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of the appearances,” said the columnist Charles Bartlett, a great friend of the Kennedy family, who had introduced Jackie to Jack. “I don’t understand why Bobby wasn’t more concerned about appearances. This wasn’t the Bobby that I knew. I knew a Bobby who was pure, while everyone else was playing around.”

“I don’t know if [Bobby] became infatuated or not,” said Paul “Red” Fay, Jack Kennedy’s old PT-boat buddy from World War Two. “[Jackie’s] a fascinating woman. If she’d throw her charm at you, why, you’d be emotionally swayed.”

Was it possible that in their grief and crushing sorrow Jackie and Bobby had fallen in love? Were they sleeping with each other? Was Bobby the Lancelot in Jackie’s Camelot?

Many people believed that when it came to understanding the Kennedys, you had to forget all the ordinary rules of behavior. In this view, the Kennedys did exactly as they pleased, and their family motto should have been: If you want to—why not?

This attitude did not sit well with J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, who knew that any dirt he could dig up on Robert Kennedy would be welcomed by the new man in the White House, Lyndon Johnson. Hoover had FBI memoranda in his private files linking Bobby to Marilyn Monroe. Unfortunately for Hoover, the source of those rumors proved to be totally unreliable.

Nonetheless, Hoover sicced his agents on Jackie and Bobby. After weeks of surveillance, the agents came up empty-handed. There was not a single incriminating note or memo about Bobby’s relationship with Jackie in Hoover’s bulging files.

“I was talking to Bobby one day about Jackie,” said his friend, the journalist Murray Kempton. “I was saying something—it wasn’t a probing question—and Bobby said in that sad voice of his, ‘Oh, she’ll never be happy.’ You can say that about someone with whom you’ve slept. But that’s one thing I could not imagine Bobby doing—knowing how he felt about his brother—that he would sleep with his widow. To the extent that he was a very Catholic person, I think he would regard it as a cardinal sin.”

One person who had a chance to study the subject at close hand was the author William Manchester, who was writing the authorized account of the assassination.

“When I flew to Washington … for preliminary discussions with Bobby at the Justice Department, I was shocked by his appearance,” recalled Manchester. “I have never seen a man with less resilience. Much of the time he seemed to be in a trance, staring off into space, his face a study in grief.

“Bob said of the book that the family was anxious to avoid flamboyance and commercialism,” Manchester continued. “I replied that he should let me know what was acceptable to him. I did suggest that since the project had apparently originated with Mrs. Kennedy, it might be wise for me to discuss it directly with her. That would be unnecessary, he answered; he represented her.”

To Manchester, it seemed clear that Bobby and Jackie were enveloped in some kind of love relationship. Each recognized in the other his or her soul’s counterpart. They were both recovering from a terrible trauma, slowly coming back to life, and if love was the exquisite pain one felt for being truly alive, then Jackie and Bobby felt that emotion.

But that was a long way from sexual consummation. Manchester was a student of the Middle Ages, and the behavior of Jackie and Bobby reminded him of medieval courtly love—passionate but chaste.

What was more, Bobby was not the type to carry on an extramarital affair. He had once planned to enter the priesthood, and he had a Catholic sense of right and wrong. His fierce self-righteousness had led him to become a prosecutor. Any overt sexual act with his dead brother’s wife would have been antithetical to his nature.

“The difference between the brothers was that Jack had a voracious sexual appetite, while Bobby was the exact opposite,” said Manchester. “He channeled all of his sexual energies into his marriage with Ethel. An affair with Jackie would have been a violation of every moral fiber in Bobby’s character. It would have been a desecration of his brother’s memory.”

PUBLICITY MACHINE

By now, the moon had disappeared behind the clouds, casting Half Moon Bay into complete darkness. Bobby got up from his chair on Bunny Mellon’s terrace and disappeared without a word. Soon the strains of “The Days of Wine and Roses” could be heard once again coming from inside the house.

Chuck Spalding handed Lee her fourth daiquiri. When she drank a lot, there was no telling what Lee might say.

“I’ve just bought a co-op at 969 Fifth Avenue,” she said after a long sip. “And I’ve been trying to convince Jackie that she should leave Washington and buy an apartment in New York, too. That way, we can live close to each other”—she paused, took another long, slow sip, then added—“after I marry Ari.”

There was silence.

Then Stas, who was the intended target of his wife’s remark, chimed in. “But, my dear, what makes you so certain that Ari wants to marry you?”

“I’m certain that Ari will be more than happy to help us in any way that he can,” Lee said.

Jackie suspected that Lee was living in a dreamworld when it came to Aristotle Onassis. Most of the published accounts of Lee’s romance with the Greek shipowner had been generated by Ari’s own London-based public-relations consultant, a young New Zealander by the name of Nigel Neilson. Neilson placed articles on Onassis in the better newspapers in England and America, and he kept his employer’s name linked to personalities like Winston Churchill, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Cary Grant, and King Farouk of Egypt.

Onassis’s affairs with some of the world’s most desirable women were all part of this publicity machine. Like Donald Trump in years to come, Onassis had a natural talent for feeding the public’s fantasies about his life as a libertine. Onassis believed that the public liked a man who lived on a