taking of his career.

Jackie had returned invigorated from her Greek holiday. Shortly after she returned, the President had taken advantage of what he called Jackie’s ‘guilt feelings’. ‘Maybe now you’ll come with us to Texas next month,’ he had said, with a smile. Jackie answered, ‘Sure I will, Jack.’ She was prepared to do anything to help, even attend the Army-Navy football game with him after Thanksgiving. ‘We’ll just campaign,’ she told him. ‘I’ll campaign with you anywhere you want.’ And with that she flipped open her red leather appointment book and scrawled ‘Texas’ across 21, 22 and 23 November.

It was a sunny morning in Dallas when Air Force One touched down at Love Field at 11.38 a.m. A smiling Jack and Jackie appeared at the top of the ramp, descended and made for the fence to touch the hands of the adoring, cheering crowd. She was presented with a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses, a contrast to the yellow roses of Texas that had greeted her elsewhere.

Her inexperienced eye did not register, behind the organised welcome reception, the sour note of hostile, misspelt placards and a group of high-school kids who had taken the day off to hiss at the President. She and Jack boarded the familiar presidential Lincoln SS 100 X. They took the rear seats, the red roses between them, with John and Nellie Connally on the jump seats facing them. Dave Powers appeared with a characteristic last-minute instruction for Jackie: ‘Be sure to look to your left, away from the President. Wave to the people on your side. If you both wave to the same voter, it’s a waste.’

The crowds along the route were screaming, ‘Jack! Jackie!’ In the Mexican section every flutter of her white-gloved hand raised hysterical shrieks, ‘Jack-eee!’ It was hot, blindingly hot, Jackie thought. She put on her sunglasses, only to have Jack tell her to take them off. She kept them in her lap, sneaking them on again through the empty sections where there were only billboards to wave at. Again Jack told her, ‘Take off the glasses, Jackie.’ They were the last words he ever spoke to her. At 12.30 p.m. the Lincoln turned off Houston on to Elm Street, five minutes away from their destination, luncheon at the Trade Mart. Moving slowly at just over 11 m.p.h. it made for the dark underpass beyond the grass of Dealey Plaza. Nellie Connally pointed to it, saying to Jackie, ‘We’re almost through. It’s just beyond that.’ Jackie thought gratefully of the cool darkness of the underpass ahead. Beside her, Jack smiled and made as if to raise his hand to wave at a small boy.

Then it happened, a sharp, shattering crack.

The first shot had hit Kennedy in the back of the neck, bruised his right lung, ripped his windpipe and exited at his throat, nicking the knot of his tie. The bullet travelled on through Connally’s back, chest, right wrist and thigh; in delayed reaction, he was not aware of it. Recognising it as a rifle shot, he was glancing over his right shoulder to identify the source. Kennedy’s wound was not fatal but the reaction of the Secret Service agents in the front of the Lincoln made it so. Both agent and driver failed to react; the driver even slowed the car down further when he saw what had happened, making it inevitable that an experienced marksman, as Lee Harvey Oswald was, would have another chance. He was eighty-eight yards away when he fired the second shot.

Seconds later, Jackie was crouching over her husband’s body, futilely trying to hold his head together, his blood and grey matter caking her white kid gloves. She knew he was dead. A man had died. A legend was about to be born.

Jackie returned to Washington in January, bringing Lee for company. Although she put on a brave face for the children, she was still distraught. The decorator Bill Baldwin came down from New York to discuss plans for the new house. Showing him the collection of Greek and Roman antiquities that Jack had begun, she broke down. ‘It’s so sad to be doing this. Like a young married couple fixing up their first house together …’ She wept. Then pulling herself together, she told him, ‘I know my husband was devoted to me. I know he was proud of me. It took a very long time for us to work everything out, but we did, and we were about to have a real life together.’ Haunted by what might have been she talked on and on about Jack, about their life together, about what could have been and should have been. ‘Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the President’s widow? There’s something so final about it. And the children. The world is pouring out terrible adoration at the feet of my children and I fear for them, for this awful exposure. How can I bring them up normally?’

The new house on N Street, into which they moved on 27 January, was not a success. Jackie had looked forward to it as a new beginning, but Mary Gallagher described it as ‘silent and lonely’. For Jackie the most difficult moments came when she unpacked cartons that had remained unopened since the move from the White House – photographs, records, scrapbooks, the couple’s personal library, all of them haunting reminders of her life with Jack. For a while she could not even bear to put up his photograph.

In her depression, Jackie began to panic about money, although she had a government appropriation of $50,000 for her expenses plus about $150,000 per year from a Kennedy trust in her name and $50,000 that Bobby provided from the Kennedy funds. She was uncharacteristically mean with her staff. The valet, George Thomas, was still on the payroll, but was finally offered a job by Jack’s former assistant, Ted Reardon. The two Navy stewards provided for her by the White House requested transfer back to the White House and their normal duties. Jackie was furious. ‘She showed no signs of recognising that her small staff did not like being called on to provide all the comforts that she had grown so used to receiving from a much larger staff during her White House years …’ Gallagher wrote.

Jackie was emotionally disturbed, subject to violent mood swings, irrational behaviour, guilt feelings about Jack – how she had not helped him enough, how she might have saved his life. Lee told Cecil Beaton that she had been ‘through hell’ trying to calm her sister’s hysteria. ‘You don’t know what it’s like being with Jackie. She really was then half round the bend! She can’t sleep at nights – she can’t stop thinking about herself and never feeling anything but sorry for herself! "I’m so unprotected," she says. But she is surrounded by friends, helpers, FBI [Secret Service men] … She gets so she hits me across the face when I’ve done nothing …’

Of all the knights of Camelot gathered round the widowed queen, Bobby was by far the closest. In a distortion of the myth, he increasingly played Lancelot to Jackie’s Guinevere. In their grief they clung together, Bobby acting as a husband substitute for Jackie, a father substitute for her children. He had always been the one member of the Kennedy family who was always there for her – at her bedside after the stillbirth of her daughter in 1956, when Jack was holidaying in Europe, with Jack after the death of Patrick, and, finally, first to the plane when she brought Jack’s body back from Dallas. Bobby was with her constantly on N Street, coming round immediately if she called him, stopping by in the evening. In order to avoid attention, he parked his car some distance away from the house on another street. But Washington, and Georgetown in particular, is a small place and it was not long before gossip began about Bobby ‘spending a lot of time with the widow’.

Jackie had always felt a tenderness for Bobby and he for her. Perceptive as she was, she sensed the kindness that lay beneath his tough, often ruthless exterior. Lacking Jack’s easy charm and cool objectivity, Bobby had an unrivalled capacity to make as many enemies as he had devoted followers. ‘Bobby was a pain in the ass,’ was George Smathers’ view of his friend’s younger brother, an opinion shared by many, including Gore Vidal, whose friendship with Jack and Jackie had been ended by a row with Bobby. Years later, looking back on his time with the Kennedys, Vidal reflected, ‘As I let the drama idle away in my mind, I suspect that the one person she ever loved … was Bobby Kennedy … There was always something oddly intense in her voice when she mentioned him to me.’

Jackie and Bobby were almost inseparable during that spring and summer of 1964. Both were planning to turn their backs on Washington for New York where Bobby planned to run for Senator. Neither of them wanted to remain in a town that reminded them every moment of Jack and, worse, that Jack’s dominion had been replaced by that of Lyndon Johnson. Jackie moved out of N Street in June. She had spent precisely four months there. The house had become a tourist attraction, turning the quiet tree-lined street into a sightseers’ throughway. The traffic never let up until nine or ten at night, said Joe Kraft, a Kennedy friend, who lived two doors away. Sightseeing buses made the narrow street a regular port of call; people even went so far as to set up picnic tables outside the house opposite Jackie’s, equipping themselves with binoculars to keep watch for a glimpse of her or of the children. Despite the presence of a policeman on guard, people were always snapping off twigs of the shrubs within reach.

Jackie’s return to life began early in the summer of 1965. Her life had settled in, and Bobby was around. Chuck Spalding, who remained close to the family, claimed that Jackie and Bobby were lovers, and that he was good for her. Some people have conjectured that Bobby and Jackie’s love for each other was morbid, as if being together was somehow sharing a piece of Jack. ‘On Jackie’s side it was a genuine, real passion,’ a friend confided. ‘For him it was more complicated.’ Asked how long the relationship had gone on, he said, ‘Close to when he died.’

Bobby was Jackie’s great love; a secret rock at the centre of her life. Their romance was all the stronger because it was an impossible one. Bobby would never have divorced Ethel, intensely loyal as she was to him and the mother of their ten children. Even if he had wanted to, both his religion and his political career presented insurmountable obstacles. Nor would Jackie have wanted to go over all the old territory again, the politics, the infidelities. Bobby was less chauvinist in his attitude to women than the other Kennedy men; he liked talking to them and in that sense he was not a user to the extent that his brothers and father were. But he had shared some of Jack’s women and had many relationships out on the campaign trail.

During the later years of her marriage to Jack, Jackie’s life had been sexless, apart from the routine brief marital encounters. Now, hiding behind her trademark dark glasses and her untouchable reputation, she did more or less as she liked. As America’s Queen, the newspapers protected her – never printing an unflattering photography or unseemly speculation about her private life. She was never shown smoking a cigarette, although she was virtually a chain-smoker. If she was reported as dancing the Twist or the Frug, she was always said to have done so ‘in a dignified manner’. She was more than aware of this: as she hubristically told William Manchester, no one would believe anything against her ‘even if she eloped with Eddie Fisher’. She believed that, after all her self-restraint in the White House, the suffering she had stoically endured after the assassination, she had earned the right to enjoy herself. Not for her the boring women’s committees, the charity round that was part of upper-class, moneyed New York life.

There was a string of escorts, public cover for more private relationships. Her first sexual affair lasted for eighteen months and was over before it was even hinted at in the press. Jackie had met Jack Warnecke when, in the year after Jack’s death, she had worked closely with him on the design of Jack’s grave. At forty-seven Jack Warnecke was a very attractive man – six foot three with the athletic physique of the ex-football star – a brilliant and successful architect and, since his divorce in 1961, the lover of a succession of beautiful women.

When Jackie telephoned Bobby to tell him about her new love, she was warned that it was ‘too soon’ after Jack’s death. With his political career in New York to consider, and beyond that the inevitable bid for the Presidency, Bobby, a political Kennedy to his fingertips, decreed that Jackie remain the priceless Kennedy asset. Jack Warnecke was to be kept under wraps and was not to be seen publicly as her escort until the autumn of 1965, when he was reported as taking her home after a party.

Just as Jack had, Jackie compartmentalised her life and her loves. Warnecke could not believe that she and Bobby were closely involved in the autumn of 1964. Yet she certainly saw a great deal of Bobby while maintaining her relationship with Warnecke and other men. In the first week of February 1965 she was at Puerto Marques, near Acapulco, with the Radziwills as guests of their old friend the architect Fernando Parra Hernandez. In February she rode in Central Park with a handsome Italian count. The man, who was working for US Steel, spent a good deal of time in New York; his relations with his wife were not close and they later divorced. With gentlemanly reticence, he refused to divulge more about Jackie than to say that she was ‘not so interested in sex’. Another admirer and constant escort through 1965 was Mike Nichols, the theatre and film director. Several years younger than she was, he was fascinated by Jackie, and remained a constant friend and support to her in difficult times. ‘They were friends and they shared some intimate moments,’ as a friend put it. Jackie was not promiscuous – sex was something that happened in the course of a friendship. ‘She clearly inspired a very romantic feeling in many men,’ her friend Antonia Fraser said. ‘I tend to think that all people sleep together once or twice if they’re the appropriate sexes …’

In May Lee gave a party (‘a teeny, tiny dance for less than a thousand’) at her superbly decorated duplex at 969 Fifth Avenue, to cheer Jackie, who appeared in a white silk crêpe dress by Yves Saint-Laurent, on the safe arm of Averell Harriman. But underneath the glamorous exterior Jackie was still in pain, still feeling sorry for herself, searching for another man to validate her as Jack had. In London for the Runnymede memorial dedication in May 1965, she opened her heart to her old English friends, Hugh and Antonia Fraser, who gave a huge party for her. Afterwards, alone with the Frasers (Jackie had acquired the habit of drinking whisky late at night), she was in confessional mode. ‘She talked about being a widow and how if you were a widow, you were a cripple, [perceived as having] something wrong with you,’ Antonia Fraser remembered. ‘I just thought it was such an extraordinary reaction – she had this horror as if she herself had done something wrong … she felt blighted by this state.’

By 1965 Bobby, too, was emerging, like Jackie, from the pall of grief. Everyone noticed the change his brother’s death had wrought. The tough, ruthless, uncompromising Attorney-General, John F. Kennedy’s hatchet man, had evolved. Norman Mailer, that most perceptive and articulate of Kennedy observers, wrote of him, ‘He had grown modest as he grew older, and his wit had grown with him’, noticing a ‘subtle sadness [that] had come to live in his tone of confidence. He had come into that world where people live with the recognition of tragedy and so are often afraid of happiness.’

In the autumn of 1967 Women’s Wear Daily predicted that Jackie would soon announce her engagement to David Harlech. Now forty-nine, Harlech was tall, poised, elegant, with a brilliant brain, with an ancestral home in Shropshire. He had adored his wife and was devastated by her death in a motor accident. But, as one of Jack Kennedy’s oldest and closest friends, there was a deep bond between him and Jackie. Although both denied any idea of an engagement, romance and marriage were in the air and, as Harlech admitted under pressure, they had slept together.

Most friends of the couple think that although they might have come close to marriage it was never really on the cards on either side. ‘My view is, having known both of them quite well,’ said Lord Jenkins, ‘that he would have had the sense to see that life married to Jackie would have a lot of disadvantages and wouldn’t really have suited him …’ Harlech himself once admitted to a close friend that there were two reasons why marriage to Jackie would not have worked out for either of them: ‘I’m not rich enough for her and it would have been like having a sixth child because she had to have the kind of adoration a child asks from you and the constant attention …’

Harlech was talking after the event. Evidence from people close to Jackie indicates that he wanted to marry her. He and Jackie remained lifelong friends. ‘He was very fond of her,’ Pamela Harlech admitted. Harlech was attractive, good company and a convenient smokescreen that drew press attention away from her other romantic attachments – and a possibility that was forming at the back of her mind.

While the American press were still following the Harlech trail, Jackie’s principal beau was Roswell Gilpatric, formerly Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy administration. As so often, the press were on to the romance when it was already over. Ros Gilpatric, like David Harlech, was not in the ‘big bucks’ league. And, like Harlech, despite his charm and intelligence, Gilpatric did not have the quality of danger that really attracted Jackie. Neither had the overwhelming self-confidence and animal physical attraction to appeal to her. One man, however, had all those qualities in abundance. Aristotle Onassis.

Onassis had kept Jackie in mind ever since she had joined his party on Christina in October 1963. He had flown to comfort her in the White House on the weekend after Jack’s assassination and they had kept in touch on the telephone ever since. Onassis loved to capture beautiful and famous women: his mistress since his divorce from his first wife Tina, in 1959, had been the internationally celebrated Greek-born diva Maria Callas. But Callas paled into insignificance beside Jackie, the most famous and admired woman in the world.

Early in 1968 Callas seems to have been aware of her lover’s interest in Jackie. She had good reason to be, for Onassis’ pursuit of Jackie was hotting up at last. As an astute businessman and a player of the long game, his sense of timing was impeccable, and he sensed that Jackie was ready to change her life. Jackie’s thoughts had been turning for some time towards the Mediterranean as a fantasy escape from America.

Onassis fed Jackie’s fantasy with his own, of himself as Odysseus, hero of Homer’s epic poem. Like Odysseus, Onassis ploughed the seas, confronting many enemies and defeating them, but always returning to his native Greece. Jackie was able to see him as a romantic figure, instead of the tough, squat, wily, ruthless businessman he appeared to others. Onassis was a pirate, a type that had always appealed to her – ‘There are no rules in business,’ he used to tell his associates. Like old Joe Kennedy, he was always looking forward to the next deal, accumulating and accumulating, winning at all costs. The Kennedys, however, did not see Onassis this way: they saw him as a threat, who might snatch away their Helen of Troy, removing their most valuable political asset and undermining their own Kennedy myth.

Onassis, with his piratical image and jet-set baggage, was a politically undesirable connection for the Kennedys. Things were to get worse. In April 1967 the democratically elected Greek government was overthrown in a military coup. The Greek government was now a military dictatorship and consequently a political pariah. Politics meant nothing to Onassis, who was doing everything he could to please the junta. Liberals in America were outraged by the government of the ‘colonels’, and the political fall-out of a family relationship with Onassis for Bobby, should he run as the liberal candidate in the 1968 election, could be disastrous.

In May 1968, while Bobby was on the west coast of America campaigning in the Oregon primary, Jackie spent five crucial days with Onassis on Christina cruising in the Virgin Islands. On 28 May Jackie disembarked at St Thomas. On that same day Bobby lost the Oregon primary to the first Democratic candidate in the field, Eugene McCarthy. No Kennedy had ever before lost a political election. The next day he flew south to California for the most important primary. At 12.15 a.m. on 5 June, as he walked through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after announcing his victory in the ballot, another lone gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, shot him through the head. At that moment Jackie was asleep in bed in her New York apartment. She was woken at four o’clock by Stas Radziwill, calling from London. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ she said to Stas. ‘He’s won – he’s got California!’ ‘But how is he?’ asked Stas. ‘Oh, he’s fine, he’s won!’ ‘But how is he?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Why, he’s been shot.’

Bobby remained technically alive on a life-support system until 1.44 a.m., 6 June. ‘Jackie was the one who turned off the machines,’ Richard Goodwin said. ‘She flew in and nobody else had the nerve. The poor guy was lying there, his chest going up and down – you know they have those machines that keep the body going for ever – and he was brain dead and the doctors didn’t dare pull the plug. Ethel was in no shape to do anything, she was lying on the bed moaning. Teddy was kneeling in prayer at the foot of the bed and finally Jackie came in and told the doctors they had to do it. It was the final seal for her.’

While after Jack’s death she had managed to hang on to her self-control during the four days that followed, this renewed horror overwhelmed Jackie with panic and loss. Bobby had been there for her when Jack died, now he would never be there again. Ros Gilpatric saw her shortly after her return to New York and was horrified. ‘After Bobby’s death Jackie became alarmingly distraught,’ he said. ‘[She] seemed highly agitated, even unbalanced. Among other things she kept referring to Bobby as her husband. She became very imperious, barking orders as if she were still First Lady. It was as if Jackie could take one such tragedy, but not two. While Ethel, pregnant with Bobby’s last child, comforted herself with the Catholic idea that the husband she had worshipped would be in Paradise, Jackie could only rage against the fates.

After Bobby’s death Jackie’s subconscious instinct for self-preservation led her, as it always had at key points in her life, to move on to another plane. She was preparing to abandon the Kennedys to their shattered dream and their dangerous legacy.

Onassis, of course, immediately seized the opportunity presented by the death of Bobby, the principal obstacle to his marriage to Jackie. He flew to the United States to be with her. Jackie’s mother did not approve. Janet thought him vulgar. When she was told of the proposed marriage she confided to a friend that it was a tragedy in the making. ‘She was heartbroken by the marriage to Onassis and I think any mother in her circumstances would have been, because it was obviously not a deep love affair.’

The sad fact is that history was repeating itself. As before, Jackie was giving herself to a man who regarded her principally as an asset rather than as a woman. But money was important to Jackie; she could not envisage a future without ‘big bucks’, which was more than the Kennedys, with their annual $200,000, plus clothes allowance, would provide. Yet, for her, materialism had to be dressed in passion, with Onassis as with Jack. Sex appeal was also part of the package, and Onassis, although physically ugly where Jack had been handsome, certainly possessed that. Ugly men have to try harder to win women, and Onassis had an international reputation as a lover. Gina Lollobrigida said of him that he was ‘a great lay’. Jack, having no need to, never bothered to try – Angie Dickinson is alleged to have said that sex with him lasted ‘seven and a half minutes’.

There was another factor in the equation: Jackie’s desire for freedom – her dream of being a bird flying away where she wished. She wanted to be free, emotionally and financially, from the hard-core Kennedys, free (temporarily at least) from the burden of being the slain hero’s widow, the high priestess of the cult, whose behaviour must conform to her worshippers’ demands. And she wanted her children free of them too; free of the financial bonds that tied the heirs to the Kennedy fortune, free of the political legacy stemming from old Joe’s ambition, the Presidency of the United States.