[quote]One who could, and did, was Aristotle Onassis. By the spring of 1968, Jackie wanted out of the Kennedy crucible, out of being a living American saint. She wanted to smash that image to pieces.
[quote]Bobby, whose presidential campaign was heating up, was apoplectic.
[quote]'For God's sake, Jackie,' he said. 'This could cost me five states.'
[quote]Bobby had known Onassis for years and hated him. The feeling was mutual, for both personal and business reasons.
[quote]Onassis worried that if Bobby became president, he'd keep Onassis's oil tankers from ever docking in American ports. And years before, Bobby had had the temerity to tell Onassis to stop sleeping with Jackie's sister Lee, then a princess by her own marriage to Prince Stas Radziwill.
[quote]Onassis, knowing full well that Bobby and Jack Kennedy were both sleeping with Marilyn Monroe, took umbrage.
[quote]'Bobby,' he snapped, 'you and Jack f*** your movie queen and I'll f*** my princess.'
[quote]Bobby was also motivated by jealousy; he had long suspected that Jackie enjoyed a fling with Onassis while Jack was still alive.
[quote]Still, for Bobby's sake, Jackie agreed to wait until after the November 1968 presidential election.
[quote]But her attraction to Onassis wasn't just about money or escape. Ari, unlike Bobby, understood what Jackie was trying to do.
[quote]'Jackie needs a small scandal to bring her alive,' Onassis said. 'The world loves fallen grandeur.'
[quote]Shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, while out campaigning in Los Angeles, Bobby was shot by an assassin.
[quote]News crews and photographers captured him on the floor, bleeding from the head, asking if everyone else was okay.
[quote]Within hours, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the next great hope of the Kennedy dynasty, was pronounced brain dead.
[quote]Jackie flew immediately from her home in New York City to LA.
[quote]Whether or not Ethel ever suspected the affair with Bobby, she allowed Jackie to comfort her, to make the decision she could not: to turn off Bobby's life-support machines.
[quote]'If they're killing Kennedys,' Jackie said, 'my children are the number one targets. I want to get out of this country.'
[…]
[quote]Onassis had been in Jackie's life for a long time. Upon their first meeting in the late 1950s, when she and Jack accepted his invitation for drinks on his yacht, Jackie had impressed him with her cool reserve.
[quote]Later, in 1963, Onassis invited her for an extended stay on the yacht following the loss of her baby Patrick, who had died just 39 hours after his birth. It proved a remarkably healing time, and she never forgot Ari's kindness.
[quote]When Jack was killed, Onassis was among the chosen few to stay at the White House in the immediate aftermath.
[quote]Later, he would claim that he, unlike Jack Kennedy, had always seen beneath Jackie's prim veneer to what he called her 'carnal soul.'
[quote]He wasn't conventionally attractive like Jack, but he was highly sexual. Among his favorite possessions was a set of barstools he'd had covered in whale scrotum.
[quote]It didn't really bother Ari that the beau monde thought him crude.
[quote]'Fortunately, people with class are usually willing to overlook this flaw,' he said, 'because I am very rich.'